A Grand Finale for Tito Ortiz

Happy endings are an exception to the rule in a sport in which any fighter with a modicum of name value is typically trotted out three, four, or five fights past their expiration date to face a dangerous young up-and-comer, ostensibly to see if they still have “it,” but really to build the stars of the next generation. Just ask BJ Penn, an all-time great searching for something much grander than a three-fight losing streak to end his career, a streak that 24-year-old Yair Rodriguez easily extended to four last weekend. Or, you could ask Tito Ortiz, who used Ken Shamrock as a stepping stone on three occasions to become one of the most famous athletes in the sport.

Years ago, it seemed that Ortiz was destined to end his career at that Shamrock point. His mind was still in the sport, whether addicted to competition or the spotlight, but his body was through with all the camps and combat. Ortiz closed his UFC career on a sad 1-7-1 run, and declared his final UFC contest – a close loss to Forrest Griffin in 2012 – the last of his entire mixed martial arts career.

Seeking a better close to his career, a year later he decided to trudge forward and signed with Bellator MMA. Injuries predictably delayed his return, but when he did, he scored a surprising upset of then-middleweight champion Alexander Shlemenko, who moved up a weight class for the bout. Then he took a decision against Stephan Bonnar in a sloppy fight. Everything was coming up Ortiz, and his name value helped him into a title match with Liam McGeary. As expected, he lost the contest, but wasn’t beaten up in the way that exiting legends too often are. Of course, surgery still followed, as it does with Ortiz. In the fall of 2016, Bellator announced a match between Ortiz and Chael Sonnen, perhaps the biggest possible opponent for him in the promotion. Ortiz decided that the bout, scheduled to occur two days before his 42nd birthday, would be his last. He got an ending most fighters of his stature can only dream they received.

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Ortiz made his MMA debut at UFC 13 in 1997, a deal brokered a UFC fighter he had trained with, Tank Abbott. He fought for free to retain his amateur status since he was still competing in the collegiate ranks at Cal State Bakersfield. His match was an alternate bout in the lightweight tournament (199 lbs. & under). His opponent, Wes Albritton, a mustachioed 26-year-old billed as a Kenpo Karate specialist, went down in 31 seconds and never competed again.

Over in the main tournament bracket, Guy Mezger, representing Ken Shamrock’s Lion’s Den, and Enson Inoue advanced to the finals. However, Inoue withdrew from the second match due to injury, forcing UFC to go with the alternate. Suddenly thrust into a match with an experienced veteran, Ortiz didn’t try to stick with what he knew. He threw heavy punches on the feet and forced Mezger to shoot for a takedown, which Ortiz easily stifled. Events continued south for Mezger, as Ortiz controlled him on the ground and landed knees to his head, which opened up a cut. During a very brief pause in the action, referee John McCarthy stopped the fight to have the doctor check and work on Mezger’s cut. Following a delay of more than a minute, the fighters resumed standing, as the rules in those days didn’t allow restarts from the same position. Shortly after the fight restarted, Mezger caught Ortiz in a guillotine as he shot in, forcing the tap.

In his first night, the 22-year-old Ortiz came close to winning the tournament. He may well have won had the rule to restart fighters in the same position been in place.

Ortiz didn’t return to fighting until after he finished his collegiate wrestling career a year later. In January 1999, he returned to the UFC and stopped Jerry Bohlander, a well-reputed Lion’s Den fighter. It set Ortiz up for a fight two months later that would change the course of his career.

Ortiz replaced Vitor Belfort to fight Mezger again in the main event of UFC 19, a show the promotion dubbed “Young Guns.” With the additional experience, Ortiz got his revenge on Mezger, who could not handle the younger fighter’s wrestling. After the bout, Ortiz flipped off Mezger’s corner and donned a “Gay Mezger is My Bitch” t-shirt, cementing his reputation as the UFC’s bad boy. Ken Shamrock, in Mezger’s corner, took umbrage to both actions. The image of Shamrock leaning over the cage, barking and waving his finger at Ortiz would be replayed for years to come, a seed planted for a feud that would become the biggest in the sport.

Next was an opportunity at the title. Frank Shamrock had defended the UFC middleweight (now light heavyweight) title three times and was considered one of the two or three best pound-for-pound fighters in the world. He also carried the Shamrock last name and had trained at the Lion’s Den, although by the time of the Ortiz fight he’d had a falling out with Ken and was no longer training there. That didn’t stop the UFC from exploiting the Ortiz-Lion’s Den feud, nor did it stop Ortiz and Shamrock, who were in contact with one another during the build to the match.

