PHOENIX, Ariz. — Henry Cejudo gets asked about his weight a lot. Sure, weight was always a topic of conversation back in his wrestling days, back when a 21-year-old Cejudo became the youngest American to ever capture gold in the Summer Olympics, without even wrestling on a collegiate level, no less. But back then the conversation was friendlier.
Now, after either missing weight or dealing with weight cutting complications four times over the course of his brief mixed martial arts career, low-lighted by an embarrassing failed cut this past August ahead of what should have been his UFC debut, it’s safe to say that the people around Cejudo have been keen to make sure he learned his lesson.
“Oh man, to be honest with you I’m to the point where I won’t even go to parties anymore. Just from stuff like that,” Cejudo told MMAFighting.com. “It’s bad, man. Which is good for me. I believe that consequences are good things, and I’ve learned my lesson. If I didn’t learn it the last two times, I’m really that hard-headed. I’m not as young as I used to be and I made a lot changes in my training.”
The focus for Cejudo, 27, now is to make the best of the cards that he’s been dealt. Following his failed weight cut at UFC 177, which led to the last-second cancellation of his flyweight bout against Scott Jorgensen, UFC President Dana White gave Cejudo an ultimatum: either move up to bantamweight or hit the road back to the regional scene.
Cejudo chose the former, and he’s expected to get his second chance at making a first impression this Saturday when he takes on Dustin Kimura at UFC on FOX 13 — if he can beat the scale first, that is.
“I’ve accepted the fact that I’m going to be at 135 and that’s the way I’ve got to look at it,” Cejudo said. “That’s it. At some point, if the UFC allows me, I’d like to go to 125, because I know I can win that belt, man. I’m too strong and I’m too fast. I’m young, I’m a good wrestler, I’m very smart. I really do feel like at 125 pounds, I could chuck these guys. I try to sound as humble as I can, but that’s the only thing that bugs me. It’s just going to be a little more challenging at 135, but that’s okay.”
Cejudo told MMAFighting.com late Thursday that he was hovering around 142 pounds, just six pounds away from the bantamweight threshold. Everything has been easier this time around, he said, especially considering that this is effectively a home game for the Phoenix-native. It’s certainly a far cry from the disaster that went down last autumn in Sacramento, when Cejudo attempted to cut 14 pounds off his 5-foot-4 frame in two hours.
“I started depleting myself because I had no minerals in my system. I was just pulling nothing but liquid out of my system,” he recalled. “So that night, I was just suffering. I was hurting, dude. I didn’t sleep one minute. And my coach was the one who told me, ‘hey man, I don’t think this is worth it.’ He’s an old school Mexican guy, he’s one of those guys who, we do it to the death. But my lip was purple, it was cold, my eyes were bloodshot red, and my kidneys started hurting. That’s when I told my brother, okay, get an IV. It was too hard of a cut. It’s not laziness, man. I’m real thick muscle, I’ve got a lot of meat on my legs. And my body was just acting different.”
Cejudo has long accepted that a cloud of negativity is going to surround him until he can earn the trust back from fans and the UFC alike. But it’s the cries of laziness that irk him most, because really, they couldn’t be further from the truth.
Cejudo’s accomplishments on the mat are the stuff inspiration is made of, building himself up as a poor kid from a broken home to the very best in the world. Compared to a road like that, everything else seems easy.
“Wrestling is the toughest sport in the world. It really is, man. I don’t think it’s mixed martial arts. I think the toughest sport in the world, the base, is wrestling. If you don’t have that, man, and you try to be the best in the world at mixed martial arts, some wrestler that’s ranked 100th in the world will beat you. Because it’s the grind,” Cejudo said.
“I don’t even know if you want to call it a sport, man. It’s almost like a sense of battle. It’s almost its own category. If you look at our right and left ears, we’re deformed for a reason. These are our badges of honor. Like, I didn’t want this, man. It just happened because I would wrestle so hard. The sport on its own, I think it has its own category. It’s the closest thing to battle, in my opinion.”
Wrestling is now behind him, but Cejudo said that even from a young age, he knew he ultimately would grow to be a fighter, renting old UFC DVDs at the neighborhood Hollywood Video and fantasizing about what it would be like to fight inside the Octagon.
If things work out as expected, Saturday will finally mark the beginning of that long-awaited chapter in Cejudo’s athletic career. However one does not win gold in the Olympics by dreaming small, and Cejudo’s dreams are anything but.
“I’m not here just to be a fighter. I’m here to be the best in the world,” he said. “I’m not interested in just being a UFC fighter. I’m not, man. I’ve never thought like that. I think ever since I was a kid, I’ve always reached for the stars and anything less than that is kind of failure to me. My goal is to be the best in the world. I’m not looking for experience, I’m not looking for fame, for glamour, or money. I’m looking to be the best in the world.
“Hopefully, if things go well, in the next year in a half, [I can] get a title shot. It’s in my contract. Four-fight deal, after my third fight I get a title shot. But that was at 125 pounds, so I don’t know what’s going to happen. I want to see how this works. [Bantamweight] is a lot deeper.”