Bad

The Toughest Man in the United States holds no official titles and has had only one fight in years. He lives with his pregnant wife and four children, three small sons and a baby daughter, in a modest ranch house on a tidy little street of similar homes in Torrance, California. He is 37, tall and skinny at 6'2", 165 pounds, and he does not look very tough. He looks more like Tom Selleck than like Mr. T He is dark and handsome like Selleck, with wavy black hair, a trim mustache and a charming, self-deprecating smile. He spends more time in the kitchen than his wife does and wears a woman's apron. He has an idiosyncratic high-pitched laugh. He picks up a yellowed newspaper with an account of one of his father's fights, adjusts his bifocals and reads. "The most savage, stupid bloody desires of the audience were satisfied,'" he says. Then he laughs. "Heh-heh!"

Rorion Gracie, a native of Brazil, is a family man in an Old World sort of way. His wife, Suzanne, with pale skin and straight brown hair, moves through her day silently and without expression. Rorion, who is eager for lunch, snaps at her and his visiting daughter, Rose, 13, from a previous marriage. They move quickly and silently to his command. His young sons, ages seven, five and three, meanwhile, are tossing ping-pong balls onto the table. His baby girl, one, watches. He asks them, please, to stop. Rorion dotes on his sons the way his father doted on his sons. It is the way of fathers from macho countries in South America and the Mediterranean, where sons are treated like little princes.

"I never spank my sons," Rorion says, "because my father never spanked me." He spends as much time as possible with his sons. He drives them to their soccer practice in his station wagon. He spends the day with them at the beach.

Rorion once fought a kick-boxing champion and made him beg for mercy in less than three minutes. Before the fight, the kick boxer had stood in his corner of the ring and flexed his muscular arms. He cut the air with savage kicks. The crowd oohed and aahed. Rorion, skinny and stoop-shouldered, stood in his corner and waited. Two minutes and 15 seconds after the bell sounded, he was straddling the kick boxer on the mat in such a way that, if the kick boxer had not surrendered, Rorion would have "choked him out."

Rorion has made a standing offer to fight anyone in the United States, winner take all, for $100,000. So far, he has had no takers--for one simple reason. Rorion's fights are fights to the finish with no rules. His fights are merely street brawls in a ring bounded by ropes. Kicking, punching, head butting, elbow and knee hits are all fair play in a Gracie fight. Only the accouterments of a street brawl--broken bottles, ash cans, bricks--are missing. The only purpose a referee serves in a Gracie fight is to acknowledge his opponent's surrender when he taps the mat with his hand or passes out from a choke hold.

Rorion (pronounced Horion, in the Portuguese way) is a master of a kind of no-holds-barred jujitsu practiced by his family in Brazil for 60 years. Gracie jujitsu is a bouillabaisse of the other martial arts: judo (throws), karate (kicks, punches), aikido (twists), boxing (punches) and wrestling (grappling, holds). Its primary purpose is defensive; i.e., to render attackers immobile. Rorion believes that since most real fights end up on the ground 90 percent of the time, Gracie jujitsu is the most devastating of all martial arts, because it relies on a series of intricate wrestlinglike moves that are most effective when the combatants are on the ground. All a jujitsu master must do is avoid his attacker's kicks, punches and stabs until he can throw him to the ground and then apply either a choke hold to render him unconscious or a hold in which he can break his attacker's arm, leg, back or neck. A jujitsu fight is like a chess match, in that the winner is usually the one who can think the most moves ahead of his opponent.

