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Because of their size difference, Kimura told Gracie, “If you last more than two minutes with me, you should be viewed as the winner.”

The match lasted thirteen minutes. Kimura controlled most of it and finally caught Helio in a reverse ude-garami, a type of shoulder lock that eventually broke Helio’s arm.

3 When the thirty-eight-year-old Helio wouldn’t tap out to Kimura, Helio’s older brother Carlos threw in a towel to stop the match. The results graced the covers of the local newspapers the next day.

Helio also fought what could be considered the longest uninterrupted MMA bout in history when he grappled with his former student Waldemar Santana for three hours and forty-two minutes at a private event. Gracie lost due to a kick to the head as well as exhaustion. In 1967, fifty-four-year-old Helio fought his last public match.

Gracie Jiu-Jitsu and other forms of combat sports continued to grow in Brazil. In the 1960s, the early forms of MMA, called vale tudo, or “anything goes,” found its way to TV on a show in Brazil called Heróis do Ringue. Some of the Gracie family participated as coaches. The bouts attracted all styles, including another popular discipline called luta livre, or “free fighting.”

Soon the popularity of the sport would cross national borders. Rorion, the oldest of Helio’s seven sons, was the first to come to America to spread the gospel of Gracie Jiu-Jitsu. Out of his garage in Southern California, Rorion taught private lessons and accepted the frequent challenges of nonbelievers who would seek him out. Some of those bouts, along with a detailed version of the Gracie family history as told by them, were captured on the Gracie in Action videotapes.

When Rorion decided to create the War of the Worlds tournament, it came from the greatest inspiration of all and one that I could personally identify with: his father. At Rorion’s gym, we’d all watched the tapes of vale tudo fights from Brazil.

Rorion said, “I am going to bring these fights to America. It will be like those fights you see on TV.” The ambitious Rorion wanted Gracie Jiu-Jitsu to become a household name in America and knew the TV medium could do just that.

Since Rorion had arrived in California in the late 1970s, he’d taught relentlessly and collected a diverse clientele. One Gracie student, Art Davie, then an advertising executive, began to develop War of the Worlds with his jiu-jitsu teacher. John Milius, another client and the writer and director of Conan the Barbarian and Red Dawn, also joined Rorion and Davie. The three men brainstormed and developed the concept of a sixteen-man single-elimination tournament where each participant would represent a recognized combat art.

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Milius, who became the show’s initial creative director, first conceptualized an eight-sided fighting structure, which Jason Cusson helped develop into an eight-sided cage with canvas-covered floor padding enclosed by fencing so competitors could neither flee nor fall off the sides or through a set of ropes. The cage was named the Octagon. Initially there was an elaborate plan to either surround it with a moat full of alligators or electrify the chain-link fencing. Cooler heads prevailed, and it was decided the cage alone would suffice.

Among Rorion’s students, friends, and family, he and Art gathered enough investors to fund the event and formed a company called WOW Promotions to produce it. Davie then pitched the concept as a one-off event to a handful of pay-per-view producers, including HBO and Showtime.

Semaphore Entertainment Group, a New York—based company that had been successful in the growing pay-per-view market, agreed to broadcast the event. Michael Abramson, an SEG executive, suggested that the name of the event be changed to the Ultimate Fighting Championship, to which everyone agreed.

Now it was time to pick the fighters. To find the fiercest, deadliest combat sports practitioners in the world, Rorion placed an ad in Black Belt magazine that simply said, “Are you tough enough?”