Fast facts
- Division: Welterweight (won The Ultimate Fighter 11 at middleweight)
- Record: 22-15 MMA, 11-14 UFC (retired); 2-0 as a pro boxer at cruiserweight
- Nationality: American
- Team/gym: Victory MMA; spent half of his TUF 11 finale camp with Chuck Liddell at The Pit
- Notable wins: Kris McCray (TUF 11 finale), Robert Whittaker, Josh Neer, Ryan Jensen, Tim Means
The first fight of UFC 332 was the last fight of Court McGee’s career. On October 3, 2026, at the Delta Center in Salt Lake City, McGee walked out for the opening bout of a card that would go on to set UFC records for knockouts (11), first-round knockouts (nine) and knockdowns (16). Eric Nolan got the first of those stoppages, putting McGee away at 3:26 of Round 3. MMA Junkie’s post-event numbers confirmed McGee retired after the loss, and Heavy ran a piece on Dana White reacting to the news.
He lost. He was also fighting in Utah, a short drive from the high school where he once wrestled and later coached, roughly two decades after a doctor had pronounced him dead.
Layton, and the eight minutes
McGee was born December 12, 1984, and grew up a wrestler at Layton High School under coach Mike Hansen. He placed sixth in the 5A state tournament in 2002 and climbed to third in 2003. He had karate too, more than 100 kumite of it, which is a strange and useful thing for a wrestler to carry around. He enrolled at Weber State and left because his heart wasn’t in it.
Then came the part of the story he has told in prisons and school gyms ever since. An injury to his clavicle and elbow led to painkillers. The painkillers got mixed with alcohol. He has said his slide started when he began running with “the wrong people - drinking, partying.” Cocaine and heroin followed. In 2005, he overdosed on heroin at his cousin’s house and was declared clinically dead for eight minutes before he was resuscitated. The damage was bad enough that he had to relearn how to walk and talk.
There were relapses after that, which is the honest version of most recovery stories. On The Ultimate Fighter he described one of them without dressing it up: “I took one drink in Vegas and I ended up in Iowa four days later with no pants on and a long sleeve shirt, looking for meth. I was strung out, the heroin addict, the drunk, the liar, the cheat, the thief. That’s who I thought I was. I never thought I was going to amount to nothing.”
He got clean in April 2006 and stayed that way. When he fought Michael Chiesa in June 2025, he was closing in on 7,000 days sober. The first thing he did with the new life was go back to Layton High as an assistant wrestling coach. Brazilian jiu-jitsu and boxing came next, then pro MMA.
The hard road through TUF 11
McGee went 10-1 on the Utah circuit starting in 2007, with two TKOs and five submissions. He submitted DaMarques Johnson, lost to Jeremy Horn, and in 2008 squeezed two pro boxing wins into the gaps between MMA fights. One came days after an MMA win over Hank Weiss. The other, against Freddie Martinez, happened during his bachelor weekend, which he revealed in 2010 and which tells you most of what you need to know about his relationship with rest.
The Ultimate Fighter 11 should have spit him out. He got past Seth Baczynski only after a sudden victory round, went to Chuck Liddell’s team as the 12th overall pick, then dropped a majority decision to No. 1 pick Nick Ring after two rounds. White and Liddell both said the fight deserved a third round. When Rich Attonito broke his hand, White handed McGee the open quarterfinal spot. Ring pulled out of the rematch with a knee injury, and McGee choked replacement James Hammortree with a standing guillotine early in Round 2. In the semis he dropped his own teammate Brad Tavares with a left hook late in the third and finished with a rear-naked choke.
In the live finale he submitted Kris McCray with another rear-naked choke in Round 2, won the season and took Submission of the Night. He later gave his second son the middle name Chuck.
The style, and the fights that defined it
McGee was a grinder with a wrestler’s engine and a karate man’s willingness to stand and trade. His UFC debut against Ryan Jensen at UFC 121 was the template: dropped and cut early, he kept coming until Jensen faded, then took him down, mounted him and finished with an arm-triangle at 1:21 of Round 3.
The Ring rematch at UFC 149 went to the judges again and went against him again, and again plenty of media called it controversial. The stats had McGee out-landing Ring 32-25 in the second round and 53-16 in the third. His takeaway afterward was blunt: “I should not have left it in the hands of the judges and finished the fight.”
He dropped to welterweight at UFC 157 in February 2013 and buried Josh Neer under volume, landing 166 significant strikes, a FightMetric record for a welterweight fight at the time. Six months later he took a split decision from Robert Whittaker, a fellow TUF winner who would go on to have quite a career of his own.
The middle years were cruel in a quieter way. After losing to Ryan LaFlare in December 2013 he was out more than 18 months with a pile of injuries, and came back to beat Márcio Alexandre Jr. on his 31st birthday. A shoulder injury and surgeries cost him another 11 months later on. Against Sean Strickland in 2017 he was first announced as having earned a majority draw, until a scorecard math error was caught and the decision flipped to Strickland.
The late run had knockout losses to Jeremiah Wells and Matt Brown in back-to-back fights, which is usually where a career ends quietly. McGee instead kept going, and at UFC 307 in October 2024 he submitted Tim Means with a neck crank in the first round. It was his first finish of any kind since 2010. Fourteen years between finishes is a long time to keep showing up.
Where he stands now
He’s done. After a decision loss to Chiesa in June 2025, McGee took the Nolan fight as his farewell and finished 22-15. According to MMA Junkie, all four of his career stoppage losses came by knockout, which means nobody ever made him tap. His $21,000 Promotional Guidelines Compliance check for UFC 332, the top experience tier for fighters with 21 or more UFC bouts, matched what Rafael dos Anjos and Deiveson Figueiredo earned on the same card.
The night produced a little noise online. After the event, a widely shared post from @ChickenKingMMA read “Court McGee went out swinging like a G” and took a shot at Chiesa, and UFC fighter Diana Belbiță wrote on X that she didn’t understand the hate Chiesa was catching. Fans picking sides over a man’s retirement fight is a fair measure of how many of them cared about him.
What comes next is work he has already been doing for years. He launched the Hope 361 project online so addicts could share their stories and get connected to treatment, and in 2015 he founded The McGee Project, which brings him to high schools, universities, prisons and youth detention centers to talk about addiction and recovery. He lives that schedule with his wife, Chelsea, and their three sons. The kid from Layton who had to relearn how to walk now gets paid to walk into rooms full of teenagers and tell them exactly how close he came.