In what many considered the best fight in UFC history to that point, Ortiz, the much bigger man, took Shamrock down at will. Shamrock, in a strategy similar to the one he’d devised for Maurice Smith in his title match with Mark Coleman two years earlier, accepted that he’d be taken down and aimed to make Ortiz tire out from the top position. That’s exactly what happened. Ortiz won the first three rounds with takedowns, control, and ground and pound. He even cut Shamrock above the eye and dug his fingers into the wound to make it larger, a tactic soon outlawed specifically due to Ortiz’s use. However, all the while, Ortiz was slowing down. He still took Shamrock down in round for and controlled almost all of it, but Shamrock swept Ortiz with 20 seconds and unleashed a storm of hammerfists. A totally spent Ortiz submitted to the attack.

Shamrock retired after the fight, relinquishing his title, while Ortiz dedicated himself to conditioning. In April 2000, the UFC pitted Ortiz against Wanderlei Silva for the vacant title. Ortiz dominated the action for the most part, save for a point in which he ran to evade Silva’s attack, winning a unanimous decision. The loss would be Silva’s only one in the division until 2005. He went on to a destructive run in Pride, while stateside Ortiz made his case for being the world’s best middleweight.

Ortiz went on to set the record for the longest championship run in UFC history with five title defenses. His opponents, although top fighters in most cases, were not quite the elite of the division. Ortiz dominated them all the same. He dispatched Yuki Kondo, Evan Danner, and Elvis Sinosic in the first round. Vladimir Matyushenko, a late replacement for Vitor Belfort, was dominated. In his eventual showdown with Ken Shamrock, the culmination of his title reign, Ortiz was at his best.

He was also the biggest star in the promotion during a time of tremendous change. In January 2001, Zuffa, an entity led by Ortiz’s former manager Dana White and his friends Frank and Lorenzo Fertitta, purchased the UFC. It was while negotiating a contract for Ortiz that White learned the UFC was in financial trouble and could be purchased. At the time, the young and brash Ortiz was positioned as the star of the promotion. He was on the cover of the first three UFC video games, and headlined the promotion’s first event in Las Vegas – considered an enormously important event at the time.

The UFC’s clearance in Nevada, where the sport had been banned, cleared the way for a return to pay-per-view. Most cable providers booted UFC off pay-per-view due to mass hysteria surrounding the product in the late-1990s. UFC 33 was thought of as the show that would push the promotion back to its former glory, but that wouldn’t be the case. The show was a complete disaster. 9/11 occurred a little more than two weeks before the show. The Bernard Hopkins vs. Felix Trinidad boxing match was moved to the night following UFC, which meant that pay-per-view providers would focus on advertising that match rather than UFC. Ortiz’s opponent, Vitor Belfort, was a late withdraw from the card. Many options were explored, including Ken Shamrock and Frank Shamrock, but Vladimir Matyushenko got the spot. Most fights were boring, and every one on the main card went to a decision. Since the UFC planned three title bouts for the big night and all went the full 25 minutes, they went over their allotted pay-per-view time. Many feeds cut out before the conclusion of the Ortiz-Matyushenko main event. Rather than a turning point, it was a short-term peak; subsequent shows only did about half of the 75,000 purchases that UFC 33 pulled.

If UFC 33 was a funeral, UFC 40, 14 months later, was a grand wedding. Ken Shamrock had become far and away the most famous MMA fighter in the United States due to a three-year run in the WWF. He returned in the UFC in 2002 to pay off his feud with Ortiz, which in reality was only getting started. It was the biggest fight of the Zuffa era, drawing a $1.5 million gate (UFC’s first million-dollar gate and nearly double their previous best) and more than 100,000 buys on pay-per-view, easily the most since the UFC’s mid-90s heyday. Plus, it was a tremendous show; all eight fights had finishes, six of them in the first round. However, it was another false turning point. The event proved the product could be a major success, but subsequent shows came nothing close to its success, perhaps due to the absence of the company’s biggest homegrown star.

In the co-main event at UFC 40, Chuck Liddell knocked out Renato Sobral in three minutes, naturally leading into a fight between him and the light heavyweight champion. Ortiz, seeing the success of UFC 40, wanted more money for the fight, publicly reasoning that his friendship with Liddell (the two had trained together in the past and were White’s two major clients as a manager) was not worth his current pay. According to Ortiz, he attempted to get Liddell to band together with him for a higher payout, but Liddell was a company man.

Ortiz was the first major fighter to come out and attempt to strong-arm Zuffa so publicly. It would become a theme throughout his career. Each time, the UFC and White had great success convincing fans and many fighters that Ortiz was a whiner, a coward – fearing challengers like Liddell – and the bad guy. When White and Ortiz were supposed to have a boxing match in 2007, the UFC ran a television special on Spike TV for the bout that was very negative on Ortiz. Never before has a promoter had such resolve to emasculate one of its biggest money attractions. Whether coincidence or by cause, Ortiz’s drawing power sharply declined in fights following the Spike TV special.

Today, particularly since the UFC was purchased by WME-IMG last summer, fighters angling for more money and better payouts from the UFC is commonplace and not something that damages ones reputation. When Ortiz took his stand, UFC successfully cast him as the bad guy, which likely achieved its goal in slowing wage growth among its roster.

