How Henry Cejudo went from sleeping on floors to UFC contention
Henry Cejudo is 28 years old and in the prime of his athletic career. He’s an Olympic gold medalist and a potential UFC champion.
He faces Jussier Formiga in a flyweight bout Saturday in Monterrey, Mexico, on the main card of a UFC show being broadcast on Fox Sports 1.
Life is good, and he’s the first to admit he has plenty of reason to give thanks next week.
But Cejudo’s life is vastly different than most. Many fighters grow up poor and learn to fight to escape a harsh environment. Few, though, endured the kind of life Cejudo did growing up in Los Angeles, Phoenix and Las Cruces, N.M.
For the first 17 years of his life, he slept on a bunch of blankets in the corner of a room. It wasn’t until he and his older brother, Angel, went to the U.S. Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, Colo., to compete in the USA Wrestling program that he had a bed to call his own.
“That was a very weird feeling,” he said. “I was still just a junior in high school. My brother and I weren’t used to that. It was one of the things in life we didn’t have. We just lived and did what we had to do. We didn’t know.”
He’d sleep on those blankets with his brother’s leg draped over him and his sister’s arm across his back. They didn’t even have separate areas in their home to call their own.
But it created an unbreakable bond between them that exists to this day. In his autobiography, “American Victory: Wrestling, Dreams, and a Journey Toward Home” that he co-wrote with the great Los Angeles Times sports columnist Bill Plaschke, Cejudo talks of how, even as an adult, the habits he learned as the youngest in a poor family remain a part of him today.
“I consider everything I order anywhere to be family style,” he wrote. “I’ll share with anybody, because, down to the last tortilla, we learned to cut it up and share with each other.”
He recounted how when he was 4, his mother bought Christmas presents for the family, but then his AWOL father, Jorge, came into their home and stole their presents. It was then he learned that Santa wasn’t real.
He was, in so many ways, born to fight. And he was inspired greatly by his older brother, Angel, who was 150-0 and won four state championships as a high school wrestler. So Henry went out and won four state titles of his own.
He said the experiences he went through with his five older siblings during their childhood brought them together, but he remains particularly close to Angel.
“He’s such a good, spirited person, very loyal, very humble,” Henry Cejudo said. “I admire him so much in so many ways. He doesn’t know this, but I still look up to him even though he’s about 210 and 5-4. But I look up to the man. He’s an incredible person, and I care about him so much and I know he cares for me.”
Cejudo earned a great deal of publicity in MMA earlier this year when he vowed not to fight in Nevada because of its five-year ban on Nick Diaz for smoking marijuana.
Cejudo’s argument wasn’t that marijuana shouldn’t be tested for, as many believe. Diaz was tested multiple times on the night after his bout with Anderson Silva at UFC 183 and one of those tests came back positive.
Cejudo said he felt Diaz was targeted, and that’s why he said he vowed not to fight in Nevada, even if that meant he’d lose a title shot against champion Demetrious Johnson.
“I do believe he messed up and he shouldn’t have smoked because he knew the rules,” Cejudo said. “That’s on him. But what my issue was was that he was targeted. Never in my life have I been tested like they tested him. I’m an Olympic champion and I’ve been tested so many times, I can’t tell you. My blood’s been drawn so much, but I never had that happen, being tested three times in one day.
“That was my biggest thing. And he passed the accredited test. It was mind-boggling what happened. So I feel like I need to be a leader and take a stand. This kind of thing can’t be allowed to happen.”
He changed his stance only after Nevada and Diaz entered into settlement talks to reduce the penalty.
If he beats Formiga, he’s going to be at the top of the list of consideration for Johnson’s next opponent.
Cejudo wants to fight Johnson, for sure, but he said he feels he’s been targeted by other flyweights.
“They’re all out to get me because they if they beat the golden boy, they boost themselves,” he said, chuckling. “I get that. I’ve lived with that for a long time. When you win an Olympic gold medal, you have a target on your back. I know it and it motivates me to keep working because I don’t want to give any of these guys a chance to use my name and my accomplishments to boost themselves.
“I have been through a lot in my life and the success I’ve had came through a lot of hardship. We grew up extremely, extremely humbly. That motivates me and it’s something that pushes me every day. I never forget it.”
