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<\/p>\nBring On the World<\/p>\n
The son of former illegal immigrants, 20-year-old Henry Cejudo has
\novercome hardship to become the youngest U.S. wrestling champion in
\ndecades. Now he wants to be the best on the planet.<\/p>\n
Cejudo, who won his first senior national title last year as a a high
\nschooler, beat Nick Simmons in April to repeat as champ.<\/p>\n
By Mark Beech<\/p>\n
The long, low-slung wrestling room at the U.S. Olympic Training
\nCenter in Colorado Springs is not a welcoming space. There are no
\nwindows or air conditioning. Sweat streaks not only the mats but also
\nthe padding on the walls. During a typical two-hour practice session
\nfor the men’s freestyle team, when the activity of roughly 30
\nwrestlers pushes the temperature well over 80,\u00b0, the atmosphere gets
\ndownright ripe. The only sounds, besides the commands of coaches, are
\nthe grunts of combatants, the thuds of falling bodies and the
\noccasional yelps of pain. It is a room in which the weak don’t stand
\na chance.<\/p>\n
In a far corner Henry Cejudo is hard at work. The reigning national
\nchampion at 121 pounds (he won his second straight title in Las Vegas
\nin April) and a resident athlete at the OTC since the fall of 2004,
\nhe has thrived in an environment that has broken wrestlers with
\nsparkling r\u00e9sum\u00e9s from some of the best college programs in the
\ncountry. He punctuates every grueling practice by lifting weights or
\nrunning a quick three or four miles around nearby Memorial Park
\nafterward. Cejudo, who was born in Los Angeles to then illegal
\nimmigrants from Mexico City who met in the U.S., is the toughest
\nwrestler in the room. He’s also, by his sport’s standards, just a
\nboy — a few months past his 20th ,\u00adbirthday — and the youngest member
\nof the U.S. national team. Last year he lost in the finals of the
\nworld team trials to 36-year-old world bronze medalist Sammie Henson,
\nwho ,\u00adremains his top rival for a spot on the 2008 Olympic squad.<\/p>\n
Cejudo (pronounced say-HOO-doh) is a prodigy of the sort rarely found
\nin the U.S. freestyle program, which typically ,\u00addoesn’t get its hands
\non wrestlers until they’ve completed their college careers. He burst
\nonto the international scene in November 2005 while still a senior in
\nhigh school, winning the New York Athletic Club Holiday International
\nafter defeating ’04 NCAA champion Jason Powell of Nebraska in the
\nquarterfinals and dominating junior world champion Besik Kudukhov of
\nRussia in the semis. Five months later Cejudo became the first high
\nschooler to win a senior national championship since USA Wrestling
\nbecame the sport’s governing body in 1983.”He is the future of
\nwrestling,”says U.S. freestyle head coach Kevin Jackson.”He’s going
\nto win a lot of world and Olympic titles for us and for himself. We
\nexpect him to wrestle until 2012 or 2016 and dominate the world.”<\/p>\n
That would be fine with Cejudo, who will be the No. 1 seed in his
\nweight class this weekend at the world team trials in Las Vegas.
\nHenson has missed time with a knee injury, leaving a hole in the
\nweight division that only Cejudo seems ready to fill. At 5′ 4″, he is
\na compact mass of muscle and focused aggression. Since he began
\nwrestling in junior high, he has thought of little else but winning
\nworld and Olympic championships. Indeed, he is obsessed with those
\ngoals, driven by a desire to prove himself to the world, as well as
\nto a father he never really knew.<\/p>\n
Jorge Cejudo — who also used the aliases Favian Roca, and Emiliano
\nand Javier ,\u00adZaragosa was no stranger to trouble. Throughout the 1990s
\nhe moved in and out of the California penal system for a variety of
\noffenses. His crimes cost him more than his freedom; they also cost
\nhim his family. In May 1991, on the eve of his release from jail,
\nNelly Rico, the woman with whom he shared a home in South Central
\nL.A., moved with her six kids to Las Cruces, N.Mex. The four youngest
\nof those children (one girl and three boys) were Jorge’s, including
\nthe baby, four-year-old Henry.”My mom ,\u00addidn’t want to be around my
\ndad because of the way he was,”Henry says.<\/p>\n
The splintered family spent 2 1\/2 years in New Mexico before Nelly,
\nnow 47, moved them again, to Phoenix. Often holding down two jobs,
\nand mostly doing factory work, she struggled to make ends meet. She
\nand her children maintained no permanent residence, sometimes staying
\nin a house or apartment for only two months and sleeping four or more
\nto a bed while sharing living space with other families and
\nfriends.”We were never finished packing,”says Henry’s older sister
\nGloria.”We’d move from upstairs to downstairs in the same apartment
\ncomplex.”<\/p>\n
In such close quarters (another sister, Christy, arrived in 1995)
\ntempers were often on edge, and Henry fought frequently with his
\nbrother Angel, who was older by just 16 months. It was Angel who
\nfound his way to wrestling first, and Henry soon followed, thrilled,
\nhe says, with the idea that he could”get trophies for fighting.”By
\nthe time he reached Phoenix’s Maryvale High, he and Angel were
\ndominating local competition.”Every time they left to go to a
\ntournament, Mom ingrained in them that the way we lived should be a
\nmotivation to them,”says Gloria.”She said that how [little] we had
\nhad nothing to do with who they were. They took that onto the mat
\nwith them. They still do.”<\/p>\n
Angel was the star back then, graduating from Maryvale in 2004 with
\nfour state championships and a career record of 150–0. He had
\nscholarship offers from several college programs but no desire to
\ncontinue going to school. When Dave Bennett, the national
\ndevelopmental freestyle coach for USA Wrestling, offered him a chance
\nto join the resident freestyle program in Colorado Springs, he jumped
\nat the opportunity. Bennett says that while he was arranging for
\nAngel’s arrival, somebody from Phoenix — he ,\u00addoesn’t remember who —