Ortiz returned for a title defense against Randy Couture, which he admits was due to him believing Couture, then 40, to be an easy payday. Prior to the fight, Ortiz injured his back, which turned into only the first in a string of injuries that hampered his performances and shortened his prime. Ortiz excusing losses with injuries eventually became a running joke, but there is no question that back, knee, and neck injuries in particular slowed him. Whether that had any effect on the result of the Couture fight is debatable. Couture ended the Ortiz era with a dominant performance, breaking open a new era that would be dominated by four major light heavyweights (Couture, Ortiz, Liddell, and Belfort) for the next few years.

Following the Couture loss, Ortiz finally met Chuck Liddell in the biggest fight UFC had promoted since Ortiz-Shamrock. The story of the sort-of friends (depending on whose version you believed), with the badass knockout brawler against the cowardly former champion that refused to allow him a title shot surpassed 100,000 buys and came a hair shy of the UFC 40 gate record. Liddell stopped Ortiz in the second round, but both saw meteoric rises in the following two years. Liddell won the light heavyweight championship from Couture, and Ortiz won five consecutive fights. Meanwhile, the promotion and both fighters’ popularity exploded due to The Ultimate Fighter television show and the UFC’s presence on Spike TV. At the end of 2006, they met again, with the same feud playing out to a much larger audience. This time, they set UFC pay-per-view – reported at both 1.05 million and 890,000 buys by different sources – and gate – $5.4 million – records. It was the peak of the second big wave of MMA in the US.

Ortiz eventually fought Vitor Belfort, winning a close split decision in the last fight of his UFC contract. According to Ortiz’s autobiography, he received offers from Pride and WFA, but neither deal had what he wanted. In the fall, he resigned with the UFC and was announced as a coach for season three of The Ultimate Fighter opposite his longtime rival, Ken Shamrock.

The first season of The Ultimate Fighter brought the company off the ledge and into a great place, but the third season took it to another level. Ortiz and Shamrock’s feud led to record ratings (to date, it is the second-highest rated season in series history behind the Kimbo-driven season 10) and eventually more records. Their rematch at UFC 61 in July 2006 recorded an estimated 775,000 buys, far higher than the record that had just been established two months prior. The result was never in question for ardent fans since Shamrock was well past his prime, but UFC at that time specialized in making large audiences believe uneven matches were just about 50/50. Since a controversial stoppage ended the match early in many fans’ eyes, UFC promoted a third fight that October on Spike TV. Ortiz crushed Shamrock again in what was then the most-viewed MMA fight in US history with 6.524 million viewers.

After 2006, injuries and age caught up with Ortiz. He was not a shot fighter, but he could not beat the division’s best. He went winless until 2011, when he toppled Ryan Bader in a shocking upset. For a moment, the victory revitalized Ortiz, but he was rushed back in one month later as a late replacement to fight Rashad Evans, one of the top three fighters in the division. Ortiz lost decisively, as he did again in December of the same year to Rogerio Nogueira. The injuries and losses led him to his first retirement, which he made official following a close loss to Forrest Griffin. Hours before what was to be his final fight, the UFC inducted him into their hall of fame.
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Bellator MMA’s “fun fights” approach is noticeably dissimilar to UFC’s. Whereas the UFC looks to build to the future with fights like Yair Rodriguez vs. BJ Penn, Bellator prefers to book for the now with aging legends battling other aging legends to pop a rating. The UFC’s approach leads to sad fights with decisive endings. Bellator’s approach leads to sad, sloppy fights, with puzzling finishes, but also leaves some room for happy endings.

By all accounts, Tito Ortiz approached his retirement match against Chael Sonnen like it was the fight of his life. Ortiz never transitioned well to his role as an elder statesman in MMA; he was much more effective as a brash youth getting a rise out of the establishment than the opposite, so there were plenty of goofy Tito moments leading into the heavily pushed fight with Sonnen. There was the potential for a similarly goofy end to his career – some fans surely prepared themselves for Ortiz to lose a decision and pin the blame on some absurd injury. Instead, they and Ortiz received an ending befitting of the impactful athlete he was in the first decade of his career.

After escaping a guillotine attempt early in the first round, Ortiz easily passed to mount and took Sonnen’s back. Once there, he got a rear-naked choke and although he didn’t have his arm under Sonnen’s chin, he squeezed with all his might and forced the submission.

The Los Angeles crowd, not far from where “The Huntington Beach Bad Boy” grew up, was ecstatic. Ortiz celebrated in the cage with his son.

Throughout his career, whenever Ortiz finished an opponent he launched into his gravedigger routine. After his peak, it became rarer and rarer to see, at one point going nearly five years between finishes. There it was again on Saturday, perhaps laying to rest one of the most important careers in MMA history on Ortiz’s own terms.

Dan Plunkett has covered MMA for 411Mania since 2008. You can reach him by email at [email protected] and follow him on Twitter @Dan_Plunkett.