still standing, still punching. The pair go at it – a brutal last three-
minute flourish of toe-to-toe boxing by two bloodied and bruised men
each craving victory. Horn finishes the round by belting Pacquiao
about on the ropes.
The bell. It’s over.
“You can hold it,” Horn
says, offering out the maroon
WBO welterweight belt he
claimed that day in Brisbane.
“Just don’t drop it.”
He points to the centrepiece
- a world map lacking
Australia and which sits
under a golden eagle.
“I can’t remember which
ones, but some of these
are real diamonds.”
It doesn’t matter. What matters are the words writ large across the
centre: ‘World Champion’.
It’s how most address him these days – well, they call him ‘champ’.
“Yeah, I get that a bit,” shrugs Horn, sat on the front steps
of Rushton’s $10m suburban Brisbane pile, where he trains out
of a purpose-built gym.
“I guess I used to get it a little bit before, when I was the Australian
champ – but I felt awkward then. Now, it’s a nice reminder of what
I’ve done as it links to being World Champ and that’s cool.”
The steps give way to a wide, semi-circular driveway and gated
front yard that’s dominated by a stone water fountain of three
leaping dolphins.
“I remember when I first came here and was like, ‘What is this
place?’’’ recalls the champ. “It was my cousin who found it. He was at
high school with me and we’d always watch the [Anthony] Mundine
- [Danny] Green fights; we’d put on the gloves and do some sparring.”
The gym – to the side of the main house, itself an oversized homage
to ’80s excess by way of Dubai – was called Scorpion Martial Arts back
then. Horn decided to follow his cousin along to learn some self-defence
techniques. He and his mates were being bullied by a few local kids and
things were escalating – verbal barbs replaced by physical force.
Horn was then floored by a coward punch to the side of his face.
“It was probably at its worst in Years 8-10,” he says of the daily
suffering he was forced to endure for either sticking up for himself,
or his friends.
“I had these gangs wanting to
fight me, or have me kneel down
before them, to show they had
the power. I didn’t want to and
thought if I do some classes then
maybe I’d be able to at least take
one of the bullies out, or have
them learn to not do it again
in the future.”
Rushton immediately saw
a competitive streak in Horn –
a refusal to lay down when
training became tough. “I alsosaw a strong jaw,” he says of the kid he calls Jeffrey. “There was
something there, definitely.”
Eager to spar, as he’d done against his cousin, Horn found his
way into the ring where Rushton would further test him. Again,
the trainer liked what he saw and eventually lined up a first fight.
He then came up with an improbable plan.
“It would have been 2008 and I said to him, ‘In four years I’ll
take you to an Olympic Games – and after that I’ll make you a world
champion,’” recalls Rushton, his resolve and belief clearly just as firm
nearly a decade on.
“I went home and told [wife] Jo,” says Horn. “And then I came
back and was like, ‘Cool, sounds good’. In a way, I’d always believed
I’d make it in something – and this was my crack, this was the one
to pour everything into and my last chance at a sporting career.”
Horn juggled a tertiary-education degree alongside his boxing goals- and then trained as he taught high-school kids health and physical
education. On learning of his quick rise though the amateur ranks
and claim on national titles (plural), lessons would disintegrate into
discussion of who the young teacher could possibly beat, hypothetical
bouts that pitted the Brisbane boy against some of the historical
“You can hold it,”
Horn says, offering out
the maroon WBO
welterweight belt.
“Just don’t drop it.”
MEN OF THE YEAR 2017 GQ.COM.AU 181