Carlson Gracie Jr., son of the legendary Carlson Gracie and current head of the Carlson Gracie Team, revealed a piece of belt history many practitioners today have never heard of.
According to Gracie Jr., there was once a stretch of time when black belt promotions were handed out so casually that the federation eventually had to introduce an entirely new belt color just to distinguish legitimate instructors from everyone else.
He explained that for a long period, there were no formal rules governing who was even allowed to promote someone to black belt:
So many people are getting promoted to black belt and people didn’t know where did that come.
Because in back in the days it was not the rules [that] you must reach some level as a black belt to be able to promote somebody.
He described just how informal the process could get:
Nowadays you have to be a third degree black belt to promote somebody to black belt.
Back in the day, a black belt could look at his friend who was a brown belt and just say: “Okay, you’re a black belt too.”So many people were getting promoted like that.
Some people were so far removed from the source that they were allegedly paying to get their black belts.
To address the growing credibility issue, the sport introduced a separate belt entirely for instructors:
We had a period of time where we all wore dark blue belts, which were supposedly the equivalent of black belts back in the day.
For the teachers, if you were a teacher, you wore a dark blue belt.
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