On a recent episode of Origin with Matt Serra, UFC Hall of Famer Matt Serra sat down with his longtime friend and former roommate Rodrigo Gracie to revisit their years training together at the Gracie Jiu-Jitsu school in New York.
The name of Craig Kukuk, the first American to receive a Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt from the Gracie family, came up naturally. During the conversation, Serra was describing how Rodrigo arrived in New York during the early days of the sport’s expansion in the United States.
Reflecting on that period, he said, “In the ’90s, when you came there, the Gracie-Kukuk school, ’cause he was partnered up with Craig Kukuk at the time, his American business partner who I started with, and then for a couple of years then Renzo moved there. Eventually they split, as we know, and we all went with Renzo. The other guy was kind of hard to get close to no? Craig.”
When Serra said that Kukuk “was a good teacher,” Rodrigo offered a brief assessment of Kukuk’s abilities. He agreed with Serra, adding, “Yeah, he was. He was interesting.”
Rodrigo then went on to say, “Yeah, he’s actually… was a black belt under Rorion,”
Serra then completed the thought by referencing the Gracie brothers who awarded Kukuk his rank, saying, “Well, he came from Royce and Rorion, and then they disowned him the second he got his black belt.”
Serra went on to recall how he first learned about Kukuk long before he ever stepped onto the mats. Thinking back to his early exposure to the sport, he said, “I used to get the Gracie newsletter. It was like a newsletter they’d send when you bought their tapes, and this is before I took any classes. And there, you know, they announced one newsletter. It was like every few months you get one or whatever.”
He then described the dramatic sequence of announcements he read in those newsletters, saying, “One newsletter said, ‘Oh, our new black belt, first American black belt, Craig Kukuk,’ and then the following one, ‘We disown Craig Kukuk.'”
Despite that very public split, Serra emphasized that Kukuk still played a pivotal role in making Brazilian jiu-jitsu accessible to practitioners in the northeastern United States during the 1990s.
Reflecting on how scarce training opportunities were at the time, he said, “I knew when he came to New York, back in the ’90s, he was the only guy teaching it, besides Steve Maxwell in Philadelphia, on Rorion and Royce, to learn jiu-jitsu.”
Serra continued, “It was so hard to learn. Now it’s in every town, you know what I mean? But back in the ’90s, I wasn’t in Rio, on Long Island there’s nothing. So he was there one day a week in Manhattan, and then it ended up becoming three days a week.”