Jujitsu originated in India 2000 years ago, traveled to Japan (via China) three centuries ago and was introduced to Brazil through Rorion's family 60 years ago, when a touring Japanese master taught Rorion's uncle some basic moves. His uncle taught Rorion's father and the two men grew enamored of it, as only two small men with monstrous egos could. They took Japanese jujitsu a step further than their teachers by introducing techniques that required less strength than the Japanese style and would make their family the most feared and famous in all of Brazil. Rorion's father, Helio, once fought an opponent in the ring before 20,000 screaming spectators for three hours and 40 minutes, nonstop, before the police finally separated the bloodied combatants. In another ring fight, he so savaged his opponent with kicks to his kidney that many attributed his subsequent death to the fight. When a rival martial-arts teacher once accused the Gracie family of fixing its fights, Helio, surrounded by a taunting crowd, confronted him on the street. He had broken the man's arms and ribs before the police arrested him. He was sentenced to two and a half years in jail for that beating, but the president of Brazil, a fan of the Gracie family, pardoned him within a week.

Rorion laughs and says, "Heh-heh! My dad kicked his butt." He is sitting in the den of his tidy little house, sifting through the many newspaper and magazine articles written about his family, while his sons wrestle, jujitsu style, on the floor.

Rorion holds up a photograph of his father in a kimono taken when Helio was 34. He is a small, slim man at 5'8", 135 pounds, with slicked-back hair, an aquiline nose and a pencil-thin mustache. He is hip-tossing his older brother, Carlos, in an open field. "That was the year my dad read a Reader's Digest article that said a boxer beat a jujitsu guy," Rorion says. "Heh-heh! My father offered to fight five boxers in one night. At various times, he offered to fight Primo Camera, Ezzard Charles and Joe Louis. He put up sixteen thousand dollars and told Louis he'd fight with Louis having no gloves, just taped hands. No one took up his challenge." Rorion shrugs. "Louis was on vacation and here was this little bee buzzing in his ear and giving him no peace. Heh-heh!"

Helio reigned as the self-proclaimed toughest man in the occidental world for 25 years. He fought 14 fights in the ring and lost only two of them, one to Japanese master Kimura and the other to a much younger man--in fact, his protégé--when Helio, at 42, was out of shape. Helio is 75 now, the patriarch of a family of nine children, including seven sons, and 18 grandchildren. Rorion has a photograph of his father at 73, still fit, gaunt-faced, with his aquiline nose and menacing pale-blue eyes. He is posing in his kimono with three of his sons, Rorion, Relson and Rickson, in their kimonos. Father and sons are standing identically--legs spread, arms crossed at their chests, eyes glaring at the camera--underneath a seal of the Gracie Jujitsu Academy, which Carlos and Helio founded in Rio in the Twenties. Helio's sons have all taught at the academy at one time or another. They are black belts. They are bigger than their father, darker, but the look in their eyes is only a parody of their father's truly menacing look. Except for Rickson. He has his own look. Not menacing but devoid of emotion. The blankness of the supremely confident. Rickson is 29, as muscular as a bodybuilder, with a Marine's crewcut, the high cheekbones of an Inca Indian and a square jaw. If Rorion is amiably handsome, Rickson is devastatingly handsome. Noted photographer Bruce Weber devoted 36 pages of his book on Rio (O Rio De Janeiro) to the Gracies and Rick-son. Rickson as a baby being tossed high into the air by his father. Rorion and Relson as small boys on the beach, Rorion hooking his leg behind his brother's before throwing him to the sand. Rickson, in bikini shorts, on his back on a mat in a ring, his legs wrapped around the hips of a muscular black man, also in bikini shorts, who is trying to strangle him.

"Zulu," says Rorion. "A street fighter. He was thirty pounds heavier than Rickson. He threw Rickson out of the ring four times in their fight." Rorion gets up to put on a video tape of Rickson's fight with Zulu for the title of toughest man in the occidental world. A grainy image flickers on the screen. Zulu is sitting astride Rickson, on his back. He is trying to gouge out Rickson's eyes. Rickson keeps twisting his head left and right to avoid Zulu's stabbing fingers while, at the same time, he is kicking his heels into the sides of Zulu's back where his kidneys are. Rorion laughs and says, "Heh-heh! After the fight, Zulu was pissing blood for weeks."

