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 to repeat as champ.
By Mark Beech
The long, low-slung wrestling room at the U.S. Olympic Training
Center in Colorado Springs is not a welcoming space. There are no
windows or air conditioning. Sweat streaks not only the mats but also
the padding on the walls. During a typical two-hour practice session
for the men’s freestyle team, when the activity of roughly 30
wrestlers pushes the temperature well over 80,°, the atmosphere gets
downright ripe. The only sounds, besides the commands of coaches, are
the grunts of combatants, the thuds of falling bodies and the
occasional yelps of pain. It is a room in which the weak don’t stand
a chance.
In a far corner Henry Cejudo is hard at work. The reigning national
champion at 121 pounds (he won his second straight title in Las Vegas
in April) and a resident athlete at the OTC since the fall of 2004,
he has thrived in an environment that has broken wrestlers with
sparkling résumés from some of the best college programs in the
country. He punctuates every grueling practice by lifting weights or
running a quick three or four miles around nearby Memorial Park
afterward. Cejudo, who was born in Los Angeles to then illegal
immigrants from Mexico City who met in the U.S., is the toughest
wrestler in the room. He’s also, by his sport’s standards, just a
boy — a few months past his 20th ,birthday — and the youngest member
of the U.S. national team. Last year he lost in the finals of the
world team trials to 36-year-old world bronze medalist Sammie Henson,
who ,remains his top rival for a spot on the 2008 Olympic squad.
Cejudo (pronounced say-HOO-doh) is a prodigy of the sort rarely found
in the U.S. freestyle program, which typically ,doesn’t get its hands
on wrestlers until they’ve completed their college careers. He burst
onto the international scene in November 2005 while still a senior in
high school, winning the New York Athletic Club Holiday International
after defeating ’04 NCAA champion Jason Powell of Nebraska in the
quarterfinals and dominating junior world champion Besik Kudukhov of
Russia in the semis. Five months later Cejudo became the first high
schooler to win a senior national championship since USA Wrestling
became the sport’s governing body in 1983. “He is the future of
wrestling, “says U.S. freestyle head coach Kevin Jackson. “He’s going
to win a lot of world and Olympic titles for us and for himself. We
expect him to wrestle until 2012 or 2016 and dominate the world.”
That would be fine with Cejudo, who will be the No. 1 seed in his
weight class this weekend at the world team trials in Las Vegas.
Henson has missed time with a knee injury, leaving a hole in the
weight division that only Cejudo seems ready to fill. At 5′ 4″, he is
a compact mass of muscle and focused aggression. Since he began
wrestling in junior high, he has thought of little else but winning
world and Olympic championships. Indeed, he is obsessed with those
goals, driven by a desire to prove himself to the world, as well as
to a father he never really knew.
Jorge Cejudo — who also used the aliases Favian Roca, and Emiliano
and Javier ,Zaragosa was no stranger to trouble. Throughout the 1990s
he moved in and out of the California penal system for a variety of
offenses. His crimes cost him more than his freedom; they also cost
him his family. In May 1991, on the eve of his release from jail,
Nelly Rico, the woman with whom he shared a home in South Central
L.A., moved with her six kids to Las Cruces, N.Mex. The four youngest
of those children (one girl and three boys) were Jorge’s, including
the baby, four-year-old Henry. “My mom ,didn’t want to be around my
dad because of the way he was, “Henry says.
The splintered family spent 2 1/2 years in New Mexico before Nelly,
now 47, moved them again, to Phoenix. Often holding down two jobs,
and mostly doing factory work, she struggled to make ends meet. She
and her children maintained no permanent residence, sometimes staying
in a house or apartment for only two months and sleeping four or more
to a bed while sharing living space with other families and
friends. “We were never finished packing, “says Henry’s older sister
Gloria. “We’d move from upstairs to downstairs in the same apartment
complex.”
