Carlos Gracie

In 2009, Carlos's daughter Reila Gracie (mother of Roger Gracie) published a biography, Carlos Gracie – O Criador De Uma Dinastia; its English translation is titled Carlos Gracie: The Creator of a Dynasty.

The same year, Carlos retired from competition and focused on teaching and managing his brothers. After moving to Fortaleza, he started teaching jiu-jitsu in the national police while he researched in the Gracie Diet. He also became a real estate investor. In 1948, he published his book Introdução ao Jiu-jitsu, which was mostly a nutrition and philosophy manual despite its title.

On July 3, 1931, Gracie and Jayme Ferreira celebrated a challenge event between three jiu-jitsu fighters from his academy and three capoeira fighters trained by Ferreira, echoing a street fight Carlos supposedly had years before with a capoerista named Samuel. The challenge forced the fighters to wear judogis and forbade strikes on the ground, which caused one of the capoeiristas, Coronel, to be disqualified upon hitting George Gracie. In the other two matches, Oswaldo Gracie and Benedicto Peres defeated their opponents. The event was negatively received, however, not only due to a ruleset perceived as too favorable to the jiu-jitsu side, but also to accusations that Ferreira (a Greco-Roman wrestling teacher associated to Gracie) was not a capoeira master and therefore his side could not represent the art. Famous professional wrestler and sportsman Manoel Rufino dos Santos criticized further the Gracie family, so a fight was stipulated for August 22, 1931 between him and Carlos Gracie himself to settle it down. In response to the announcement, Carlos's teacher Donato Pires said through the press that Gracie's claims to be a direct apprentice to Mitsuyo Maeda were false and thus was equally unfit to represent jiu-jitsu. This almost caused the fight to be delayed when Carlos and his brothers assaulted Donato in front of the America Hotel in Catete one day before the event. By this incident, ties to Pires were severed and the Marquez de Abrantes academy became fully a property of Gracie.

He started his career on the rings by challenging judoka Geo Omori in São Paulo in 1929, although he was initially rejected due to Carlos's lack of training and experience. They eventually faced off in two exhibitions (non-competitive matches) of "jiu-jitsu" (judo and jiu-jitsu were terms used interchangeably at the time in Brazil) staged as a favor to Carlos's father for the Municipal Guard in January 1930. Afterwards, Carlos and his brother George founded a small school in the city's Barrio nas Perdizes, where they brought in Omori to teach them further jiu-jitsu. Gracie claimed to have faced several "no holds barred" challenges in his school by this time. However, after Carlos was arrested and jailed for assault on three men who had supposedly insulted his girlfriend, the two brothers had to move back to Rio de Janeiro. There they joined Donato Pires's school, opened in Marquez de Abrantes in September 1930. The date of their return to Rio is both popularly and officially given as 1925, but sources of the time place it in the mentioned year. During this time, aside from both teaching and learning jiu-jitsu under Pires, Gracie dedicated himself to participate in unsanctioned prizefights in small bars, promote rooster fighting, and experiment on nutrition and dietary habits. He would claim in 1981 to have competed in amateur boxing with a 20-0 record during this time, while his relative Reila Gracie cited him as a national middleweight champion, but there's no record for those claims. In June 1931, Pires moved to Santa Catarina due to his job in the Ministry of the Economy, leaving his academy in Gracie's hands.

Carlos Gracie was born on September 14, 1902 in Belém, Pará, Brazil.

Gracie Jiu Jitsu developed in Brazil in the early 1900s using techniques learned from the great Japanese Judo champion, Mitsuyo Maeda (known in Brazil as Conde Koma—the "Count of Combat"). Maeda, who was taught by Jigoro Kano, the creator of Judo, fought hundreds of victorious challenge matches against practitioners of other styles using his Judo techniques to overcome them. Maeda had become a champion Judoka in Japan and was so highly revered by Kano he was sent around the world to spread Judo, alongside other fellow talented Judoka.