Jeremy Glick Tried to Stop a Hijacked Plane With His Hands. The US Judo Association Just Made Him a 10th-Degree Black Belt.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, Jeremy Glick called his wife Lyz from a payphone in the back of United Flight 93. He told her the plane had been hijacked.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, Jeremy Glick called his wife Lyz from a payphone in the back of United Flight 93. He told her the plane had been hijacked. She told him what she knew: two planes had already struck the World Trade Center. That conversation lasted less than two minutes.

In those two minutes, Jeremy Glick, National Collegiate Judo champion, black belt, 6-foot-2, 220 pounds, understood something the hijackers had not anticipated. This was not a hostage situation. There would be no negotiation, no ransom demand, no safe landing. He and everyone on that aircraft were already dead unless they did something about it.

He told Lyz he loved her. He handed the phone to a flight attendant. Then he and a small group of passengers moved toward the cockpit.

Photo: Photo via family / public record — Photo via family / public record

In 2008, the United States Judo Association awarded Glick an honorary 10th-degree black belt. The citation read: "for living the principle of judo, mutual welfare and benefit, and sacrificing his life for our country."

A national champion nobody talks about

The grappling community talks a lot about origin stories. Royce Gracie in the UFC. Helio defending himself on Brazilian streets. Rickson's myth. These stories get passed down because they answer a question practitioners care about: does this thing work when it counts?

Jeremy Glick is a less-told answer to that question, and it's a harder one.

He competed at the University of Rochester and won a national collegiate judo title. He wasn't a hobbyist who picked up a black belt at a weekend seminar. He trained for hundreds, likely thousands, of hours, drilling the things judo teaches: how to read a situation, how to move without hesitation, how to generate force against a larger opponent. The depth of his training meant his muscle memory wasn't weeks old—it was embedded at a level that wouldn't abandon him under extreme stress.

He was also a rugby team captain and fraternity president, which matters only because it describes what kind of person he was: someone who walked into rooms and immediately started solving problems. On the morning of September 11, that instinct had about 25 minutes to work. Those minutes would determine whether an aircraft carrying 33 passengers and seven crew members reached its intended target or not.

What separates Glick's story from other martial arts origin myths is that there's no ambiguity about the outcome. The plane went down. Thirty-three passengers and seven crew members died that morning. Two aircraft had already hit the World Trade Center. The Pentagon had been struck. The equation was simple: without Glick and the other passengers acting, Flight 93 would have joined that chain of attacks. The hijackers had already decided the plane's fate. The only variable was whether it would follow orders or whether trained people would recognize the moment and move.

What he knew

Glick and the other passengers on Flight 93 pieced together what was happening through phone calls to family on the ground. The World Trade Center had been hit. The Pentagon had been hit. This was coordinated. A hijacked plane wasn't being used as a bargaining chip. In previous hijackings throughout aviation history, the assumption had been that cooperation increased survival odds. Hijackers wanted ransom or safe passage. They needed the hostages alive. That calculus had changed, and the people on that flight figured it out through fragments of information relayed by loved ones watching events unfold in real time.

Glick had trained long enough to understand something about violence that most people never learn: the window closes. Once you recognize that waiting makes things worse, waiting is a decision. It's picking the outcome you don't want. The passengers of Flight 93 took a vote. Every single one agreed to act. Mark Bingham, Tom Burnett, Jeremy Glick, and other men on that plane made the same decision independent of each other through phone conversations: this was the moment. They moved together.

The cockpit voice recorder captured what came next. Yelling. A struggle. The hijackers rolling the aircraft left and right, trying to throw the passengers off their feet. This wasn't a fight in a controlled environment where technique could be applied cleanly. This was a narrow corridor at altitude in a moving aircraft, with trained combatants and civilians working together, trying to reach a hardened cockpit door while the plane itself was being used as a weapon against them. The passengers kept coming. The plane crashed into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania at 10:03 a.m., approximately 150 miles from Washington, D.C.

No one on board survived. Investigators later concluded the intended target was the U.S. Capitol. It was not reached.