The two men, locked in combat, roll toward the edge of the ring. The crowd surges forward. Hands reach out and slap at the combatants. The referee kicks at the hands, trying to drive the crowd back, while he grabs the combatants' legs and pulls them back to the center of the ring. A rain of crushed paper cups descends on the ring. The referee kicks the cups out of the ring like a soccer player.

"Wild people, huh?" says Rorion. "Brazil is a violent country. Watch here." Rickson stops kicking Zulu's kidneys, locks his legs around his hips and rolls him over so that now he is on top. He unleashes a barrage of bare-fisted punches to Zulu's face. Zulu tries to block the blows with his hands.

Zulu manages to roll Rickson over now so that he is on top of him, close to the edge of the ring again. Before Zulu can set himself, Rickson twists Zulu's body so that Zulu is lying on top of him, both men facing the overhead lights. Rickson gets Zulu in a choke hold and squeezes. Zulu's eyes begin to roll back into his head.

Rorion, smiling, turns off the video and says, "I used to change Rickson's diapers. Now he's the best in the world. Heh-heh!" It amuses him that he is the toughest man in the United States and yet he is not even the toughest man in his own family "Rickson has never been beaten," he says. "No one will challenge him after Zulu. It's been three years. The Gracie family is the only family in history that will fight anyone with no rules. The Gracies don't believe in Mike Tyson. Rickson issued a public challenge to Mike Tyson, but he has not responded."

All the while Rorion has been talking, his three sons have been grappling on the floor, like monkeys, in a silent parody of their father and uncle Rickson. Their names are Ryron, Rener and Ralek. Nearby is his daughter Segina. Rorion has two daughters by a previous marriage in Brazil, Riane, 12, and Rose. Rorion believes that the letter R has mystical powers. He also shuns common names, like Robert, because they carry their own associations. "An original name has only the aura you give to it," he says. It is a belief, one of many, that Rorion inherited from his father, whom he worships almost as a god. (Rorion's other siblings besides his brothers Relson, 36, and Rickson are brothers Rolker, 24, Royler, 23, Royce, 22, Robin, 15, and sisters Rherica, 20, and Ricci, 12.)

Rorion's beliefs were fashioned out of Helio and Carlos' devotion to jujitsu, not merely as a martial art but as the cornerstone for a way of living that encompasses every aspect of a man's life, from morality and sex to diet. Rorion, for instance, eats only raw fruits and, occasionally, vegetables, and only in certain combinations as prescribed by his uncle Carlos, a nutritionist. His back yard is a greengrocer's market of boxes of apples, watermelons, bananas, mangoes and papayas he has bought in bulk. A typical Gracie meal might include watermelon juice, sliced persimmons and a side of bananas, and the talk around the Gracie dinner table between Rorion and his wife invariably concerns such questions as whether apricots should be combined with mangoes at a meal. His sons have only a passing acquaintance with foods other than fruits. They have had chicken maybe three times in their lives, and once, at a friend's birthday party, they were given lollipops, which they began smacking against the sides of their heads because they didn't know what they were.

If the Gracie family's belief in the efficacy of fruits and the letter R seems nutty, if harmless, then their devotion to warrior values such as courage, honor and chivalry borders on the fanatical. Gracie men do fight at the drop of an insult, with predictably savage results. When Carlos and Helio returned home one night and found a robber in their house, they offered him the choice of fighting or going to jail. He chose to fight. In minutes, his screams woke the neighborhood: "Jail! Jail! Jail!" When Uncle Carlos fought, he was not content merely to beat an opponent, he also wanted to teach him a lesson, or, as Uncle Carlos likes to say, "He's gonna get to dreamland all right, but first he must walk through the garden of punishment."

Rorion laughs and shakes his head. "Uncle Carlos was a bratty little kid. When he saw a Japanese guy carrying heavy loads of laundry, he liked to trip him. Heh-heh! He was very aggressive." When Carlos found opponents scarce for his ring fights, he advertised for them in the newspaper under a headline that read, "If you want a Broken arm or rib, Contact Carlos Gracie at this Number."

