September 11, 2001.
Twenty-five years ago, the internet belonged to a very different era. Social media did not yet exist, and news did not travel at anything close to the speed it does today.
On that day, HKJudo.com reported a name.
Jeremy Glick.
He was not an Olympic champion, nor was he one of the most famous judoka of his time.
Yet twenty-five years later, when we look back at what happened that morning, his is still a name worth remembering in the judo community.
Jeremy Logan Glick was 31 years old. He was a judo black belt and a former national collegiate judo champion in the United States. On the morning of September 11, 2001, he boarded United Airlines Flight 93, scheduled to fly from Newark to San Francisco.
What happened next became part of the history of September 11.
Flight 93 was hijacked.
As passengers and crew members learned by telephone that other hijacked aircraft had already struck the World Trade Center in New York, they began to understand that this was not an ordinary hijacking.
Jeremy called his wife, Lyz.
According to records preserved by the U.S. National Park Service, he calmly described the situation aboard the aircraft and told her that passengers and crew were making plans to rush the hijackers and try to regain control of the plane.
Before the call ended, he told his wife that he loved her.
Then he joined the others.
At 9:57 a.m., the passengers and crew began their counterattack.
Flight 93 never reached Washington. At 10:03 a.m., the aircraft crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Everyone aboard was killed.
Subsequent investigations and the U.S. National Park Service identify the United States Capitol Building as the most likely intended target of the hijackers.
Looking back twenty-five years later, one point must be made clearly.
There is no evidence that Jeremy Glick used judo techniques inside the aircraft to overpower the hijackers.
This is not a story about a judo expert stopping a terrorist attack with judo.
What matters is something different.
He was a judoka.
A black belt.
Someone who had spent years training, learning to remain composed under pressure, to assess a situation, and to act when a decision had to be made.
And at the most critical moment of his life, he and a group of ordinary people chose not simply to wait.
They acted.
Twenty-five years have now passed since September 11, 2001.
Many young judoka training today were born years after that morning.
But for HKJudo.com, Jeremy Glick is not a name we discovered today.
We reported his story twenty-five years ago.
And twenty-five years later, we tell it once again.
Not because of the medals he won.
But because, on one of the darkest mornings in modern history, a judoka and a group of ordinary people made an extraordinary decision.
Jeremy Logan Glick
1970–2001
Judo black belt.
Former U.S. national collegiate judo champion.
Passenger on United Flight 93.
25 years later, we remember.