JJ VS LL

From BJJHeroes.com:

...One of luta livre’s golden boys, Marco Ruas started being mentioned as a candidate to fight jiu jitsu’s champion, Rickson Gracie in the near future. Rickson had decided at this point that he was moving to the United States, and he did not want to leave Rio de Janeiro with this shadow on his back. He decided to go to the gym were Ruas trained to make the challenge official, and possibly fight there and then.

Rickson arrived at the gym while a packed night class was taking place, accompanied by his father, Helio Gracie, and his friends Sergio ‘Malibu’ and Marcelo Behring. There he met with Ruas and his coaches challenging the up and coming fighter to a closed door bout, something very common during those days. Ruas stepped back and asked for a 4 month period to prepare for the fight, Rickson did not accept, he wanted to fight sooner than that as he had plans to move out of Brazil. The discussion got heated up and at a certain point Helio said “Maybe we should make a list of people who want to fight Rickson”, Hugo Duarte, who was one of the main luta livre competitors heard the jiu jitsu master’s comment and said “you can put my name on that list”.

The gracie convoy left without the fight they wanted, but Hugo Duarte’s challenge made it to the streets. The street gossip urged Rickson Gracie to take a stand, much like he had done when the same happened with Ruas, previously. This time Rickson wouldn’t make the same mistake as before and give the challenger a chance to pull out. Duarte was a regular visitor of the Praia do Pepê (Pepe Beach), so Rickson planned to confront the luta livre man in public so there would be no back pedaling. A couple of weeks later, Hugo was met and challenged at the beach, on a Saturday morning. People gathered around in a circle while the two fighters scrapped.  A camera was brought in to film the fight and handed to the late Ryan Gracie. Ryan was 12 years old at the time and could not cut through the crowd of grown ups to film the fight, thus the poor quality of the video (below) and the cussing of the young Gracie all throughout the footage. After a few minutes of fighting Hugo Duarte gave up due to strikes from the mount.

Afterwards, as the two fighters went to the water to clean up their wounds, Hugo told Rickson he was not happy with the result, this feeling would lead to the events that followed...

Read the full account of the long-standing rivalry at BJJHeroes.com!

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