ROSE Gracie:
When I went out in Brazil, Gracie family members and students would just take over whatever club we were in. Sometimes the bouncers would be Gracie guys too, or other times our guys would just pretend to be bouncers [so they could] clear people away from tables we wanted to sit at and things like that.
One time we were at a club in Rio where all the Jiu-jitsu guys used to hang out. I forget the name of the club because it was always changing. What they do [in Rio] is, they run a club for one or two years and then they tear it apart and build a new club with a new name, but it’s still the same place, you know? I was standing there with a big group of Gracies and Gracie students who were always at that club causing major mayhem. We would always roll in with twenty or thirty Gracies plus the students, so half the club would be Jiu-jitsu guys.
At one point in the night, some guy grabbed my cousin’s ass and then disappeared into the crowd, so all of our guys stopped everything. With the help of the bouncers, they stood outside the front door and brought everybody out one by one. Every time a guy would come out, Carlson Gracie Jr. would hold him and ask my cousin who got her ass grabbed, "Is this the guy? No? Okay, man, you can go." They went through almost EVERY SINGLE GUY in the club like that! (laughs) They finally found the guy who did it, and obviously they beat him up. That’s how intense they were, they would shut down a whole club just to find one guy who grabbed my cousin’s ass!
On another night, a guy did something to upset all the Gracies so they walked outside with him and a bunch of his friends. My cousin Russo held up his right fist to the guy and said, "If you can escape from this punch, we won’t beat you up." But while the guy was looking at Russo’s right hand, his brother Daniel threw a punch over Russo’s left shoulder and knocked the guy out with a punch he never even saw coming — and then of course all hell broke loose! It was so much fun! (laughs)
One other thing Daniel liked to do — if he had something against a guy but didn’t have a good enough reason to fight him, he would say to me, "Rose, go slap that guy in the face". That would make it look like the guy had insulted me or something, and then Daniel had an excuse to beat the guy up! (laughs) It was terrible! But we always had so much fun in those clubs.
When you’re in the middle of that sort of thing it’s just normal, everyday stuff. It wasn’t until I grew up that I realized how serious it really was. We had plenty of bar fights, every single time we went somewhere it was a problem. And if one of our group did something, we would all have to move because of safety issues. Sometimes I would have just gotten to a bar with my girlfriends and already I have to leave because of some trouble where the Gracies might be in danger. I would be so disappointed! (laughs)
