At age 44, Royce Gracie says he still has some fight in him.
"I have one more," he told The Canadian Press.
The UFC Hall of Famer says he does not know when it will happen, although there is speculation it could be at the UFC's August show in Brazil.
"I'm a fighter," he said with a smile. "It doesn't matter. Anywhere."
Despite a lopsided loss in his last UFC fight in 2006, and a positive drug test four years ago, Gracie remains a mixed martial arts icon. A new DVD "UFC Ultimate Royce Gracie" is out and the UFC has had Gracie doing extensive publicity around UFC 129.
UFC president Dana White calls him "the Godfather." UFC welterweight champion Georges St-Pierre says Gracies is his idol. "He did stuff nobody has done. For me, he was the pioneer."
St-Pierre even trained with six-time world Brazilian jiu-jitsu champion Roger Gracie in England to prepare for his title defence against Jake Shields at UFC 129.
"Gracie is not a family, it's a factory of fighters . . . we're fighters by nature. We're teachers by nature," says Royce.
The Gracie name comes with a price, Royce concedes, however. People like to test Gracies.
"It could be a blessing or it could be a curse," he said. "It depends. it's a heavy name to carry, very heavy name to carry."
Royce (13-2-2) has carried it well, becoming the figurehead of the famed Gracie family.
The Gracie fighting story really began when Royce's grandfather, Gastao Gracie, did a favour for a Japanese neighbour Esai Maeda in the 1920s. As a thank you, he started teaching the family a raw form of jiu-jitsu.
Carlos Gracie, Royce's uncle, opened an academy and started to refine the martial art. Helio Gracie, Royce's father, had to watch from the sidelines because he was frail and small.
As he watched, he rethought the moves in his mind.
"So he didn't invent the car, the wheel. What he did was he invented the jack, the leverage," Royce says on the "UFC Ultimate Royce Gracie."
His jiu-jitsu worked against all-comers, and it was cunning, with opponents unwittingly often descending into deeper waters when they tried to escape.
According to lore, Carlos was late teaching a private lesson one day and Helio took over. His brand of jiu-jitsu took off with Carlo and Helio eventually moving to Rio de Janeiro to open a new academy and spread the word.
Helio's six sons -- Rorion, Relson, Rickson, Rolker Royler, Robin and Royce, the youngest -- began to teach in the family business. They instituted the Gracie Challenge, taking on all-comers to prove the power of their brand of jiu-jitsu.
Rorion took the venture to the U.S. and brought Royce there in December 1984. The brothers taught jiu-jitsu out of a garage and soon word spread. The brothers held their own "Gracie In Action" challenges, which they filmed to have documentary evidence of their fighting superiority.
Rorion decided to turn the Gracie challenge up a notch.
Promoter Art Davie came in and, together with pay-per-view producer Semaphore Entertainment Group, the first UFC debuted Nov. 12, 1993, in Denver with an emphasis on matching one fighting style against another. The prize was US$50,000 and the title of the Ultimate Fighting Champion.
Seven fighters from 70 applications were chosen. When it came time to pick a Gracie to complete the field of eight, Rickson seemed the obvious choice because of his fighting skills. But instead they choose the six-foot-one 178-pound Royce, because of his slender, unassuming look.
The tone was set early when Savate world champion Gerard Gordeau kicked 420-pound Sumo wrestler Teila Tuli in the head and a tooth flew out of the cage.
There were no rules, other than a gentleman's agreement that there'd be no biting or eye-gouging.
The gi-wearing Royce came out in the middle of a line of family members, each with their arms on the shoulders of the man in front of them. It was dubbed The Gracie Train.
Boxer Art Jimmerson tapped out against Royce in two minutes 18 seconds, frustrated at having the Brazilian glued on top him. Twenty-four minutes later, Royce went to the cage to face ground fighter Ken Shamrock, who lasted 57 seconds before he tapped out to a choke. And Gordeau was dispatched in 1:44 in the championship bout, enraging Royce when he bit him in the ear.
As Royce notes, there was no red card or official sanction at UFC 1. So he head-butted him in the face and then applied a choke.
"I just held the choke a little longer," he said slyly with a laugh.
Royce was crowned the Ultimate Fighting Champion, Gracie jiu-jitsu was the king and cage-fighting was up and running.
Royce said he always knew the concept was a winner.
"People are always interested in finding out who is the best fighter? Who is the best athlete? Let's go back in time, what would happen if Bruce Lee could have fought Mike Tyson? Who'd win that fight. There's only one way to find out, take all the rules out, all the weight divisions. ... It's human curiosity."
Does he wish there were more rules when he started fighting?
"I wouldn't change the past for nothing," he said with a smile.
"In the beginning, it was a quest for my family," he added. "If our style was really the best."
They needed to get rid of the rules to have everyone on an even footing, so it was style against style, he argued.
"Gracie jiu-jitsu proved to be the best," he said.
Royce won UFC 2, but had to withdraw from UFC 3 after one fight due to dehydration (pulling out before he was to fight Canadian Harold Howard). He returned to win UFC 4, defeating wrestler Dan Severn and then won a super-fight against Shamrock at UFC 5.
Today, Gracie travels six months a year, making appearances and doing seminars -- sometimes for the general public, other times for police or the military.
After Toronto, his itinerary reads Philadelphia, New York, Scranton, New York, New Jersey, London, Ont., and Halifax.
Gracie's last UFC fight was a one-sided loss to Matt Hughes at UFC 60 in May 2006.
"I knew exactly what he was going to do, he did exactly what my team thought he was going to do. I trained for that. I just didn't show up," he says, shaking his head.
Gracie, a father of four now living in Los Angeles, fought just once more, beating Kazushi Sakuraba in June 2007. He subsequently tested positive for the anabolic steroid Nandralone.
Today Gracie is a father of four and lives in Los Angeles.
The first member of the UFC's Hall of Fame, he says the success of the now sanctioned UFC is something to savour.
"Of course, this is my family's baby," he said. "My father would be very proud of the way Zuffa and Dana White and the Fertitta brothers, the way they took and spun the whole thing around."