Rorion is not so aggressive as Uncle Carlos, but he has inherited the Gracie sense of honor and chivalry And he likens "The Gracie Myth" to the myth of Sparta. "My purpose in life," he says, "is to keep the flame of Sparta alive." Although appropriate in a macho country like Brazil, this warrior mentality often seems out of sync in the more benign clime of Southern California. Nevertheless, Rorion is not one to ignore an insult. When he drove his wife and sons to a movie recently and inadvertently cut off another driver, he apologized. The man rolled down his window and yelled, "Asshole!" Rorion told the man he wasn't being polite. "Asshole!" the man yelled. Rorion followed the man until he stopped at a light. He got out of his car and walked up to the man and said softly; "Your mother's an asshole!" The man rolled up his window and sped through the light.

"I can't go to sleep having swallowed frogs," Rorion says. "Jujitsu is my peace of mind. It's like having a forty-five-caliber gun in the drawer. Suzanne knows just enough jujitsu to use it in her dreams to come to grips with her fears. It's very therapeutic. It takes away paranoia."

Rorion will not teach Suzanne jujitsu, he says, because he already spends too much time in the kitchen. He laughs, then says seriously that it is a man's, not a woman's, duty to defend a woman's honor. It is another belief he learned from his uncle and his father. In fact, his relationship with Suzanne is a parody of the chauvinistic relationships his uncle Carlos and his father had with their wives, except for one significant point. Suzanne, who was raised in Southern California, does not see herself as a docile Brazilian wife.

Uncle Carlos had four wives and 21 children. When his first wife died, he gave seven of his children to Helio to raise. At the time, Helio was on his honeymoon with his wife, a chestnut-haired beauty named Margarida, who had been educated in Paris. Helio also had another family of sons with a woman who lived in Rio.

"When my mother couldn't have any more sons," Rorion says, "my father had six more kids with another woman. When my mother found out, she freaked. My dad told her he still loved her and he would never leave her. He just wanted more kids. When I heard this, I was only a boy and I thought my mom would get thrown out. But my dad told me not to worry: Then he said, 'How many brothers would you like?' I said, 'As many as possible.' He said, 'Good, you have three more.' Now I have six; two from my mom and four from my dad's other woman. We're all one family now." Rorion holds up a two-page magazine photograph of a Gracie family get-together in Rio. Helio and his wife are seated in the middle of a flock of their children and grandchildren, Carlos' children and grandchildren and Helio's children with his other woman. There are 48 beautiful, smiling Gracie offspring in that photograph, ranging in age from two to 52. Fifty-seven other offspring are missing from the photograph.

I had the nicest youth you could ever dream of," says Rorion. "In summer, we lived on a ranch in the mountains outside Rio. It had twenty-four bedrooms and eighteen bathrooms for thirty-seven kids. All the meals were served three times each. The kids ate with kids and the adults with adults." He laughs. "You had (continued on page 144)Bad(continued from page 94) to separate the cowboys from the Indians. There was always something cooking in the family, always some action." Rorion puts the photograph down and looks up, smiling. "Do you know, my mom and dad are still together. My dad spends four days a week with her at the ranch and three days with his other woman in Rio. It works out fine."

Just then, Suzanne passes through the den. She is wearing a baggy sweat shirt that does not hide the fact that she is very pregnant. She stops at the sliding glass door that leads outside and looks at Rorion. He does not notice her. He goes on talking about his father's beliefs about men and women and procreation.

"In the Gracie family," Rorion says, "the men are peacocks. Women are along for the ride. When my dad and mom went out on their first date, my mom smoked a cigarette. My dad said, 'I never kiss a woman who smokes.' My mom put out her cigarette and said, 'I don't smoke.'

