The Gracies have certainly done a lot for the sport, but I wonder how much of their legacy is actually legitimate and how much exists simply because they were in a position to write their own history. For those of us who don't live in Brazil and don't have direct connections with people who were in Brazil during the early days of BJJ and Vale Tudo, most of what we "know" about those times comes either from members of the Gracie family or their students.
Certainly, the sheer size of the family and the vast number of them that are/have been involved with BJJ means they have had a huge impact in terms of the number of students that come from the Gracie lineage. And of course they were the ones who spread BJJ to America, started the UFC, and promoted the art/sport to the world. And they deserve a lot of credit for that. But all that stuff about how they were the ones responsible for the evolution of BJJ from Judo just seems fishy to me. There were a lot of Japanese immigrants moving to Brazil at the time, and certainly there were many other Brazilians training Judo and competing in Vale Tudo. And it seems that their impact has largely been minimized in favor of the questionable idea that a single family was responsible for everything.
I also find it interesting that almost every high-profile loss the Gracies had during those early days is protested as not being a "fair" fight, or that the rules "weren't clear", or something along those lines, while at the same time they claim ridiculous and unverifiable winning records (see: Rickson). It would be interesting to see a database compiled of verified vale tudo and BJJ results from those early days to see just how successful the members of the Gracie family were in comparison with their peers. Were they really the best, or were they simply the ones with the financial means and business acumen to market the art/sport (and themselves) the best?
Please note, I'm not bashing the Gracies. I respect what they've done for BJJ and MMA, and I know that it is fairly unlikely that I would be training BJJ right now if it weren't for their contributions in promoting the art outside their home country (maybe somebody else would have done it eventually, but who knows?) I've just always been the sort of person to think critically about information I'm given and the sources it came from, and it seems to me that most of us outside Brazil (and given the sheer size of the family and the number of students they've trained over the years, even a lot of people in Brazil) are getting all our information from a single, and potentially biased, source. That's why threads like this are interesting - it's not every day that we get to hear something about those early days that didn't come directly or indirectly from the Gracie family.
