Sherdog’s Top 10: Greatest Brazilian Fighters

10. Royce Gracie

MMA’s first great champion opens this list. Where to place Gracie is of course purely a matter of criteria. From one perspective, he is a legendary pioneer more influential than any fighter in MMA history, and by that standard could even be No. 1. On the other hand, he wasn't even the best fighter in his own family, and by some estimates was the level of a purple belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu in 1993 when he competed at UFC 1. Yet Gracie’s grappling, toughness and intelligence allowed him to score some legendary victories in the sport's earliest years. Winning the original Ultimate Fighting Championship by triumphing three times in a single night, the roughly 175-pound Gracie defeated 225-pound striker Gegard Gordeau in the finals, but his most impressive victory was submitting 225-pound Ken Shamrock, the only other competitor who had any grappling prowess or significant no-holds-barred fight experience.

Four months later at UFC 2, Gracie won an incredible four times in a single night against an even more impressive group of foes. He submitted future Pancrase mainstay Jason DeLucia, who had acquired some basic ground skills after being humiliated in a pre-UFC “Gracie challenge,” before tapping 240-plus pound heavyweight judoka Remco Pardoel with a lapel choke in 91 seconds. Obviously, lapel chokes are impossible in the modern UFC due to the gi being illegal, but it's still a very impressive victory over a much larger grappler, who was wearing his own gi that night. In the final, Gracie defeated world-class heavyweight striker Patrick Smith, who weighed 220 pounds and had learned enough grappling in the months since Shamrock eliminated him at UFC 1 that he had tapped out two opponents that night on his way to the final. Interestingly, Gracie elected to finish Smith with ground-and-pound rather than a submission.

At UFC 3, Gracie didn't win a tournament for the first time, being so depleted after defeating 235-pound Kimo Leopoldo that he couldn't continue. Many thought Gracie’s dominance was over, but he won for a third time at the UFC 4 tournament, with the finest moment of his career coming in the finals. Against 240-pound former NCAA All-American wrestler Dan Severn, Gracie was the one taken down, with seemingly no way to win. However, after almost 16 straight minutes of fighting, he executed a tactic that very few people in North America, including the commentators, had ever seen before. It was called a triangle choke, and Severn had no choice but to tap. At UFC 5, Gracie had a rematch with Shamrock, billed as a “special superfight attraction.” Showing his own improvement and that of MMA as a whole in terms of grappling and ground fighting, Shamrock was able to take down Gracie, neutralize his submissions and inflict some ground-and-pound. However, since there was no decisive result after 36 minutes and there were no judges yet, it was declared a draw.

After that, Gracie didn't reappear until Pride Fighting Championships’ 2000 Grand Prix where, after defeating Nobuhiko Takada by decision, he engaged in a truly epic 90-minute encounter with Kazushi Sakuraba, which ended when aged family patriarch Helio Gracie, the founder of Brazilian jiu-jitsu and Royce’s father, decided to wave the towel. Almost seven years after his debut, the original Ultimate Fighting Champion had finally been defeated.

Amusingly, Gracie would have some success in MMA in his later years. While a main event at UFC 60 against then welterweight champion Matt Hughes ended with Hughes injuring Gracie's arm during a submission attempt and then brutally pounding him out in under a round, Gracie got the better of two of his old rivals. First, a preposterously chemically enhanced Gracie beat a faded Sakuraba by decision at K-1 Dynamite! USA in 2007. Then, in his last fight in 2016, Gracie won the trilogy against Ken Shamrock by, of all things, a knockout from a knee and punches in less than half a round. Certainly, the sport of MMA owes a large debt of gratitude to Gracie.

Continue Reading » Number 9