\nasked if Henry, then 17, could come along too.”And I thought, I like
\nthat idea,”says Bennett.<\/p>\n
Henry, who’d just won his second straight Arizona state championship,
\nwas already on the radar in Colorado Springs. He had spent several
\nweeks early in the summer of 2004 training at the OTC with Patricia
\nMiranda, who was a couple months away from winning Olympic bronze at
\n106 pounds in ,\u00adAthens in women’s freestyle. She had first met Cejudo
\non a trip to Phoenix, during a training session at a local high
\nschool.”He kept taking me down,”says Miranda.”He moved so well
\nfrom position to position. Once we found out how well he challenged
\nme, we wanted to include him in my every-day training.”<\/p>\n
When the Cejudo boys began their residency at the OTC at the start of
\nthe school year, they were assigned to separate dorm rooms and slept
\nin their own beds for the first time in their lives. But wrestling
\nremained at the center of their worlds. Henry ,\u00adcouldn’t get enough of
\nthe program, rising before 6 a.m. for individual workouts with
\nresident freestyle coach Terry Brands, then running or biking to
\nclasses five miles away at Coronado High. After school he would
\nreturn for freestyle practice. He also found time to wrestle for
\nCoronado, winning two Colorado state championships to go along with
\nhis pair from Arizona. Angel, despite some initial success, has not
\nfared as well. He is still in the residency program but has struggled
\nwith his weight (he wrestles in the 132-pound class), as well as with
\nthe demands of raising a two-year-old daughter with his girlfriend,
\nAngela.”He’s trying to balance where he’s at in life,”says Bennett.<\/p>\n
Like his brother, Henry decided to forgo college in favor of training
\nwith the OTC freestyle program.”It was never my goal to be an NCAA
\nchampion,”he says. His talent is perfectly suited to freestyle,
\nwhich rewards aggressiveness. Cejudo’s ability to create scoring
\nopportunities from almost any ,\u00adposition — he’ll often drop to his
\nknees before ,\u00adattacking — is unmatched on the U.S. team.”His hip
\n[flexibility] is unbelievable,”says Brands, a two-time world
\nchampion and the bronze medalist at 128 pounds at the 2000
\nOlympics.”He can do things that most guys can’t or won’t because
\nthey’re so difficult.”<\/p>\n
It is no coincidence that Cejudo began trying to reunite with his
\nfather at precisely the time he’d started making his family name one
\nof the most prominent in American wrestling. How do you like me now,
\nDad? Nelly had always refused to say anything negative about Jorge,
\ntelling his four children that their father loved them very much. But
\nher kids had spent nearly 20 years blaming him for all of the
\nmiseries they had endured. Last year, when Henry expressed an
\ninterest in going to Mexico City to see his father — with whom he
\nhad spoken on the phone only once in 15 years — his siblings talked
\nhim out of it.”We had called my father’s family, and his sister said
\nhe was still messed up on drugs,”says Gloria.”I wasn’t going to let
\nHenry go and see him like that.”<\/p>\n
He will never have another oppor,\u00adtunity. Jorge Cejudo died of heart
\nfailure at his mother’s home on May 9 at age 44, the result, his
\nfamily says, of years of drug and alcohol abuse. Any hope Henry held
\nout for closure, for meeting the man who never saw him wrestle, is
\nlost.”I should have done more,”he says of his plans to visit his
\ndad.”I just obeyed.”<\/p>\n
Cejudo is still drawing motivation from his father, insisting his
\ndeath will not be a distraction this weekend in Las Vegas.”It’s bad
\ntiming,”he admits,”but I’m sure if he was at the tournament, he’d
\nwant me to win.”<\/p>\n
There is enough anguish behind that statement to choke up the
\ntoughest man in any wrestling room. But Henry Cejudo — the toughest
\nman on the U.S. team — does not cry. He simply says,”I’ve just got
\nto win.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Bring On the World The son of former illegal immigrants, 20-year-old Henry Cejudo has overcome hardship to become the youngest U.S. wrestling champion in decades. Now he wants to be the best on the planet. Cejudo, who won his first senior national title last year as a a high schooler, beat Nick Simmons in April […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":3732,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2576","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-wrestling","category-olympic"],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":6}},"acf":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.wrestlingpod.com\/wrestling-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/06\/1477065-henry_promo_super.jpeg?fit=300%2C449&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2B7Di-Fy","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wrestlingpod.com\/wrestling-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2576","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wrestlingpod.com\/wrestling-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wrestlingpod.com\/wrestling-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wrestlingpod.com\/wrestling-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wrestlingpod.com\/wrestling-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2576"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.wrestlingpod.com\/wrestling-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2576\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wrestlingpod.com\/wrestling-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3732"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wrestlingpod.com\/wrestling-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2576"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wrestlingpod.com\/wrestling-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2576"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wrestlingpod.com\/wrestling-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2576"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}