Jerry Lai-USA TODAY Sports
Are you ready for this hot take?
Kajan Johnson is convinced we will never see Henry Cejudo fight a woman inside the Octagon, but he is confident morbid curiosity would translate to pay-per-view buys.
Johnson mulled on the very unlikely possibility of Cejudo fighting Amanda Nunes on Wednesday’s episode of the Pull No Punches podcast. “I think it’s possible that Amanda Nunes sleeps him,” he said. “I don’t know if that would ever happen.”
“I don’t think a man fighting a woman is a healthy thing for either party. It’s kind of a lose-lose situation he would be putting himself in,” Johnson continued. “If Henry Cejudo fought Amanda Nunes this weekend, tell me you’re not going to watch it… People would definitely boycott and cause riots in the streets, but it would cause so much attention. Guaranteed. They would sell it out. They would sell it out for sure.”
If the fight were to ever happen, Johnson believes it would generate potentially record-breaking numbers. “Especially at the highest level. Champ vs. champ. It could be like Conor-Mayweather,” he argued. “It actually could if you think about it. The amount of interest it could generate. There would be so much bad press. There would be so much press around it. Traditional news outlets would cover it… I guarantee you there will be a bunch of people who say, ‘I will never watch that’ and then there will be a whole lot more who say, ‘I really don’t want to see this but I can’t not watch’ like it’s a car accident.”
Cejudo has really been leaning into the gimmick of being this inter-sex world champion. He has called out the likes of Valentina Shevchenko and Weili Zhang, but would he ever really sign a contract to fight a woman in the cage? “If somebody calls his bluff at this time, he’s been going to so hard with it… if it remained private that he declined, he’d decline,” Johnson believed. “If they make it public that he declined, I don’t think he can [turn it down] at this point.” Adding, “I think it’s crossed his mind, but it’s so far outside the realm of possibility at this point that he doesn’t believe there is a chance it’ll happen.”
Back on Planet Earth, Nunes is preparing to defend her UFC women’s bantamweight title against former featherweight champion Germaine de Randamie at UFC 245 on Dec. 14.