"Women become feminists because of men's weakness," says Rorion. "Every woman wants her man to treat her like a woman or he loses his position of strength with her. Women are meant to be mothers. Having kids is the only thing a woman can do that a man can't. Most Gracie men do not believe in birth control. We believe sex is a holy thing. For procreation of the species. If Suzanne does not want to get pregnant, we don't have sex. Before we got married, I told her that she was my vehicle for having sons. As many as possible. She said, 'Would ten be enough?' I want to have sons to keep the Gracie myth alive," says Rorion. "I want to raise as many jujitsu champions as I can. We are like a family of Magic John-sons. I told Suzanne that it is possible I may want to start another family, like my father. If I can find a woman with the right karma. But that would be hard. The only thing harder to find than a good woman is a good man," Rorion says, laughing.

"Rorion!" Suzanne's voice, like a rifle shot, swivels his head toward the sliding glass door. "You can't tell him that!"

Rorion smiles. "I have to tell him everything."

Suzanne glares at her husband. "He wrote it down!"

Rorion tries hard to keep his smile. He says calmly, "We'll talk about it later, Suzanne," and looks away from her. She glares at him, then opens the sliding glass door, steps outside and slams the door so that the glass rattles in its frame.

"Women," Rorion says. "They don't understand." He glances quickly toward the door and then back again. He laughs.

Rorion Gracie first visited the United States in 1969, when he was 17. He bummed around New York, L.A. and Hawaii for a year. He worked in a restaurant and on a construction site, where he slept. "I was always the first one on the job in the morning," he says. When his finances got precarious, he panhandled on the street. After years of being protected in the Gracie bosom in Rio, he learned to live on his own. "I grew a lot," he says. "Trouble only conies to test our reactions."

When Rorion returned to Brazil at the end of 1970, he went to college, got a law degree, though he has never practiced law, got married, had two children and then got divorced. In 1979, he decided it was time to cut the Gracie umbilical cord and return to the States for good to establish Gracie jujitsu in the States.

"I felt there were more opportunities in America to spread the word of the Gracie myth," he says. "I felt that in Brazil, the Gracie family had reached the top and I didn't want to stay there and live off of my father's fame."

The Gracie myth in Brazil began with George Gracie, a blue-eyed Scottish sailor who settled in Brazil in the early 1800s. His descendants were bankers, diplomats, rubber-plantation barons and confidants of Brazilian emperors. A different kind of fame commenced with Carlos and Helio, whose fights were the stuff of legends. Helio was the first jujitsu master in the occidental world to defeat a Japanese master, Namiki, in 1932. He challenged any and all corners to fight in the ring with him, without rules, to the death. He fought a man to the death, only to have him surrender after four minutes. A newspaper story the following day said that the man had chosen not to die and dubbed him "The Dead Chicken." Helio fought Fred Ebert for 14 rounds of ten minutes each, until the police climbed into the ring to separate the two combatants, who had broken noses, lost teeth, welts over their eyes and blood streaming down their faces. The fans rioted at the halting of the fight. When Helio challenged a famous Brazilian boxer known as The Drop of Fire to a fight to the death, more than 20,000 fans showed up at the stadium. Only The Drop of Fire never showed, and overnight, the press dubbed him The Drop of Fear. Once, Helio dived into the turbulent, shark-infested Atlantic Ocean to save a man from drowning and was given his nation's Medal of Honor for his heroism.

Finally, in early 1951, Helio choked to unconsciousness Japan's number-two master, Kato, in a fight in Brazil that earned him a shot at Japan's premiere jujitsu master, the toughest man in all the world, Kimura. The fight took place in October of 1951 before thousands of Brazilian fans. Kimura, 80 pounds heavier than Helio, agreed to the fight only if Helio, who had a reputation for never surrendering, would promise to tap the mat in surrender if his position seemed hopeless. "Kimura was a gentleman," says Rorion, "and he didn't like to go to sleep at night dreaming of the sound of broken arms." The fight lasted 13 minutes. Kimura got Helio in a choke hold and noticed blood coming out of Helio's ear. "You all right?" Kimura said. "Yes," Helio said. "Good," Kimura said, and grabbed Helio's head and began to crush it like an overripe melon. Carlos threw in the towel.

The next day, Kimura appeared at the Gracie academy to invite Helio to teach at the Imperial Academy of Japan. Even though Helio wasn't scheduled to fight, Kimura could not guarantee his safety in Japan, where the fans often threaten to kill non-Japanese masters to maintain their monopoly of that martial art. Helio refused the offer. None of the current Japanese masters have dared venture to Rickson's home turf of Rio.

"The Brazilian youth had no idols before my father," says Rorion. "They felt there was nothing important known about Brazil. My father gave them hope. Something to believe in."

Rorion was 27 when he decided to come to the States to spread the word of the Gracie myth. He felt that the seed of Gracie jujitsu would flourish in the fertile soil of America, where men are bigger and stronger than in Brazil. He felt that American men could become a kind of master race of jujitsu warriors. Furthermore, he felt that men, and their women, too, were tired of their world image as the wimps of feminism. As proof, he could point to the popularity of such American movie actors as Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Chuck Norris, who personified in their movies the kind of macho warrior that bore a striking resemblance to the roles assumed by Gracie men in real life in Brazil. Only the Gracie men did not need bazookas and machine guns.

Rorion moved to Southern California in 1979 and began to spread the word of Gracie jujitsu while trying to support himself in a strange country. He took a job cleaning houses. He met a woman whose husband was a movie producer. "You should be yin movies," she told Rorion. Her husband took him to Central Casting and soon he was appearing as an extra in such TV series as Hart to Hart, Starsky and Hutch and Hotel. Rorion left the housecleaning business and set up a jujitsu mat in his garage, where he began to teach students. The youngest was the four-year-old son of a movie producer and the oldest, a 75-year-old retired Marine general. When a movie producer saw his fight against Ralph Alegria, the kick boxer, he hired him as a consultant for Lethal Weapon. Rorion choreographed the final fight scene between Mel Gibson and Gary Busey in that movie. Then he met Chuck Norris and began to teach him jujitsu for his movie Hero and the Terror.

While he waited for Gracie jujitsu to catch on in the States, Rorion busied himself with his movies, his students, demonstrations for law-enforcement agencies and colleges and an occasional challenge from a beach bully. He issued a $100,000 challenge, winner take all, to a fight to the death. Finally, a few months ago, a producer called to tell him about a documentary movie he was filming on the martial arts. A kick boxer in that movie, who claimed he was "the baddest dude in the world," had put up $100,000, winner take all, to fight anyone. Rorion accepted the challenge immediately and then told the producer, "First you better tell him who he's going to fight."

Rorion laughs and says, "I sparred a few times with him before. I was very gentle with him. I took him to the mat a few times, showed him some nice choke holds and he tapped the mat. Heh-heh."

The next day, the producer called back and said that the kick boxer would fight Rorion only under the following rules: Rorion had to put up the entire $100,000, the fight would consist of ten rounds of five minutes each and the two combatants could not stay on the mat for more than a minute at a time. Rorion laughed. "But that is not a street fight," he said. The producer never called him back.

Rorion sits in his tidy den in his little house on a quiet street in Torrance, California, and waits. Suzanne moves silently and impassively through the house. She washes the lunch dishes in the kitchen sink. She says, "Rorion thinks he wants to start another family." She goes silent.

In the den, Rorion passes his time browsing through the many books, newspapers and magazines with stories about the Gracie family. He holds up pictures of his father fighting Kimura and studies them. "See here," he says, "the choke." He memorizes that choke hold and the many facts of Gracie history: the names of long-dead ancestors; the dates of famous fights; the nicknames of vanquished opponents: Dudu, The Elephant, The Drop of Fire, The Dead Chicken, Zulu. He glances at his young sons in kimonos, wrestling on the rug. They grapple, silently, trip one another, tap the mat, stand, begin again. He looks outside to the garage, where two men in kimonos stand in front of the closed door. One man opens it to reveal a spotless, empty room with a gray mat on the floor. There is a photograph of a gaunt, mean-eyed old man, his arms folded across his chest, underneath a seal that reads Academia Gracie. The two men step inside onto the mat. They are barefooted. They face each other, plant their legs wide, like crabs, and begin to circle each other like ancient warriors. They circle and circle, looking for an opening on this peaceful day on this quiet street in Torrance.

