ADCC champion and jiu-jitsu historian Robert Drysdale does not understand why the world remembers Bruce Lee before it remembers Euclides Pereira, one of the sport’s original Vale Tudo legends. In a recent interview on The MMA Lab, Drysdale put the comparison bluntly.
“The fact that we live in a world where Bruce Lee is more famous than Euclides Pereira, who’s still alive by the way, is sh0cking to me. Most people have not heard that name. Guy retired undefeated. We don’t even know how many matches he had, but well over a hundred. These guys were competing like once a month, man. It was a lifestyle to them. Retired undefeated. He’s in his late 90s, mid-90s, and he’s still teaching class.”
Drysdale placed Pereira alongside Ivan Gomes and Carlson Gracie as the true proto stars of Vale Tudo, athletes who tested themselves under rules and consequences that modern MMA never had to face. He argued that Pereira’s record, built across decades of unregulated compeition, is difficult to even categorize next to a movie career.
“It’s a very strange world where Bruce Lee is more famous than him. To me, that’s a very odd world. I’m like, why? This guy’s a superhero. This guy’s an actor. How can people not see the difference in merit, effort, skill, courage, sweat on their brow. You can’t even put them in the same conversation, yet one no one’s ever heard of.”
Drysdale pointed to American media as the reason the imbalance exists, noting that a single Hollywood film can shape global memory more than a lifetime of documented fights ever could.
“I think Hollywood has been such a negative force in the world. You ask people any World War II question, they’re going to give you a quote from Saving Private Ryan. It’s very easy to get deceived by biased information because it’s 100% of what you know. And 100% of what you know can very easily lead you to believe that it’s 100% of the story, because it is 100% of the story to you.”
That said, Lee’s connection to the sport Drysdale has spent his life competing in and documenting is not disputed. Bruce Lee’s influence on the development of modern martial arts is difficult to dismiss.
Long before the UFC existed, Lee had already begun moving away from rigid loyalty to any single martial art. During the mid-1960s, he developed the ideas that would eventually become known as Jeet Kune Do, a philosophy built around taking useful techniques from different disciplines rather than treating one style as complete.
UFC President Dana White has previously reflected on the similarities between Lee’s approach and what athletes do today.
“You take the good things from every different discipline. You use what works for you, and you throw the rest away. That’s what MMA is all about. There is no style but the one that works and gets the job done.”
That does not necessarily mean Lee invented MMA or that Jeet Kune Do was the first mixed combat system in history. Martial artists had been borrowing from, adapting and combining different styles long before Lee. Vale Tudo itself was already producing athletes who tested techniques from different disciplines against one another under minimal rules.
However, Lee was among the most influential figures to openly promote the idea that no single style should define a figh ter.
The same argument came up when Joe Rogan discussed Bruce Lee’s influence during a conversation with Dwayne Johnson.
Rogan acknowledged that Lee’s popularity transformed the way the wider public viewed martial arts. Beyond his combat ability and screen presence, Lee helped make martial arts exciting and accessible to audiences around the world, inspiring a generation of people to begin training.
According to Rogan, Lee incorporated ideas from disciplines including Wing Chun, boxing, wrestling, judo and karate while constantly adapting his approach based on what he believed was effective.
“What Bruce Lee said is, ‘Use everything that’s useful, everything that’s useful.’ And he put together a system of martial arts that incorporated everything he learned… He put it all together with Western boxing and wrestling. He realized, like, there are so many different ways to fig ht, and the style is having no style; the way is no way.”
Rogan argued that this philosophy eventually became central to mixed martial arts.
“Figuring out how to adapt and move to every situation, to be like water. Be formless, and he taught that philosophy, and that philosophy eventually became mixed martial arts.”
Gomes and other Vale Tudo pioneers may have accumulated competitive accomplishments that were far more extensive than anything Lee ever did in a documented combat career. Yet Lee’s ideas reached audiences and fighters far beyond the world of traditional martial arts.
One of the most prominent examples of Lee’s continuing influence can be found in Jon Jones. Jones has previously spoken about incorporating Lee’s philosophy into his approach to striking, particularly the idea of remaining relaxed and adaptable before suddenly exploding into an opening.
“I use his philosophy of crashing and flowing with my standup. It’s all about visualising going from zero to 100 and striking like a cobra. I try to stay completely relaxed and cerebral at all times when I’m figh ting until the moment of impact, when it’s time to explode.”
Jones also cited him directly as an inspiration for his standup, including the kick that was popularized in Lee’s combat scene with Chuck Norris.
Before his match against Stipe Miocic at Madison Square Garden, Jones spent months refining a spinning back kick that he had begun developing after drawing inspiration from the legendary martial artist.
“About six months ago we started training the spinning back-kick. My taekwondo coach would come over to my house, we trained that same kick three hours a week for several months,” he said during an interview.
Jones eventually used the technique to devastating effect against Miocic, dropping him with the kick in front of a packed Madison Square Garden. Reflecting on the preparation behind it, Jones invoked one of Lee’s most famous philosophies.
“Bruce Lee says he doesn’t fear the man that knows 10,000 kicks, but the man who has worked one kick 10,000 times. I worked it and it was a devastating shot.”
The history of Brazilian jiu-jitsu offers a parallel to Bruce Lee’s story: lasting influence is shaped by more than effectiveness alone. BJJ’s global rise was driven not only by its success in combat but also by the Gracie family’s highly effective promotion and marketing of the art, particularly in presenting Brazilian jiu-jitsu as the ultimate answer to other combat styles.
Critics of that history have also argued that the Gracies were selective about the challenges they accepted, with claims that they were particularly keen to avoid facing American wrestlers, whose style presented a difficult matchup.
The martial arts that become globally dominant are not always simply the ones that are most effective. They are often the ones with the strongest stories, personalities and ability to market themselves.
