Helio gracie rolling11/30/2023 ![]() ![]() At the end of the day, I would call everyone over and question them.”ĭespite the discipline adopted, Hélio would praise his teachers: “They were good. And these inspections helped me find out when a teacher was impatient, intolerant, or bad at explaining things. Sometimes, the student is a little dumb, or awkward, but that is not his problem. I love the student I don’t want to hear about anything else. I am a nitpicker, I only think about solving the student’s problem. And he had to teach the class the way I wanted it taught, because I teach for the student to learn, not to fool around. He could only open the door by calling first, and if it was me. If I knocked on the door and the teacher opened it, he would be fined. I would enter each ring for five minutes. In fact, he was even more rigorous concerning method, which he says he perfected over the years, just like his Jiu-Jitsu. The system was perfect.”īut the master’s demand that the gym be maintained just the way he wanted it was not limited to organization and punctuality. But, when I was looking over the student’s form, I noticed he had taken a class outside of the normal schedule, and I asked her: ‘Where is the money from so-and-so’s extra class?’ She turned red and answered: ‘Didn’t you say I could take it?’ ‘So put it back,’ I replied. But there was no way, the system was so complex that no one understood it completely, except me,” he says with pride, recalling one case: “Once, a secretary named Mary tried to pocket some money from an extra class. It could not go over that count, I knew the number of classes by the number of gis, and I challenged the secretary to steal from me without my knowing it. “One of them I still have in my house,” says the master, who used the gis to weed out weaknesses in the system. At the end of the week they would load up a pickup with 600 dirty gis and take them to the laundry, with two industrial laundry machines, they maintained in the house in Teresópolis. The teachers ate in the gym, there was no time.”Īs the academy provided the gis, the Gracies had a stock of 3,000 complete kits, manufactured by them. ![]() Everything was full, from seven in the morning to seven at night. Sometimes, people would wait a whole year to sign up for their class. There was no make-up class, because there was no time for it. If the student arrived late, he would leave at the right time. The teacher had one minute to leave the ring with the student and bring in the next one, in between half-hour classes. The team of instructors at the Gracie academy (Carlson and Robson Gracie, Hélio Vígio, Armando Wriedt and João Alberto Barreto were the ones that spent the most time teaching there) was rigorously supervised by Hélio: “I kept track and charged fines for lateness. He would have his class and, when he left the ring, the teacher would go to the reception and turn in the class form signed by the student to the secretary.” All of this she would make note of on the student’s form. When he would go to the ring, another call was made to the secretary informing the time of entry. When the student would go to the dressing room, the employee at the clothing booth would call the secretary informing that the student had arrived at such and such a time. The employee would then check to see if everything was in order (time, payment etc.) and he would hand over the little basket with the towel and gi. The academy would provide a gi and towel, when he would present his card at the clothing booth. The student would come and pick up his card and go to the clothing booth. Double what Rorion has these days,” he compares.Īt the time there were no computers, but Hélio organized his entire contingent of students, as he explains: “When the student would sign up, he would receive an id card and pay his contractual fee. We had 600 students per month for over 20 years. It took up the whole floor of the building, with five rings and 100 private lessons per day. “Although Rorion’s gym in California is more spacious, the Rio Branco organization was a business. “There has never been and will never be anything like it,” says the master with pride. Helio had announced his retirement after the big fight, and started dedicating himself to the administration of what was, according to him, the greatest Jiu-Jitsu academy of all times. ![]() Also in ’52, Carlos bought a “house” in Teresópolis, which served as the setting for the weekends of the entire Gracie family until the 1980s. That was when his first legitimate son, Rorion, was born, and when he, along with his brother Carlos, opened a massive gym on Rio Branco Avenue, in downtown Rio de Janeiro, which was kept running for 30 years. The year of 1952, following the year of his epic fight against the Japanese Kimura, stood out in the life of Grandmaster Helio. ![]()
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