^{Ricardo Juca}

By Roberto Pedreira

Ricardo Juca taught only a few classes in the evening at the Academia W2M, at R. Raul Pompéia, 94, sobreloja, in the space vacated by DelaRiva when he moved to his current location. Possibly Ricardo worked during the daylight hours as a professor (like Alvaro Barreto), or engineer (like Roleta), or airline pilot (like Sergio Penha), or entrepreneur (like Sergio Malibu). Maybe he was a doctor. I met doctors in several academies. One gave me some timely tips on not exacerbating a recrudescent neck injury. There are a lot of well-educated Brazilians on the tatames in the academies of Rio. In short, I don’t know what Ricardo Juca did outside of the academy but in the academy he taught jiu-jitsu with extreme attention to detail. He could afford to. One of his students (who had lived in Chicago) told me there were only about twenty-five students. It was the second most spacious academy I saw in Rio, after Carlson's. But Carlson's was crowded. There were only six guys on the mat at Ricardo's. Like DelaRiva, Ricardo was another student of Carlson, but if he had won any major competitions as a black belt, it hadn't been recently; at least, I had never read about him in any of the Brazilian jiu-jitsu magazines over the past two or three years.

Ricardo was interested in Japan. “Which fighters are most famous in Japan?” he wanted to know. Takada, Sakuraba, Rumina Sato, Rickson and Royce, Mark Kerr, Bas Rutten, Enson Inoue, Yuki Nakai, Hugo Duarte, I told him. "Hugo Duarte? Hugo Duarte!" he exclaimed. He couldn't believe Hugo Duarte was famous in Japan. Hugo is regarded in jiu-jitsu circles as a bully-boy brawler with crude skills.

One of Ricardo's students was Andre Brandão, the noted attorney and jiu-jitsu blue belt. Andre had just written a book on jiu-jitsu which, he was confident, would sell 100,000 copies in Brazil. He based that projection on circulation figures for Otatame and the other jiu-jitsu magazines, his distribution deal, and a reasonable cover price (the same as a magazine). He also planned to sell advertising space within the book. He asked me to get it distributed in Japan. I agreed to try but I had to honestly tell him that I didn't think the profit potential was anything to get excited about. He didn't care. "Something is more than nothing", he explained, and mathematically at least, he was correct. I tried to be optimistic. "Let's get rich together,” I said. "I'm already rich" he replied.

Post Script December 2001. While visiting the X-One Cross Training Gym in Fujisawa, Japan, GTR observed a couple of young fighters studying a book that looked kind of familiar. It was Andre's book. He found a distributor in Japan. He's already rich, but now he'll be richer and famous in Japan too.

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Revised December 2001