Dave Meltzer has the scoop from Yahoo! Sports<\/p>\n
Henry Cejudo, the only American to capture a gold medal in wrestling at the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, China, recently negotiated with Japanese promoters for a match on that country’s biggest event of the year, the annual New Year’s Eve event on network television that has become almost a cultural institution.<\/p>\n
Promoters wanted to throw Cejudo, 21, into the deep end, as they wanted him to face Norifumi “Kid”\u009d Yamamoto, Japan’s most popular MMA fighter. The match would have a storyline where Yamamoto would be fighting for national pride, since Cejudo defeated a fellow Japanese wrestler, Tomohiro Matsunaga, in the gold medal match in the 121-pound weight class.<\/p>\n
However, Yamamoto, coming off knee surgery, at this point doesn’t look like he’ll be ready.<\/p>\n
Rick Bassman, who represents Cejudo, said talks are still ongoing but with Yamamoto out, it makes it less likely Cejudo would be brought in to debut on such a high profile show.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Dave Meltzer has the scoop from Yahoo! Sports Henry Cejudo, the only American to capture a gold medal in wrestling at the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, China, recently negotiated with Japanese promoters for a match on that country’s biggest event of the year, the annual New Year’s Eve event on network television that has […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"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":[1,13,5],"tags":[143],"class_list":["post-2812","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-wrestling","category-mma","category-olympic","tag-henry-cejudo"],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":6}},"acf":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2B7Di-Jm","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wrestlingpod.com\/wrestling-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2812","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=2812"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.wrestlingpod.com\/wrestling-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2812\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wrestlingpod.com\/wrestling-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2812"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wrestlingpod.com\/wrestling-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2812"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wrestlingpod.com\/wrestling-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2812"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}