Henry Cejudo will walk to the cage one final time Saturday as he wraps up a legendary MMA career that saw him win belts in two weight classes.
Yet the journey he concludes in a bantamweight bout against Payton Talbott on the main card of UFC 323 at T-Mobile Arena won’t be the first sports accomplishment he tells his future grandchildren about.
“The Olympics is more special,” said Cejudo, a gold medalist in freestyle wrestling at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. “I’m very proud of becoming a two-division champ, but doing something in the sport of wrestling, I prefer being called an Olympic champion to a UFC champion 100 percent. … It was my dream since I was a little kid.”
Cejudo, who is in the National Wrestling Hall of Fame and likely to go into the UFC’s, believes the UFC belts have been cheapened somewhat by a proliferation of undeserving challengers being granted title shots.
“That stuff doesn’t exist in the Olympics,” he said. “You are in a 16-man bracket. You don’t know who the hell you’re going to wrestle until the next day. If you’re truly the best, you have to show it. Sometimes that doesn’t feel like the case here.”
Cejudo found a way to conquer both sports in an illustrious career that will end Saturday, win or lose.
It’s a decision he made once before, but he insists it’s real this time at age 38. When Cejudo stepped away from the UFC in 2020, he did so as the reigning champion. He knew he could still compete at the highest level.
He returned in 2023 to fight for the belt again and lost to Aljamain Sterling. He then dropped a decision to Merab Dvalishvili before a controversial loss after an eye poke to Song Yadong in February.
Now that he’s a family man with two children and successful ventures outside the cage, Cejudo knows it’s time to retire for good.
“I can’t serve two masters,” he said. “I’m in real estate and the content business, and I think I do a pretty good job of that. The ‘Triple C’ of before was single, young and wild and doing my thing dedicated 100 percent to fighting. But if I can’t be the best in the world, then why do it?”
Cejudo believes he can move on the same way he moved on from wrestling. He can appreciate what he did without reflecting too much on what he still could have accomplished.
Cejudo also can rest easy with the feeling he did more for the sport than it did for him. He thinks his ability to create an overconfident “King of Cringe” character helped generate enough interest in the 125-pound division he once dominated to keep the weight class from being eliminated.
“Who else saved an entire division from extinction,” he said. “Even if it was just that, thanks to the gimmick and the persona, the weight class was able to elevate.”
The card will be the final pay-per-view of the ESPN era. The main card will begin at 7 p.m., with the preliminary card on ESPN2 at 5 and the early prelims streaming at 3 on ESPN+.
Contact Adam Hill at ahill@reviewjournal.com. Follow @AdamHillLVRJ on X.
UFC 323
— Main card bouts for Saturday’s 7 p.m. pay-per-view at T-Mobile Arena:
— Merab Dvalishvili (21-4) vs. Petr Yan (19-5), for Dvalishvili’s bantamweight title
— Alexandre Pantoja (30-5) vs. Joshua Van (15-2), for Pantoja’s flyweight title
— Brandon Moreno (23-8-2) vs. Tatsuro Taira (17-1), flyweights
— Henry Cejudo (16-5), vs. Payton Talbott (10-1), bantamweights
— Jan Blachowicz (29-11-1) vs. Bogdan Guskov (18-3), light heavyweights
