awesome
Great stuff, thanks!
The CBJJ logo as it appeared before and after the folding of Carlson, Jr's IBJJF
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Someone asked me if Carlson Gracie Junior's IBJJF 1.0 was an accepted organization in the community. You can see here that bjj.org listed it along with the other prominent US organizations of the time.
TTT!
Would be nice if you also had this up more permenantly on a website or on a blog. Or have bjjheroes.com have it on their site. 
Great info btw. Interesting stuff regardless of what comes of it. Thanks for posting.
TristanESP -Would be nice if you also had this up more permenantly on a website or on a blog. Or have bjjheroes.com have it on their site.
Here ya go :)
http://mixedmartialartshistory.wordpress.com/2013/06/10/in-search-of-the-ibjjf-part-1/
Later
delete double
Subbed and voted up
In for part three!
The thread is reset to open per numerous requests.
Great Stuff.
I guess Helio & Carlos didn't care that Gastao jr and Pedro Hemeterio had schools in São Paulo because it didn't cut into there business.
This is a long background piece on the backstory of BJJ and modern grappling; I thought I would post it in advance of the Gracie Barra history piece I owe you guys. It's written as part of an academic piece on the subject, so the tone is on the dry side. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.
In the received narrative, both fact and fiction, we frequently encounter the story of the Ronin,or masterless Samurai; the lone warrior who honed (and often redefined) his craft by wandering the world seeking out the greatest competition his age could offer: Miyamoto Musashi, the”Sword-Saint” of Japan; Lancelot of Arthurian legend; Mitsuyo Maeda; Frank Gotch, BennyUrquidez. Again and again we find the cycle of personal and technical transformation repeated, and the central theme: that each man’s commitment to engage the world, and to measure himself against it, provides the essential pressure against which he his art and his relationship to it are transformed.
The world of Man is essentially artifice; Nature’s hazards are blunted by the benefits of civilization, and the fruits of cooperation. Battlefield arts may be honed by war, but skill and technique in personal combat, publicly displayed, and yielding primarily prestige (rather than land or wealth) to the victor, must be sought out if they are to be had. The pressure of selection, so effortlessly part of the natural world, must be intentionally injected into Man’s kingdom through the ritual of the Challenge.
It is not my intention to argue that the ritual of single combat is a recent addition to Man’s story; probably it is as old as Man himself. Intraspecies conflict over mates, stature and resources is a fixture in the animal kingdom, and is central to primate social organization. Rather I am making the point that the essential pressure of competition, without which strategies of personal combat will not grow, is something that must be sought out, and that when it is sought broadly and aggressively by a rogue (often wandering) male, that revolutionary progress in the space of a single lifetime is occasionally the result. As the process of modernization, then fully underway in the West, begins to take hold of Meiji period Japan, contests between experts in battlefield arts such as KenJutsu gave way to a restoration of what was surely the original form of single combat: the empty handed challenge. Into this arena stepped a young man, born in Okayama prefecture in 1869, named Tanabe Mataemon.
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Mataemon began the study of JuJutsu under his father and grandfather in 1878 (four years before the founding of the Kodokan), and received his menkyo kaidan (teaching licensure) in 1886. Driven as fathers often are to transform his son into the best practitioner in the land, Mataemon endured a particularly cruel childhood in which he was often encouraged to contest with adults, the result of which was frequent injury, stunted growth and broken bones. At the tender age of fourteen, his father brought him to JuJutsu shiai (competition) for the first time.
Drawing with his much larger opponent, the young JuJutsuka earned applause from the crowd, and praise from his father.
Passing into adulthood, Mataemon continued to approach shiai with the same indomitable, perhaps reckless attitude, developing a unique strategy that combined a ruthless technical focus on groundwork with a determined mindset that reused to accept the threat of pain, unconsciousness or injury as any obstacle to victory. In a young man’s personal solution to the puzzle of the “fair-fight” challenge match, we find the seeds of strategy that, a world away in Brazil would form the nucleus of the Gracie family’s own solution a generation later.
