Royce Gracie has a new corner to work, according to a post on X. “BREAKING: UFC legend and Hall of Famer Royce Gracie endorses Ken Paxton for U.S. Senate in Texas,” the account ALX (@alx) wrote on X on Monday, Oct. 12, with an attached link.
That post is the only sourcing in front of us. It comes from a third-party account. No statement from Gracie himself and nothing from Paxton’s campaign appears in the material available, so treat the specifics of the endorsement (how it was announced, what Gracie said, whether he’ll campaign) as unconfirmed until one of them speaks on the record.
If you came up after the Conor era and only know Gracie as a name on a poster, here’s the résumé. Born in Rio de Janeiro in December 1966, he’s one of nine children of jiu-jitsu grandmaster Hélio Gracie and got his black belt from his father at 17. Shortly after turning 18 he moved to Torrance, California, with brothers Royler and Rickson to join Rorion, who ran the Gracie Academy there. Rorion co-founded the UFC in 1993, and Royce became the proof of concept.
View post on X
He won the openweight tournaments at UFC 1, UFC 2 and UFC 4 in 1993 and 1994, submitting much bigger men under a near-total absence of rules. He beat Ken Shamrock at UFC 1 and drew with him in the UFC 5 Superfight rematch. Later in PRIDE he went 90 minutes with Kazushi Sakuraba in 2000, which is roughly the length of a modern five-round title fight plus a feature film, and he had the disputed special-rules match with Olympic judo gold medalist Hidehiko Yoshida at PRIDE Shockwave in 2002. He also competed in K-1’s Dynamite!! series and Bellator.
The UFC made him its first Hall of Fame inductee in 2003, alongside Shamrock. The Martial Arts History Museum Hall of Fame followed in 2007, then the International Sports Hall of Fame in 2016.
Gracie is retired, with no fights booked, so this one carries no betting angle. What it does have is name recognition. Nobody in the sport’s history has a stronger claim to having changed how people fight, and his success is the reason the rest of the planet calls it Brazilian jiu-jitsu. Whether that pull matters to Texas voters is another question entirely, and one no oddsmaker is going to post a line on.
The next thing to watch for is simple. Gracie or the Paxton campaign confirming the endorsement in their own words would turn a single post on X into a sourced story.
