Gordon Ryan recently revealed that he’s been trying to compete against Olympic gold medalist Gable Steveson for quite some time, and even shared evidence of that fact. Steveson has established himself as one of the greatest wrestling talents of his generation, winning two NCAA Division I championships and three world titles before adding an Olympic gold medal to his resume. It was at that point that Steveson was a sought after talent in the world of combat sports, and he was fielding offers from a number of different MMA promotions. Now it appears as though they weren’t the only offers that Steveson had, and he actually had grappling matches proposed to him as well.
The news comes after Gable Steveson revealed that he would be interested in grappling matches with either Nicky Rodriguez or Gordon Ryan. Although it appeared as though he was eager and willing to face some of the world’s best submission grapplers in their own sport, it’s not something that’s ever happened before. According to him:
“Gordon Ryan, I would do it. I mean, any guy I would do it.”
But Ryan has now revealed that this isn’t the first time that this match has been talked about, and he didn’t get any response last time. He shared screenshots of a conversation between himself and Mike Sears, the matchmaker for Who’s Number One, where they started to discuss a potential match with Steveson. To Ryan’s credit, he actually offered Steveson the choice of both date and ruleset that they would compete under and although Sears had a specific date in mind, he was also open to discussion. The specific date he mentions appears to refer to a Who’s Number One event back in 2022 headlined by Craig Jones and Pedro Marinho, which lines up with the date of this conversation on October 24th, 2021. Apparently, Steveson didn’t agree to the proposed match.
Gordon Ryan shared the screenshots of conversations where he has tried to arrange a match against Gable Steveson in a recent post to the story on his official Instagram account:
