A true fighters fighter: Why Jeremy Horn deserves more love as an MMA pioneer

You could be forgiven for not knowing this already, even if you consider yourself to be the hardest of the hardcore MMA fan, but Jeremy Horn has a fight this weekend.

Yes, that Jeremy Horn, the same one who once choked out Chuck Liddell and knocked out Forrest Griffin. The one who beat Chael Sonnen no fewer than three times. The one who fought every early MMA luminary from Randy Couture to Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira, sometimes strapping on the gloves and making the walk 10 or 12 times a year.

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Yep, same guy, still on the mats every day at his gym in Utah. He’s 44 now and willing to say the hell with it and take a fight every now and then. This one’s a pro boxing match – his first – on a hybrid fight card in Iowa put together by Horn’s longtime manager Monte Cox. When I spoke to Horn over the phone a couple weeks ago, he couldn’t recall the name of the man he’s scheduled to fight. (It’s Marty Lindquist, if you’re curious.)

“I think he’s a mid-level pro from somewhere around there,” Horn said, offering up what he did know about the man who’ll be trying to punch him in the face soon. “It should be fun.”

That about sums up Horn’s approach to his professional fighting career. From the time he first got into the sport in the mid-90s, all the way through stints in the UFC, PRIDE, WEC – even a stop in Bellator and the IFL – Horn has been the guy who would show up and fight whoever, whenever.

He didn’t stress too much about the opponent or the weight (though he’ll admit he was never a fan of diets and weight cuts). According to Cox, who took over as Horn’s manager when he had only a handful of the 119 pro MMA fights he’s currently credited with, a lot of times he didn’t even stress about the money.

“Sometimes we’d be on the plane, going to the fight, and he’d turn to me and ask, ‘Hey how much am I getting for this one?’” Cox said. “I mean, who does that?”

Which is not to say that Horn treated his career carelessly. He was always eager to fight and compete, he said, and of course, he didn’t mind getting paid, but he never wanted to be the guy who signed up for fights he knew he couldn’t win or wasn’t prepared for, all just for the sake of a paycheck. From the beginning, Horn approached MMA as a martial arts proving ground – and he took it seriously. This is still how he views himself, as a serious martial artist who wasn’t afraid to challenge himself against the best in the world.

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But now even Horn has to admit that his career is winding down. He hasn’t had an MMA bout in five years (though he’s not necessarily opposed to taking one, under the right circumstances). His foray into boxing is more for fun and variety than to kickstart a new career. He still owns and operates his own gym – Elite Performance Fitness in Sandy, Utah, just south of Salt Lake City – but many of his closest personal ties to the big-time action of the contemporary fight game have been severed by time.

It’s all enough to make you wonder how MMA will remember Horn, who’s given more than two decades of his life to it. As the sport pauses to look back and celebrate some of its early pioneers, often viewing them with a softer and more forgiving lens than the one it applied to them in their primes, where’s the appreciation for Horn?

His longtime manager Cox has wondered the same thing from time to time, especially when people laud the longevity and activity of fighters such as Travis Fulton, whose record has become the stuff of MMA legends.

“I like Travis, and he started with me, but he’s got 300-something wins and like 40 losses, and when you look at the 40 losses it’s all the good guys he fought,” Cox said. “The guys he beat, most of them were not top of the line, and a lot of them were the same guys that he fought over and over. But when you look at Jeremy’s record, you go through and it’s like, ‘Oh, I didn’t realize he beat him or him or him.’ But he did.”

There’s some truth to this. In addition to wins over greats such as Liddell and Sonnen, his record includes a whole bunch of fights that even longtime fans might not know about (or might have long since forgotten). He beat Akira Shoji and Gilbert Yvel in his two PRIDE appearances. He fought to a draw against Dan Severn in 1997, when “The Beast” was only two years removed from winning UFC 12 and Horn was only in his second year as a pro. He won decisions over Dean Lister and Travis Prangley, and lost them to Couture, Nogueira and Ricardo Arona. He even came up short on the scorecards to some guy named Anderson Silva one long-ago night in Seoul.

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“Jeremy Horn is a true fighter’s fighter,” said the former UFC middleweight contender Sonnen. “He’d fight anybody, any time. Always in shape, always dangerous, universally respected. … If there was a fighter’s union, Jeremy Horn would be the shop steward.”

Even more impressive to his longtime manager Cox was that he did it all without ever being what anyone would call an imposing figure.

“He wasn’t stronger than many people he fought,” Cox said. “He wasn’t a great athlete. If you went out and played basketball with the guy, he’s not going to wow you with his natural ability. It was just, this is what he does.

“I used to yell at him for letting people take him down, and I think he probably cost himself some decisions this way, but he just always had this attitude that eventually this guy is going to make a mistake or I’m going to catch him. He always thought he could find a way to win against anybody, and he usually did. A lot of times when he lost it was just, you know, he ran out of time.”

Still, when MMA fans are reminiscing about fighters of a bygone era, Horn’s name doesn’t typically come up that often. Even when they’re thinking back on the classic crew from Iowa’s Miletich Fighting Systems, where Horn was a fixture for a time, he’s just not the guy who leaps to mind.

