Renzo started teaching Jiu-Jitsu when he was only 12 years old: he taught everything he learned with his master Rolls Gracie to his friends, in the house where he lived with his mother and brothers in Barra da Tijuca (Rio de Janeiro). The huge room on the second floor of his house was covered with mats and was frequented by dozens of boys.
 
RENZO: What Jiu-Jitsu gives me, I give to others.
 
INTERVIEWER: And what did Jiu-Jitsu give you at this time?
 
RENZO: Power. Courage. And freedom.
 
He had made many friends at the public school he attended, on the beach, in nearby buildings and houses. They were poor and rich, black and white boys, coming from very expensive private schools or precarious government schools, from buildings by the sea or from shacks in the favelas.
 
VERA (Renzo's mother): From a young age he learned to treat everyone the same and this continues to this day: he gives the same attention to everyone he meets, whether a beggar or a king. He knows that people are essentially the same.
 
On Renzo's part, there was nothing to stop those kids from being there: you just had to love Jiu-Jitsu like he loved it. Some ended up staying at his home for days, months, and sometimes years.
 
VERA: Renzo told me that a friend, Félix, had been kicked out of the surf board shop where he slept and needed to stay at our home for the weekend. I agreed: the boy stayed 15 years with us. (Laughs) Another, Klebil, lived with us for 8 years... We had 20 boys sleeping there. There were so many children that people were sure our house was a daycare!
 
With his small army of fighters formed (“splitting the bread”, as he says), Renzo drove drug dealers off a wide stretch of beach.
 
RENZO: We warned the guys: you won't sell drugs here. Some learned quickly, others needed to be punished to understand... I once broke a drug dealer's leg. I told him: “I'm doing this for your own good, I'm giving you a chance to change. Because maybe, from this broken leg, you will rethink your life and choose another path. A cop won't give you that chance.”
 
In a short time, drug trafficking had ceased in the area of Quebra Mar.
 
RENZO: None of this was planned, things just happened. We reacted to what we felt was wrong. Many people question the existence of God. Some say that God does not exist, others say that God is this or that... But the fact is that we are born with a unique thing: the certainty in the heart of what is right and what is wrong. THAT is what I call God. So you choose in your life which path you want to follow, what choices you want to make, in the face of the problems that appear day by day. Because you've gained this notion of good and evil; every human being has received this gift.
 
In one of his lectures, Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson states that: “...all young people break rules, or rather, all healthy young people do.” Throughout his adolescence, several times Renzo's sense of justice and fearlessness came up against situations that made him break certain rules of social life. Some of these situations even put him in an outlaw position... But none of these incidents, however violent (or “intense”, as he prefers to call it), made him break with the central prerogative dictated to him by his mother when he was very young, and which has never been forgotten: “The only things you can't really do in your life are steal and humiliate. The worst thing in the world, my son, is humiliating someone.”
 
ROBSON (Renzo's father): Our family has always been about confrontation, fighting – and street fighting too, if need be. 
 
In an interview, his cousin Relson points out that the atmosphere in Rio de Janeiro in the 1980s was very different from the notion of civility that exists in developed countries. What there was was a savage setting, in which street fights were inevitable: “We weren't looking for trouble, but trouble was looking for us...” At one point, confronted by the interviewer, Relson states: “If protecting my life and the lives of the people I loved was a crime, then I was a criminal.”
 
(to be continued)