‘The only rules? No biting and no eye gouging’: UFC’s first champion Royce Gracie on the night MMA was born
Royce Gracie, the first ever UFC champion and most famous practitioner of jiu-jitsu in the world, slips through the back door of Costa Coffee.
He’s a hard man to get a hold of. I hardly imagined I’d meet him in a coffee chain in Essex, and the peripheral sight of him sat next to me while intently whisking the foam on his Massimo hot chocolate is a little startling. My perception of Gracie as almost mythical implanted images in my mind of him consuming nothing but raw fruit (skin on, of course) and human sweat.
But here he is, still one of the most dangerous men on the planet at 53, clad in a plain black sweatshirt and beanie hat, glad to have left the evening chill outside. His subtle entrance is no attempt to be inconspicuous; his reputation in jiu-jitsu and MMA is essentially unrivalled, but the average Brentwood high-street goer and Costa patron is unlikely to be aware
