Olympic gold medalist Gable Steveson recently sat down for an interview with the JAXXON podcast and revealed that he’s open to professional grappling matches with both Nicky Rodriguez and Gordon Ryan. Steveson was a three-time wrestling world champion and two-time NCAA Division I winner by the time he won his Olympic gold medal in 2021, and that solidified his status as one of the greatest grapplers on the planet. He was inundated with combat sports offers at that point and he really could have done anything, as all of the world’s biggest MMA promotions were eager to secure her services.
In the end he decided to take a slightly different route and he signed with the WWE in order to become a professional wrestler instead. He eventually decided to put all his focus on his newfound career and opted out of competing at the 2023 world championship, even though he won the US Team Trials. Steveson hasn’t had a single wrestling match in almost a year at this point, but he is still very young and could easily return or make the transition to submission grappling if he chooses. Gable Steveson was actually asked in the interview about the idea of taking on Nicky Rodriguez or Gordon Ryan and he was clearly open to the idea:
“Nicky (Rodriguez) reached out, I think I reached out to him about doing one, but it just never fell through.”
“Gordon Ryan, I would do it. I mean, any guy I would do it.”
He isn’t exaggerating either, he actually did challenge Nicky Rodriguez to a grappling match just last year. This revelation came as a bit of a surprise to Quinton ‘Rampage’ Jackson and the rest of the hosts, no doubt because it’s a sport that he’s never competed in before. Steveson was clear that it wasn’t a concern for him though:
“Yeah! I mean, what’s the problem with that?”
While Steveson’s elite wrestling background obviously gives him a huge head-start when it comes to picking up Jiu-Jitsu, he would still be up against the very best that the sport has to offer. That’s a daunting task and he was asked if he’d ever actually done any Jiu-Jitsu before because he’d need to learn a lot about the sport before competing in it. Again, Steveson wasn’t too concerned:
“No, but I’ll get it.”
The full interview with Gable Steveson, including the section where he discusses potential grappling matches with Nicky Rodriguez and Gordon Ryan, was uploaded to the official YouTube channel of the JAXXON podcast:
