Henry Cejudo will make his boxing debut on September 26 at the James L. Knight Center in Miami, matched with former Misfits Boxing lightweight champion Nurideen “Deen the Great” Shabazz, the promotion announced Tuesday. The card streams live on DAZN. Weight class and undercard have not been announced.
The scheduling around the booking is the part that stops you. Cejudo, 39, wrestles former UFC bantamweight champion Merab Dvalishvili this Saturday at RAF 12 in Cleveland, a rematch of their July freestyle match at RAF Georgia, which Dvalishvili won. Assuming he leaves the mat healthy, the boxing debut lands roughly five weeks later. That is three rulesets, wrestling, and now boxing, layered into a single year of what is nominally retirement, and it extends the pattern this summer has made unmistakable across the sport: the exclusive-contract era’s walls are down, and the athletes are treating disciplines as venues. Tsarukyan runs a four-date gauntlet across cage and mat. Danis boxes, grapples, and fights MMA in the same quarter. Cejudo, a year removed from the cage, has simply joined the calendar.
His credentials need no inflation, which is fortunate, because his last chapter does not allow any. Cejudo won Olympic freestyle gold in Beijing at 21. In the UFC, he avenged his 2016 loss to Demetrious Johnson with a split decision at UFC 227 to take the flyweight title, defended it with a 32-second knockout of T.J. Dillashaw, stopped Marlon Moraes at UFC 238 to claim the vacant bantamweight belt and join the short list of two-division champions, and retired in 2020 after finishing Dominick Cruz, on top and on his own terms. The 2023 comeback reversed all of that framing. Four fights, four losses, the last of them to Payton Talbott at UFC 323 in December, and a second retirement that closed the cage chapter with the record reading 0-4 across the return. None of it moves his Hall of Fame case an inch. It does mean the boxing debut arrives with a fighter looking for a first win, in any discipline, since February 2023 on the mat notwithstanding, and that context belongs in the story whether his camp would choose it or not.
Shabazz brings his own rebound arc. The 25-year-old was one of influencer boxing’s genuine fixtures, holding the Misfits lightweight title for more than 800 days before being stripped in 2024, and his most recent outing ended in the first loss of his ring career, against Amado Vargas at Misfits Mania in December. He has spent the layoff calling for bigger names, including a shot at Max Holloway that the former BMF titleholder waved off as crazy, and a former two-division UFC champion is about as big a name as the crossover circuit can currently deliver him. For Misfits, which has spent two years pulling MMA fighters, YouTubers, and traditional boxers into the same pipeline, Cejudo is the most decorated combat-sports résumé the promotion has ever booked.
The stylistic question is the commercial logic. Cejudo built his MMA striking on short combinations tucked behind level changes, with the wrestling threat doing half the work of every feint. Under boxing rules, the level change threatens nothing, and the man across from him has fought exclusively in a ring, at pace, against opponents who box full time. Shabazz’s speed and volume against a 39-year-old making a striking-only debut is a genuinely open question, and the openness is the product. Neither man has faced anything like what the other represents, which is the entire reason the fight sells.
The read on Cejudo’s calendar is the kinder one the schedule itself suggests. Two freestyle bookings inside three months, a rematch against a fellow former UFC champion this weekend, and a boxing debut five weeks later is not the itinerary of a man settling into appearance-fee retirement. It is a decorated competitor at 39 looking for competitive outlets that fit what his body still does at world class, and the sport’s new patchwork of promotions keeps handing him dates. Whether September 26 becomes a one-off or the start of a boxing chapter, he has not said.
First, Saturday. Dvalishvili beat him once this summer already, and RAF 12 offers the answer to the nearer question before Miami asks the further one. The James L. Knight Center card goes September 26, live on DAZN, with full details expected in the coming weeks.