Amazing Gracies: For half a century, Brazil's jujitsu brawlers have made headlines with their fight-to-the-death challenges. In 1933, the 140-pound Oswaldo choked a 360-pound adversary into submission in two minutes; brother Helio went on to challenge Joe Louis and Ezzard Charles to bouts. (Louis' manager issued a polite letter of decline.) Helio further enhanced the family's folk-hero status when, after breaking the arms and ribs of a critic of the family, he was pardoned by the president, a Gracie fan, and left the detention house in triumph. Given the Gracie style--just about anything goes--finding a willing opponent was always a major challenge; even the world's number-two jujitsu master, kato, got his gi straight, only to be thrown for a loss (choked to unconsciousness). Helio's progeny seemdestined to carry on the family's scrapping supremacy: Son Rorion donned his kimono at the age of one, then joined the fighting clan (that's Rorion, standing, right) with brothers Rickson and Relson (seated, middle) and other family roughnecks whose names begin with R. Rorion's sons, Ralek and Ryron, only look small; Rorion, when not teaching, looks positively benign in civvies.

Let's Get Tough

are you man or wimp?

Corporate Tough

Carl Icahn, H. Ross Perot, Merv Griffin

Tough Love

Givens--Tyson, Gitte--Gastineau, Sean--Madonna, Locke--Eastwood, Woods--Young

Hanging Tough

Manuel Noriega, Salman Rushdie, Jimmy Swaggart

Dancing Tough

James Cagney, Patrick Swayze, James Brown

Tough Guy Who Doesn't Dance

Norman Mailer

Toughest Men On Ice

Mario Lemieux, Jimmy Hoffa

Not Tough Enough

Debi Thomas, Frank Lorenzo, Cast of thirty-something, Mike Dukakis

Tough Choices

"Do I ice her or do I marry her?" --Jack Nicholson in Prizzi's Honor

"To be or not to be. "--Hamlet in Hamlet

Tough Dames

Margaret Thatcher, Lauren Bacall, Ethel Kennedy, Mother Teresa

Icons Of Tough

Lee Marvin, Robert Mitchum, John L. Lewis, Kate Hepburn

Tough Acts to Follow

Kirk Gibson's series homer First five minutes of any Bond movie

Tough Act To Swallow

Jim Bakker

Court Tough

Rudolph Giuliani, John Gotti, Jimmy Connors

Tough Titties

Leona Helmsley, Nancy Reagan, Winnie Mandela, Yoko Ono

Crazy Tough

Ayatollah Khomeini, G. Gordon Liddy, Billy Martin, Dan Rather

D.C. Tough

Senator Robert Byrd, Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, Sam Donaldson, Dexter Manley

Tough Jacksons

Reggie, Jesse, Stonewall, Glenda

Not-So-Tough Jackson

Michael

Tough Johnsons

Magic, Lyndon

Not-So-Tough Johnson

Ben

Tough

Richard J. Daley, John Poindexter, Joe Clark, Ted Koppel, Elvis Presley, Elizabeth Dole, Marilyn Quayle, Most people named Mike, (Ditka, Ovitz, Tyson, Royko, Singletary, Wallace)

Tough Lite

Richard M. Daley, Oliver North, Sly Stallone, Morton Downey, Jr., Elvis Costello, Bob Dole, Dan Quayle, Most people named Percy

"'In the Gracie family,' Rorion says, 'the men are peacocks. The women are along for the ride.'"