Carlson Gracie vs. BTT, the split told by the reporter who covered it: “Both sides were inflexible”
Marcelo Alonso followed the fight up close. He tells VF Comunica the story of the Last Supper T-shirt and rejects the simple version of betrayal
The split between Carlson Gracie and the students who founded Brazilian Top Team, in 2000, is one of the most painful chapters in the history of Jiu-Jitsu and MMA in Brazil. On one side was the master who had built a generation of champions. On the other, names like Murilo Bustamante, Zé Mario Sperry and Ricardo Libório. Journalist and photographer Marcelo Alonso was in the middle, a friend to both sides.
In an interview with Vitor Freitas for VF Comunica, Alonso told what he saw and rejected the idea that it all comes down to betrayal. “This story is very complex. I was there, I lived it, I wrote the story on the day of the split,” he said. “Both sides were inflexible, and there were also people who wanted the split to happen.”
The Last Supper T-shirt
Carlson called the students he had broken with “traitors” and, according to Alonso, demanded that the journalist pick a side. “He would get mad because I didn’t take his side in that situation. I wanted the guys to make peace,” he recalled.
The pressure came by phone, from Chicago, where the master lived. Carlson asked for photos of each former student to print on a T-shirt. When Alonso asked what they were for, he got the explanation: “I’m Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ in the middle, and the traitors around me stealing the bread from my hand.”
The shirt was made. Alonso refused to wear it and still keeps it. “I still have it. He gave it to me,” he said.
“Vitor was the one that hurt the most”
Among Carlson’s breakups, Alonso points to the one with Vitor Belfort as the most painful. “I think Vitor was the one that hurt him the most, because Vitor was like a son to him,” he said. Belfort was the one who convinced the master to move to Los Angeles and start over. “Imagine doing that at 70,” the journalist said.
Affection on both sides
Alonso stayed close to the BTT founders after the fight and says he never heard a word of contempt from them about their former teacher. “There isn’t a lunch where they don’t talk about Carlson with affection, laughing a lot. They felt it deeply. And Carlson even more, because he went to live in Chicago alone,” he said.
For him, the disagreement over the master’s share of the fighters’ purses hid a relationship nobody wanted to break. “Carlson spent everything he had,” he said, explaining that money was not the center of the issue. The journalist says that, listening to both sides, he saw the split coming. “These guys love the master,” he said.
Carlson Gracie died in 2006, in Chicago. “When Carlson died, everybody was really shaken,” Alonso recalled.
The size of what Carlson built
The scale of the split is measured by what existed before it. Alonso recalls that, from the creation of the federation in the 1970s to the era of the World Championships, Carlson’s academy won almost every division in Jiu-Jitsu competitions, and that the same students took that dominance to vale tudo, the no-holds-barred fights that came before MMA. BTT, founded by them, went on to become one of the biggest MMA teams in the world.
Full video on YouTube
The full interview with Marcelo Alonso is on the VF Comunica YouTube channel (in Portuguese).
For you, is there a right side in the story of Carlson and BTT? Leave your opinion in the comments.
