Rickson Gracie is very proud of being humble.
And that is only the beginning of the paradoxes that surround the Brazilian Jiu Jitsu legend.
An alpha personality in the dojo, within his family he took a backseat to his brothers. Born with a fierce temperament, he adopts wild animals, gentling them into pets. Adamantly in favor of respecting progressive, dynamic women, and a father who believes in empowering his two daughters, he also repeated the chauvinistic behaviors modeled by his father and uncle. Perhaps most poignantly, he asserts himself as a self-aware realist, and while that is undoubtedly true, it is also evident that he isn’t quite as self-aware as he believes.