Return of the Grappler

Marcelo Garcia, the “small” giant of submission grappling, is back with a new school and a fresh challenge following a long hiatus from competition. Photo by Lawrence Tabudlo

In the world in which Marcelo Garcia operates, where arm drags, chokeholds and joint-manipulations are commonplace, pain is a constant, throbbing reality.

But on one morning about two years ago, the discomfort Garcia felt was something entirely different.
Sitting at home on his couch, he inexplicably found himself struggling to swallow food. This was followed by a dull pressure in his chest — a sensation he had never before experienced even as a highly decorated martial artist who routinely had men twice his size lying or pressing on his sternum.

“I felt like I wanted to burp,” Garcia recalls, “but then I could not burp.”

Naturally concerned about what was going on in his body, Garcia went to see his doctor and an upper endoscopy was scheduled. Following the procedure, it was determined that he had stomach cancer. The jarring news hit particularly close to home for the native of Brazil because he had lost his adoptive mother to the same disease years earlier.
“I was very lucky. You usually don’t feel (cancer) until it’s really spread out,” says the man who’s called Hawai‘i home since 2022. “Mine was in the junction of the stomach and esophagus and that’s why (it was) uncomfortable to swallow.”

Today, Garcia is cancer-free following chemotherapy sessions and surgery to remove a tumor. And although surgeons were also forced to take out half of his stomach and two-thirds of his esophagus, they thankfully left the rest of his internals in place, including that championship-beating heart of his.

In the Brazilian jiu-jitsu universe, Garcia is a legend — a skilled submission grappler who’s enjoyed a long and storied career. His fearlessness in taking on foes of all sizes (he’s competed and won in multiple weight divisions, including middleweight and openweight) has led to an impressive record consisting of 80 victories — 59 by submission — and just 11 losses.

As proof of his place among the pantheon of all-time greats, Garcia has captured five World Jiu-Jitsu Championship crowns and four Abu Dhabi Combat Club Submission Fighting World Championship titles. Additionally, he was named the ADCC’s most technical fighter in 2003 and 2007, and has been inducted into both the International Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Federation (IBJJF) Hall of Fame and the ADCC Hall of Fame.

Not a bad list of accomplishments for someone who’s about to turn the ripe old middle age of 43. (Note: His Wikipedia page and recent press reports list his current age as 41, but Garcia confirms his birthdate as Jan. 17, 1982.)

Thing is, he’s not quite done yet.

Next month, Garcia officially returns to active competition following a 13-year break, when he meets mixed-martial artist Masakazu Imanari, the namesake of the famous “Imanari roll” maneuver, in an openweight submission grappling match. The showdown, slated for Jan. 24 at Impact Arena in Bangkok, Thailand, is part of the fight card for ONE 170, an event produced by the sports promotion company ONE Championship.

The two men have never before met on or off the mat “but I know he has a big ankle attack so it will be interesting for me to go against him,” says Garcia, who signed a two-year exclusive contract with ONE Championship that requires he fight a minimum of two matches annually.

“I want to prove that I still can do this,” he says. “I want to prove that times change, but not so much. I feel like I can still do everything.”

He then adds, “To be able to share this with people and everything I went through (with cancer) and still come back and go compete, and still be able to perform in the way that I’m planning to, I hope people will see that we can do a lot more than what we sometimes think.

“We shouldn’t put a limit on what we want to do.”

While Garcia’s return is being billed as a coming-out-of-retirement occasion, the truth is the longtime grappler never actually called it quits in 2011 after capturing gold at the ADCC World Championship in Nottingham, England.
“I was never retired,” he insists, “but because I took so long to come back, the people kind of retired me. I think they expected that I was not going to go back to compete.”

Garcia says he stayed away from active competition to help wife Tatiana raise their two children. Of course, now that the keiki are older (Olivia is 11 and Marcelo Jr. is 9) and able to appreciate what made their father famous, Garcia is ready to jump back into the combat cage again.