Some of it might be a stylistic issue. Horn’s first love was always jiu-jitsu, and he was known far more for working his way to submission wins than for scoring flashy knockouts. He also never really had that cage fighter look. No mohawk or giant, gaudy tattoos, and what muscles he had, well, to put it delicately you might say they were well-camouflaged in an unremarkable build. It didn’t stop him from beating a whole lot of people who looked the part better than he did, though.

Horn first found his way into martial arts after discovering a talent for violence under duress while growing up in Omaha as one of four boys. After coming to his younger brother’s aid in a street fight, Horn and his brothers gained a reputation around town as the kids who would gladly accommodate you if you were looking for a tussle.

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“With my brothers, I was probably the most docile of the four of us, to tell you the truth,” Horn said. “But once I found martial arts, it was like, here’s a thing that really speaks to me. I just connected with it. I know a lot of kids love the martial arts and karate movies and things like that, but once I started actually fighting it was kind of like, where have you been all my life?”

Horn fought six times the year he turned pro, mostly in Iowa. Slightly over two years after his pro debut, he fought for the UFC middleweight title, losing via submission to then-champion Frank Shamrock. He’d go on to reel off long winning streaks at various points, once having 22 fights without a loss, then winning 15 straight later in his career. Cox liked to joke that Horn must be his greediest, most selfish client because he was always calling his manager and asking for another fight.

“If he had to sit around the gym for three weeks with no fights booked, he’d start going crazy and calling me every day,” Cox said. “He just always wanted to fight.”

But the way Horn saw it, he might as well fight and get paid since he was always in the gym anyway. And of course, he was always going to be in the gym because where else would he be? This seemed to be the only thing he wanted to do with his life.

“I never really looked at myself as a professional fighter, like that’s my career,” Horn said. “I always looked at myself as somebody that loves to train. I trained as much as I could, all the time. It just so happened that I got to fight and make some money, but really all I wanted to do was train.

“If there was no money in this, I would have been training as much as I could fit it in around a full-time job. I never looked at it like, this is my career and I’m trying to get to some certain point with it. To me it was, well, I’m in the gym training all day anyway. It just happens that I get to fly around the world and compete, and this way I make enough money that I don’t have to get a job.”

That mindset seems almost anachronistic now, in the age of UFC pay-per-view points and Conor McGregor-sized paydays in MMA. Back when Horn started, the fight purses were meager and the chances for meaningful career advancement almost nonexistent. Even now, when young men walk into his gym talking about their dreams of fighting their way to wealth and fame, he can’t quite square it with his own philosophy on the fight game.

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If you don’t love martial arts enough to do it whether there’s money at the end of the rainbow or not, he wonders, why bother at all?

But it’s been long enough since his own prime that some of those people coming in off the street genuinely have no idea who he is. Maybe they heard he used to fight in the UFC once upon a time long ago. Or maybe it’s just the closest gym to their house. They don’t necessarily know the guy who basically lives on these mats once held his own against just about everyone who ever mattered in that earlier era of MMA, back when the sport was crawling out of its dark early days and moving toward the mainstream spotlight.

And, if they don’t know, Horn isn’t going to go out of his way to tell them.

Ask about his rematch with Liddell for the UFC light heavyweight title and he’ll tell you that it was just another fight. Ask him about the decision loss to Couture and he might admit that he thought he could have won that one with a few little adjustments. If you want to know the moment from his long and well-traveled career that he’s most proud of, look back to 2003 when he fought three times in one night before losing to “Babalu” Sobral in the finals of the IFC: Global Domination tournament – a bracket that also included Chael Sonnen, Forrest Griffin, and “Shogun” Rua.

Horn may have finished as runner-up in that tournament, but there’s something about it that still feels special, even among all his other bouts.

“I feel like that night I fought closer to my potential than I ever had before, or really ever did after,” Horn said. “You know how, in any competition you do, you always come away feeling like, I’m better than that or I can do better than that? It’s always that way. But that night was the time I really felt like I was closest to fighting as well as I’m truly capable of. I just felt unbeatable that night, you know?”

The fact that he didn’t win this tournament that few current fans have probably ever even heard of? That doesn’t matter so much to Horn. Not as long as he still gets to show up at his gym and train every day, he said.

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Still, it does seem like MMA – both as a sport with a history but also just as an ever-changing cultural thing – should have some way of holding onto a memory of guys like Horn, doesn’t it? There’s the UFC Hall of Fame, but then, Horn acknowledged, he’d fought there only a handful of times and he never seemed to be a favorite with the front office anyway. There’s also the stories fans love to pass around on message boards and social media, this sort of collective memory that gets transferred between generations of fans, but that type of post-career fame tends to belong to the larger-than-life figures, the ones who can be explained with a highlight reel or a classic interview.

The physically unremarkable everyman who consistently finds a way to win, he just doesn’t tend to get that brand of love in MMA.

So where does that leave Horn, a guy with over 100 fights and the respect of his peers, but not much in the way of a legacy that you can pin down and put a name to? He doesn’t quite know.

“I mean, it’d be nice to be remembered,” Horn said. “But I guess I’d like to be remembered for being a nice guy who was lucky enough to be a part of this sport for his whole life, and hopefully as a guy who contributed something to it. I just don’t know what, specifically, that would be. But then, I don’t know, maybe that’s not for me to say.”

(Top photo: Josh Hedges / Zuffa LLC via Getty Images)

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