Gordon Ryan’s bad bout of stomach flu caused him to pull out of his rematch with Felipe Pena.
This led Pena to compete against Nick Rodriguez instead. Rodriguez was a late day replacement and put on a really good show considering he had several days to prepare for a 30 minute match.
Afterwards, questions arose regarding the authenticity of Ryan’s pull out, with Pena suggesting that he might have been afraid of losing. And for a while, it seemed like the grappling match might never happen.
Pena plans to transition to MMA, which might be problematic considering he’s 31 years old.
Now in a latest interview Pena revealed some of the negotiation issues he’s run into negotiating the previous outing as well as a timeline update.
“I would have to train 2, 3 months again, set a date to make time for this camp and make it happen. So if it happens, I think it would have to be in June, July or something like that. ”
Pena went on to explain that he’s still very much against the no time limit ruleset:
“I suggested it to be a match with time, a 30 minute match. I even suggested an hour, but Gordon said he would only do the match if it was a no time limit match. I didn’t want to do this no time limit match. I think it’s a match that gets boring, the audience doesn’t want to see it. Flograppling didn’t want to do this no time limit match. But because Gordon wanted it, the match ended up being no time limit,”
“I think it’s a less dynamic match. Because the athletes don’t give their all, because they know there’s still a lot of time… so it’s a match where the athletes save themselves, save conditioning to get in at the right time, take advantage and capitalize on the right moment. So I think a match should be less long, for example 15 minutes, 30 minutes. I think is a lot, I think a 15 minute match is a lot of time”
Pena also shed light on another interesting fact. Apparently Gordon Ryan’s transplant teammate, Nicholas Meregali, would only agree to step in on late notice if the match was 15 minutes.
” I did the whole camp, for this no time limit match. Because he wanted to, he pulled out 3 days before”
“No one would accept a no time limit match 3 days before. So I don’t even blame Nick because he accepted the 30 minute match, which is a long time. There were other athletes who said, for example, Meregali. It seems he didn’t want to accept a 30 minute match, it should be 15 minutes”
