Cult favourite Joe Elmore prepares for an emotional homecoming in Atlanta.
Joe Elmore has had a lot of time to think over the last little while.
It’s been over a year since his last BKFC appearance against Dustin Pague, a bloody battle that he left with one eye that wouldn’t open whatsoever and another that could partially. Before those wounds could even heal, he was back into his exhaustive routine, spending over three hours a day in his car driving from boxing training to grappling training to cryotherapy to physio and to therapy. As he drives from the Georgia country in Kennesaw to the trendy midtown Atlanta and everywhere in between, between the sounds of Wu Tang Clan and various podcasts, he listens to the thoughts in his head, constructing his future dreams, but more often these days, reminiscing on the past.
It's been a sentimental time for Elmore as he prepares to fight Derrick Findley in his home region as the co-main event of BKFC Atlanta on December 6. God willing, it won’t be his last fight, but it feels like a culmination of a fifteen-year professional journey, and a fighting life that extends back to childhood bare knuckle scraps behind the church in the country. As he walks into the Canopy Hotel in Atlanta, his gym bag is over his shoulder as he clutches a ticket sales sheet with a collection of tally marks and zeroes after commas outpacing everyone else on the card, and a tumbler cup bearing his 187 Hitman nickname made by a fan several years ago. In one hand, mathematical evidence of his popularity, in the other, the reason why.
Elmore seemingly doesn’t forget anyone he’s ever interacted with, and certainly not anyone who has ever supported, much less aided him in his life. Everyone from his original sponsors from 17 years ago during his amateur MMA days to old tattoo artists to kids who work at the Dunkin Donuts location he visits at 5:30 AM every day (all of whom he knows by name), to those he teaches in jiu-jitsu class will be there to watch him face Findley.
“Like, I can tell you, I've been driving down the road and all these moments are coming in at once, it's just so much, it's overwhelming. I've almost looked up in the sky and I'm like, 'thank God', almost with tears in my eyes, like it's almost unbelievable,” said Elmore. “When Conor McGregor got to go and fight in Ireland--this is my Ireland, this is my Atlanta. Before I became BKFC Hitman 187, I did a lot on the local circuit, and people believed in me, gave me money when you just had to sell sponsorships and get a ride down the road. I get to be grateful to them. It's been 20 years these people have been riding my back, right? So it's all of that coming together in one weekend.”
There was a time when Elmore’s sentimental thoughts were just far-fetched dreams, and when in his head was a torturous place to be. Elmore has been living with ADHD since well before the American Psychological Association had even defined the three subtypes of ADHD that we have come to understand today. All he knew as a hyperactive kid was that combat sports were the one thing that could both hold his attention and be an outlet for his natural ruggedness and energy. As a distant cousin of WWE Hall of Famer Jerry Lawler, Elmore grew up with Memphis and Mid-South Championship Wrestling, a factoid that makes a whole lot of sense when seeing Elmore’s ring walk costumes and showmanship in his fighting career. As he got older, he was drawn to the newfangled world of mixed-martial arts, ordering PRIDE FC tapes from Japan, and “enrolling” in early era online grappling classes with Eddie Bravo.
Scholastic athletics provided a formal training and competition structure that Elmore didn’t previously have, boxing in the backyard and learning jiu-jitsu as best he could watching whatever videos Windows 98 could process. With access to the school weight room, he could bench 350 as a young bantamweight teenager, and became a state-caliber wrestler at Dyersburg High School in Tennessee, about 65 miles away from where Quinton “Rampage” Jackson was doing the same at Raleigh-Egypt High School in Memphis.
"People wouldn't think that Joe Hitman 187 was little Joe Joewho had was an introvert and was only capable of hugging ladies at church," said Elmore. "I found martial arts, and people love me, and I can be around--God, there's gangsters and cops and alcoholics and rednecks and whatever people label people; I don't, but like they're all there, they all love me, they all feel something. I can make them feel happiness, and I'm that strange kid that was the weirdo, and now like my weirdness isn't really weird, it's special."
The truly transformative moment in Elmore’s life and careerhowever, was also the one that almost ended both of them. When Elmore was 24 years of age, having lapsed in his martial arts training, he fell off his motorcycle while riding 120 miles per hour. He says that 65 per cent of his body was covered in road rash, a reality he wasn’t privy to for some time while he was in a coma. His first memory upon waking up with his stepfather at his bedside was seeing Jackson, whom he once wrestled side-by-side with in Tennessee, facing Dan Henderson at UFC 75, which was fortuitously available on the hospital television as it was on Spike TV. Elmore, wrapped nearly head-to-toe in bandage and gauze, was one of the 4.6 million people who watched the broadcast that night.
Still in a concussive haze compounded by a cocktail of pain medication, Elmore drifted in and out of consciousness. At one point during the undercard, he says he remembers a voice, one he attributes to God, telling him “if you do this, I’ll take care of you.” It was the kind of affirmation he’d seldom heard, mainly from his grandmother when he did hear it, one of the only ones who had wholeheartedly endorsed his outlandish dreams and told him he could achieve anything he wanted to.