What training actually means

There's a tendency in the martial arts community to mythologize the moment when training meets crisis. Reality is messier. Training doesn't guarantee victory. Training doesn't guarantee survival. What training does is reduce hesitation. It builds pattern recognition for threats. It teaches you to move when stillness becomes dangerous. Glick had logged enough hours on the mat that his body understood how to generate force, how to move against resistance, how to read another person's intent before it became action.

None of that made him invincible. The hijackers had weapons. They had position. They had prepared for resistance based on earlier hijackings where passengers had been cooperative. What they hadn't prepared for was meeting several trained grapplers simultaneously who had done the calculus and decided that action—any action—was better than passive waiting.

Jeremy Glick didn't defeat four armed hijackers in hand-to-hand combat. But he and the other passengers on Flight 93 did something harder: they recognized the moment when the rules had changed, and they moved together to ensure that the aircraft wouldn't be used against the Capitol. Technique alone doesn't do that. That requires something else: the ability to read a situation, the training to execute without hesitation, and the clarity to understand that in certain moments, the only real choice is action.

What a 10th degree means

In judo, a 10th-degree dan isn't earned by winning competitions. It's not a rank for the most decorated competitor. The people who hold it are rare, and the rank means something specific: a life spent in the art, and a commitment to what the art is actually for.

Historically, 10th-degree black belts in judo have been people like Kano Jigoro, judo's founder, or his direct students who spent decades developing the system. The rank isn't about competition wins. Jigoro himself believed that the highest expression of judo wasn't winning matches—it was using the principles to serve society.

The USJA giving Glick an honorary 10th degree in 2008 was a statement about that specific principle. Judo's foundational concept is jita kyoei: mutual welfare and benefit. You train so you can be useful to something larger than yourself. Not for your own advancement. Not for credentials. Not for status or Instagram followers or tournament glory.

Glick didn't just train judo. He completed it.

He also received the Medal for Heroism from the Sons of the American Revolution and the Arthur Ashe Courage Award in 2002. The judo honor carries the most weight for practitioners, though. It's not from an institution that hands out awards to athletes. It's from the art itself, from the organization that represents the discipline he spent his life mastering. That recognition carries a different kind of weight because it acknowledges that Glick didn't just win a match. He understood what the training was for.

The debate that won't die

The BJJ community has this argument on a reliable schedule. Every few months, someone goes on a podcast and says sport jiu-jitsu doesn't translate to real life. Someone else posts a takedown outside a bar. Rockhold says butterfly guard is useless in MMA. Forum debates run for days about whether modern sport BJJ has drifted too far from practical application.

It's a legitimate argument. Sport BJJ is built for sport BJJ. The rules are specific. The environment is controlled. The question of what transfers to other contexts is worth asking and worth taking seriously.

But the framing almost always turns on hypotheticals. Imagine this scenario. What if someone had a weapon. What would you actually do. These conversations often stay abstract because nobody actually wants to test them. Nobody wants to be in a real hostage situation with armed combatants to figure out whether their leg lock game transfers.

Jeremy Glick didn't have to imagine it. He was in it: an aircraft at cruising altitude, four armed hijackers, zero law enforcement, zero backup, and a phone call that told him the window for passive options had closed. There were no refs. There was no mat. There was no time to figure out if his training was useful. He had to decide in the moment.

He recognized the situation faster than anyone else on that plane. He made the decision. He moved. So did the other passengers, some trained and some not, and together they ensured the aircraft didn't reach its intended target.

The plane didn't land where the hijackers planned.

That's not a thought experiment. That's not a clip someone staged for Instagram. That's not a story about someone's cousin's friend who stopped a robbery with a triangle choke. A trained grappler, in one of the worst-case scenarios the art could have asked of him, did the thing judo teaches: read the situation, recognize the moment, find the opening, and move without hesitation.

The US Judo Association put it on a plaque. Grapplers should be the ones passing this story down, not because it validates sport training or proves anything about self-defense, but because it's an honest example of someone understanding what he trained for and having the clarity to use it when it mattered.

That's the story worth telling in a sport obsessed with testing things and proving things and ranking things. Jeremy Glick is the answer to a question most practitioners never want to face: when it counts, do you understand what the training is actually for? He did. He acted on that understanding. The rest is history that deserves to be remembered not as an inspirational anecdote but as proof that training matters when someone truly understands its purpose.

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