“My kids are doing their own thing and they already have all their play dates and the other stuff they want to do with their friends,” he explains. “And now, I also have more time to train and so I feel like it’s a good opportunity so my kids can see their father compete.”

Growing up in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, the youngster nicknamed Marcelinho (“little Marcelo”) learned to first compete in karate and judo before gravitating to jiu-jitsu. He trained under Fabio Gurgel, a four-time World Jiu-Jitsu champ, and eventually received his black belt, along with a lot of valuable advice, from the man known as “The General.”

Among the lessons learned was that despite Garcia’s average height (5 feet 8 inches) and modest weight (he usually competes at around 170 pounds in the openweight class), he could still beat the sport’s biggest challengers.
“I was always a small guy competing in the openweight division where everybody was way bigger than me,” notes Garcia, adding that his opponents have occasionally topped the scales at 300-plus pounds. “Jiu-jitsu gives us the opportunity. It’s one of the few fighting sports where the technique can win against the weight and strength of large opponents.

“For example, I can find my arm to go around my opponent’s neck and I can choke him, and it doesn’t matter how strong he is because my arm is going to be stronger than his neck.

“People were always inspired (by my small stature) — that’s what people tell me and I appreciate that very much,” adds Garcia, who first shocked the world as an underdog at the 2003 ADCC Submission Grappling Championship in Sao Paolo, Brazil, where he needed just over 20 seconds to beat Vitor “Shaolin” Ribeiro by rear naked choke.
“That always made me feel very good to be a good example … that it doesn’t matter your size, you still can go and beat a big opponent.”

If there’s anything that motivates the soft-spoken Garcia, it’s a challenge.

When he moved from Brazil to the United States almost two decades ago, one of the immediate demands was for him to open a school. He accepted the call and launched a school in 2008 in Pembroke Pines, Florida. A year later, he established an academy in Manhattan, New York.

Those schools no longer exist, but when he and his family relocated to Hawai‘i, the challenge was the same.
“My plan since I moved here (was) to open a gym,” Garcia says. “A big part of my life was to train and compete, but I always felt I learned more while I was teaching. My time with my students, I feel like they constantly make me think, they constantly ask me questions. I feel like that’s a big part of my learning.”

In 2023, Garcia began scouting locations for his O‘ahu school. He eventually found such a place — a spacious 2,800-square-foot facility located at 48 Maluniu St. in Kailua. Last month, he put the final touches on his gymnasium, christened it Marcelo Garcia Jiu-Jitsu Hawai‘i and unlocked its doors for business.

The school is currently open Mondays through Fridays with kids’ classes offered in the late afternoons and adult sessions held in the evenings.

For Garcia, the benefits of Brazilian jiu-jitsu have been life-altering.

“It’s been my life and has done so much for me,” he asserts. “As a child, I didn’t have no goals in life and jiu-jitsu just give me direction, and a very good direction — like away from drugs, away from alcohol. I never drink and I still avoid those things.”

But beyond offering discipline and direction, the martial art has been a way to galvanize an often disparate populace because it strips away all pretenses.

“I feel like in the world that we live today, we’re missing the connection to people,” he says. “Jiu-jitsu is one of the only things going against those things because more and more I feel the social media is keeping us apart. But when you do jiu-jitsu, you’re able to connect a lot of people. We get sweaty, we get tired and exhausted around and on top of each other, and it’s really hard to pretend when you’re in those situations.

“In jiu-jitsu, we have to open up our guard and we’re forced to be ourselves.”

If anything, Garcia’s long break from competition reminded him of how much he truly missed the sport, particularly during the first few weeks of chemotherapy treatment, when he was constantly nauseated and miserable. In those lowest and arguably most painful moments of his life, Garcia recognized not only how much he needed jiu-jitsu, but also how much he longed to be around others.

“I realize how much I was missing jiu-jitsu, and not just the exercise and the fighting, but missing being around people — missing the time that we have before and after class just talking to people,” he says.

“All of us will need help one day or another and we need to have people around us that can support us when we go through things. And that was never so clear to me as when I was sick …how much I need people. We need people.”