Classical Japanese JuJutsu (Mataemon was eventually the head of Fusen ryu) provided the technical foundation, and the philosophical principle of yielding, for this approach to single combat, but it was a single young man’s creativity and tenacity that yielded the strategy: Innovate; play from the ground; conserve energy; bring your opponent to exhaustion; fight to the end, and never concede the match.
After gaining his licensure in 1886, Mataemon affiliated with an Osaka based Sensei named Yataro Handa, and introduced his ground attack strategy to his students there including both Yukio Tani and Sadakazu Uyenishi, who would later bring JuJutsu (and mixed-styles challenge wrestling) to the United Kingdom. At this time the Kodokan was establishing itself as the dominant school in the Tokyo area, experiencing rapid growth, and developing its relationship with The Metropolitan Police, but it was not yet the single dominant style it would become; in fact, the newaza heavy Osaka style was emerging as a competitor.
As notable JuJutsu challenge wrestler and British JuJutsu pioneer Taro Miyake would later note,
Venturing into Tokyo as an instructor at the police academy at the age of 22, Mataemon crossed hands with Kodokan Judoka for the first time, defeating Takisaburo Tobari (3rd dan) twice, and dominating Hajime Isogai (3rd dan, eventual organizer of Kosen Judo) on the mat. A team of representatives from the Osaka style were invited to the Kodokan to compete, and decisively won each of their matches by sucking their opponents into a leg scissor (guard) position and securing a submission from the back. Given the Kodokan strength at throwing into a side controlling position, it is likely that leg scissor strategy emerged as a specific counter, denying the Judoka both his throw, and his strong hold-down positions. Suitably convinced of the strength of this approach, Kano invited Mataemon to the Kodokan as instructor of certain of his students inclined to challenge wrestling (notably Mitsuo Maeda), and in 1906 was made full instructor (Kyoshi) of Judo.
As Matemon Tanabe worked to spread the Osaka/Handa style in Tokyo, Yukio Tani, also of the Handa dojo, left for London at the urging of Edward W. Barton- Wright, the founder of Bartitsu. Settling in London in 1900, Tani initially was employed by Barton-Wright as an instructor at his academy (which offered instruction in various western martial arts, and Japanese JuJutsu). When the school closed in 1902, Tani began a career as a challenge wrestler, and began to take on “all comers” in the music halls of the era.
It is important to note that among the various wrestling styles that held sway in Edwardian England, none formally accepted wrestling for submission. True, a hold could be used to force a fall, and certainly one could win a match if his opponent conceded due to injury, exhaustion or the like, but intentionally causing pain or injury for the purposes of ending the match was considered foul. Still, it was Tani’s personal act, and he was within his rights to set the rules. Over his career, Tani would fight over hundreds of these music hall matches, many against accomplished wrestlers, and lost only to fellow Osaka JuJutsuka, Taro Miyake.
Whereas the British Catch Wrestling of today contains a vast array of finishing holds, and the concept of wrestling for submission is well established, the catch-as-catch-can (and Lancashire) wrestling of the day clearly did not, and forbade such tactics explicitly.
Together with Sadakazu Uyenishi (who wrestled as “Raku”), also of Handa ryu, he founded the first academy of JuJutsu on British soil in 1903. It is not clear precisely who among England’s wrestlers studied there, but it is almost certain that the battery of locking and choking holds the two Japanese possessed, if not the peculiar ground strategy they employed, came to be absorbed into catch-as-catch-can wrestling; certainly the very idea of wrestling for submission, as it came to be understood in the West, originates with these two.
In 1903, just as Tani and Uyenishi were beginning take on all comers in the music halls of Edwardian England, the senior Kodokan Judoka, Yoshiaki Yamashita, his wife, and assistant Saburo Kawaguchi sailed for the United States at the invitation of a Seattle business man who arranged an exhibition between Yamashita and British heavyweight boxer, C.E. Radclyffe who gave the following account of the match