In such close quarters (another sister, Christy, arrived in 1995)
tempers were often on edge, and Henry fought frequently with his
brother Angel, who was older by just 16 months. It was Angel who
found his way to wrestling first, and Henry soon followed, thrilled,
he says, with the idea that he could “get trophies for fighting. “By
the time he reached Phoenix’s Maryvale High, he and Angel were
dominating local competition. “Every time they left to go to a
tournament, Mom ingrained in them that the way we lived should be a
motivation to them, “says Gloria. “She said that how [little] we had
had nothing to do with who they were. They took that onto the mat
with them. They still do.”
Angel was the star back then, graduating from Maryvale in 2004 with
four state championships and a career record of 150–0. He had
scholarship offers from several college programs but no desire to
continue going to school. When Dave Bennett, the national
developmental freestyle coach for USA Wrestling, offered him a chance
to join the resident freestyle program in Colorado Springs, he jumped
at the opportunity. Bennett says that while he was arranging for
Angel’s arrival, somebody from Phoenix — he ,doesn’t remember who —
asked if Henry, then 17, could come along too. “And I thought, I like
that idea, “says Bennett.
Henry, who’d just won his second straight Arizona state championship,
was already on the radar in Colorado Springs. He had spent several
weeks early in the summer of 2004 training at the OTC with Patricia
Miranda, who was a couple months away from winning Olympic bronze at
106 pounds in ,Athens in women’s freestyle. She had first met Cejudo
on a trip to Phoenix, during a training session at a local high
school. “He kept taking me down, “says Miranda. “He moved so well
from position to position. Once we found out how well he challenged
me, we wanted to include him in my every-day training.”
When the Cejudo boys began their residency at the OTC at the start of
the school year, they were assigned to separate dorm rooms and slept
in their own beds for the first time in their lives. But wrestling
remained at the center of their worlds. Henry ,couldn’t get enough of
the program, rising before 6 a.m. for individual workouts with
resident freestyle coach Terry Brands, then running or biking to
classes five miles away at Coronado High. After school he would
return for freestyle practice. He also found time to wrestle for
Coronado, winning two Colorado state championships to go along with
his pair from Arizona. Angel, despite some initial success, has not
fared as well. He is still in the residency program but has struggled
with his weight (he wrestles in the 132-pound class), as well as with
the demands of raising a two-year-old daughter with his girlfriend,
Angela. “He’s trying to balance where he’s at in life, “says Bennett.
Like his brother, Henry decided to forgo college in favor of training
with the OTC freestyle program. “It was never my goal to be an NCAA
champion, “he says. His talent is perfectly suited to freestyle,
which rewards aggressiveness. Cejudo’s ability to create scoring
opportunities from almost any ,position — he’ll often drop to his
knees before ,attacking — is unmatched on the U.S. team. “His hip
[flexibility] is unbelievable, “says Brands, a two-time world
champion and the bronze medalist at 128 pounds at the 2000
Olympics. “He can do things that most guys can’t or won’t because
they’re so difficult.”
It is no coincidence that Cejudo began trying to reunite with his
father at precisely the time he’d started making his family name one
of the most prominent in American wrestling. How do you like me now,
Dad? Nelly had always refused to say anything negative about Jorge,
telling his four children that their father loved them very much. But
her kids had spent nearly 20 years blaming him for all of the
miseries they had endured. Last year, when Henry expressed an
interest in going to Mexico City to see his father — with whom he
had spoken on the phone only once in 15 years — his siblings talked
him out of it. “We had called my father’s family, and his sister said
he was still messed up on drugs, “says Gloria. “I wasn’t going to let
Henry go and see him like that.”
He will never have another oppor,tunity. Jorge Cejudo died of heart
failure at his mother’s home on May 9 at age 44, the result, his
family says, of years of drug and alcohol abuse. Any hope Henry held
out for closure, for meeting the man who never saw him wrestle, is
lost. “I should have done more, “he says of his plans to visit his
dad. “I just obeyed.”
Cejudo is still drawing motivation from his father, insisting his
death will not be a distraction this weekend in Las Vegas. “It’s bad
timing, “he admits, “but I’m sure if he was at the tournament, he’d
want me to win.”
There is enough anguish behind that statement to choke up the
toughest man in any wrestling room. But Henry Cejudo — the toughest
man on the U.S. team — does not cry. He simply says, “I’ve just got
to win.”
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