"I was scared to even say nothing. I knew I was I was going crazy, I just knew it, but at the same time I looked up at the sky like i have the last month just almost crying, looking at the sky, being grateful for this moment, and I remember going, 'I'm not taking no more pain medicine.' It hurt so bad," remembers Elmore. "I went, I was getting scraped by this girl I went to school with, like half-naked on this table leaning there, and I was telling myself, 'I'm gonna be a UFC star.' I was like, 'When I get this done, I'm gonna go back and I'm really gonna focus.' And I just remember them laughing, and, I mean, obviously in that moment, that was just what pushed me through to get back into martial arts. Maybe 10, 12 weeks later, I was back up running, and I didn't even have bottoms on my feet."
Photo Courtesy of BKFC.
Not long after, Elmore made his new vocation official in the way one did back in 2007: By posting it on MySpace. He put his fists up, gave his Mom a digital camera, and posed in front of a door in his family home. That photo, accompanied by a MIDI file of a Gorilla Zoe track, became his homepage. Little Joe Joe was not only alive, he was officially a fighter.
In the eyes of state commissions, Elmore became a pro fighter in 2008 when he made his professional debut at Wild Bill’s in Duluth, GA. By then, his training journey had taken him to South Florida to Alabama and ultimately to Georgia where his roots are now firmly planted.
He lost that fight by knockout, but it was anything but boring. It established a theme in Elmore’s career that has carried throughout his brief stint in Bellator to his fights overseas, to his current life as a BKFC star. His win-loss record—13-12 in MMA, 2-3 in bare knuckle—is secondary, if not an enhancement to, his overall popularity. Somewhat antithetically, Elmore’s longevity has been in large part due to the fact that he bleeds, he swings hard, and sometimes he loses, but his willingness to invite danger makes him an irreplaceable part of any fight card.
"You know how many times my coaches and corners--and the only person I listen to is my wife--but they'll cuss me out, like, what are you doing," says Elmore, recalling a moment in the corner during his battle with Tom Shoaff. "I go, 'Hey Coach, I know you said move my head, but I'm getting fight of the night tonight, baby."
Elmore, who romanticizes early era, no gloves UFC and Japanese MMA, found a true home in bare knuckle fighting in 2020. His first two fights in the promotion: A vicious knockout win over Will Chope, and a five-round classic with Shoaff that became the blueprint, the demo tape to show audiences how incredible bare knuckle boxing can be.
“There are moments like when I'm getting my ass whooped in the ring and you want to quit, but I think about everybody else watching me and people tell me a month later, 'Dude, like this was going on in my life, and I remember seeing you in there, like licking blood off your face, and I'm like, 'If he can do that, I can right.' It's cool, dude, it's so much more than just fighting, and yeah, it's taking somebody that didn't fit in, and it made me realize I was special,” said Elmore while looking at the sky once again. “Everybody wants to come to a party and feel something, if you've never been to a fight, I'm gonna make you feel something, I promise you, whether you love me or you hate me, I'm gonna fight and I'm gonna put on the fight of the night.”
In BKFC, Elmore has been given free rein to lean into the entertainment aspect of his presentation, whether it be cutting professional wrestling style promos like the ones he used to watch at the Mid-South Coliseum during his backstage or ringside interviews, or dressing up as Uncle Sam to walk to the ring.
He’s also been able to do it with the only manager he’s ever had, his wife Maggie, who doubles as a first-grade teacher, and the person who can help him work through his insecurities.
“My wife says it best, and that's why I love her. My whole fight career, we've done it all on our own, but she says, 'take the dis out of disability, and all you have is a special ability,’” said Elmore. “My wife will tell me, time doesn't exist, you're only as young as your children think you are.
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On a Friday night in Atlanta, three weeks before his battle with Findley, the Elmores made the 90-minute round trip to Corey Studios in Atlanta to take in an Overtime Boxing event headlined by Brandon Adams and Andreas Katzourakis.
Elmore’s love for fighting and the fight community couldn’t have been more apparent. A smile never seemed to leave his face, save for the minute when his fight was promoted on the DAZN broadcast, when he snapped into the Hitman 187 character to mean mug and fist pump for the camera. Elmore was the first man to his feet to applaud Oshae Jones and Femke Hermans after their IBF junior middleweight title fight, and was on the edge of his seat watching Katzourakis and Adams put on a fight of the year contender.
But as excited as Joe was watching the fights, the first thing he and Maggie wanted to talk about after the show was how excited they were to see the Georgia commission members, folks they’d known for close to 20 years, and ones who helped legalize bare knuckle in the state. In other words, the people who extended his dream.
“I've made the people I love most proud, and I think that God, it makes me want to cry right now,” says Elmore, wiping away tears and taking a deep breath. “Uh, it's a powerful thing to carry that into the ring and have the ones you love the most watching you; it makes me feel invincible. This is not like crying tears, it's like I get this feeling and I can't let it out now because you only let it out in the ring, man. But I get to let it out and it's special. It's like God puts his hand on me and allows me to be way more powerful than I am at any other moment in life.”
After the show, Elmore hops back in the vehicle to head back to Kennesaw. In the passenger seat, hand in his hand, sits Maggie. In the console next to him, a phone full of loved ones—some of whom are ex-opponents he messages every single day. In the rearview, the image of himself laying on the road, waiting to be airlifted to the hospital. On the road ahead of him, still, the far-fetched dreams that were born on the brink of death.
Top Photo Courtesy of BKFC.
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