Henry Cejudo acknowledges that if he stayed retired in 2020, he’d be viewed in a different light.
Cejudo (16-6 MMA, 10-5 UFC) hung up his gloves after retaining his bantamweight title against Dominick Cruz at UFC 249. The Olympic gold medalist wrestler was walking away as a UFC two-division champion with wins over the likes of Demetrious Johnson, T.J. Dillashaw, and Cruz.cHowever, Cejudo decided to come back in 2023 and lost four straight before retiring again after dropping a lopsided unanimous decision to Payton Talbott at UFC 323.
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What if Cejudo never came back? Would he be considered one of the greatest of all time?
“If I could leave like Khabib (Nurmagomedov) or Jon Jones, then it would be like, ‘Oh, he is the greatest combat athlete of all time,'” Cejudo told Bloody Elbow. “But because of these losses, it was like, ‘Oh, he’s one of them.’ But if you really think back and look at the resume and what I’ve done, doing sh*t that people can only dream of. I beat the best of my generation at the best of their time. All of them.”
Cejudo doesn’t necessarily regret coming back, but it was a tough realization that he could never be the same.
“I think because I’ve been competing my whole life and then taking those three years off, I was just never really able to understand my recovery again or reach that peak to understand the pace,” Cejudo said. “And that’s honestly what I can analyze now because it’s almost like I felt that sh*t in every fight. It was like, ‘What the f*ck?’ Things are just not coming back to me.”
This article originally appeared on MMA Junkie: Henry Cejudo knows career-ending losing skid impacts UFC legacy
