This is gonna hurt, p.11
This Is Gonna Hurt, page 11
The UFC wanted me to fight Chuck Liddell for my next title defense. I was all for it, but I knew that the UFC was making a shitload of money off the fights, and I wasn’t about to agree to the fight for a measly $160,000. I wanted Chuck to band together with me and hold out for more money for the fight.
But Chuck folded. He said that all he cared about was winning the championship and that he would fight for whatever amount the UFC was offering. So the fight didn’t happen because I sure as hell wasn’t going to settle for less than what I thought I deserved. So instead Liddell fought Randy Couture for what the UFC would claim was a fight to determine the interim champion.
I was pissed off. I felt like I had been betrayed. I felt like everything I had worked so hard for had just been thrown out the window. The UFC had just taken my title away.
Couture beat Liddell and all of a sudden I was being forced to fight Couture to maintain my title. Couture was forty-one years old at the time, and I had it in my heart that I was not going to lose to him. So I put my problems with the UFC and all the drama with Kristin and Heather out of my head, and made a conscious decision not to let any of it impact my performance.
Quite simply, I thought I was going to crush him. He was an older man. I really didn’t respect him at all. I thought this was going to be an easy fight.
I went up to Big Bear and began training three months before the fight. Right in the middle of training I began to feel this extreme pain in my back. Doctors examined me and found that I had a bulging disk in my back. I was bedridden for four days and was given pills that would help with the inflammation of the disk. I did boxing, weight training, jujitsu, and running. But because of the disk I could not wrestle, and with somebody like Couture, you’ve got to wrestle.
The fight with Randy Couture took place September 25, 2003, and was billed as UFC 44: Undisputed. I was in as good shape as I could possibly be considering my back problems. But it wasn’t good enough.
Couture dominated every round, and every round I dug a deeper hole for myself. I was trying to knock him out and he simply outwrestled me. He won in a five-round decision.
That was the first time I lost a fight in six years. To me it was like a loved one dying. It was tough trying to swallow that loss. To lose to Couture, well, it just hurt too much.
When I came home, Kristin could tell the difference. I certainly couldn’t talk to Heather about it. I was hard on myself for two solid months. I cried all the time. I did a lot of drinking to kill my sorrows. I was very depressed. It was hard to lose a championship that I had held for four years. All of a sudden it seemed like everything was ripped out from under me.
Including my relationship with the UFC.
All of a sudden the UFC and, in particular, its president and my former manager, Dana White, didn’t care about me anymore because now I wasn’t the champion. They didn’t like the fact that I was always asking for a bigger piece of the pay-per-view money and more money in general. I had a contract with the UFC that would end after the next three fights. And I was prepared to honor that contract.
Even though we were at odds, the UFC was smart enough to realize that I was still a major draw and they were quick to schedule another fight with me, the fight everybody had wanted to see. The fight with Chuck Liddell.
I was doing a lot of my training in the Los Angeles area and would only go up to Big Bear for the last six weeks. That was always my normal routine, but things were pretty intense between me and Kristin around the house, and being in Big Bear became a much-needed escape. Those kinds of distractions were the last thing I needed when I was preparing for a fight.
KRISTIN ORTIZ
Over the course of the next couple of years, things got worse. I was feeling real hatred for Tito. I just remember being fed up. I felt I either had to get out now before Jacob got older and got his heart broken or I had to stay in the relationship. I felt strongly that I didn’t want Jacob to grow up thinking that it was okay to treat women the way Tito was treating me.
It was like the last bit of love was slowly draining out of my marriage to Kristin. I continued to fool around. There really wasn’t much left for us to say. We knew we both loved our son, and that was probably the only thing that was keeping us together.
But I think we both realized that Jacob was getting old enough to sense that his parents weren’t happy, and that’s no way for a kid to grow up. So I decided to try therapy for a second time. Seeing a psychiatrist while I was training for a fight was probably not the best idea. Being in therapy made me feel very soft. I would come out of the sessions feeling very weak and emotional—not the best way to feel when trying to build up a sufficient level of hostility for a fight.
Prior to the Liddell fight I received another acting offer in the filmThe Crow: Wicked Prayer . It was a step up from what I did inCradle 2 the Grave . I played this real nasty character called Famine. I didn’t think much of the script, but I learned a lot from the actors, especially Danny Trejo, who told me that as an actor I would spend more time waiting to act than actually acting. The film was not a huge success on any level, but it taught me a bit more about the craft, and acting was something I could see doing in the future.
The Liddell situation had not changed. He was still a good friend, but he didn’t care about holding out for the money we deserved. I felt like he had sold out, but he was going to fight to be the best, and I couldn’t look down on him for that. After all, you have to fight the best to be the best.
The fight with Chuck was simply billed as UFC 47: It’s On and was held on May 2, 2004. He was dominating me in the first round. I was kind of holding my own, but I couldn’t take him down. In the second round, he went to throw a punch just as I was throwing a punch and his thumb got me in the eye. I stepped back, wiped my eye, and couldn’t see a thing. I managed to block about six shots and then the next four connected and he dropped me. The referee stepped in and stopped it.
I lost.
In the meantime my relationship with Kristin was just about shot. She had chosen to ignore my affairs for a while, but I wasn’t making any attempts to hide Heather from her anymore.
On one occasion I went to Calgary, Canada, with a friend of mine named Damian. I probably told Kristin that it was business related, but I was really just looking for an excuse to get out of town and party a little bit. Damian and I went to a strip club and brought some chicks back to our room. When I got home, Kristin was going through my bags and she found a condom. I told her it wasn’t mine. I told her that I had put all my clothes in a drawer and that Damian must have dropped it in there. She didn’t believe me for a second.
The arguments became more and more intense between us until the relationship finally came to an end.
Kristin smokes, and I just hate people who smoke. She quit when she got pregnant, but when Jacob was born she started smoking again. One day, I had just gotten home from training and I had my foot in an ice bucket. We were arguing back and forth, and one of the things we were arguing about was her smoking. At one point I said, “Well, at least Heather doesn’t fucking smoke!” Kristin wound up and hit me real hard across the face.
I looked up at her and thought,I should punch this bitch in her fucking face.
But I’ve never hit a woman in my life. Instead I took my foot out of the ice bucket and tossed the water on her. She was soaked from head to toe. I got up, said I was done, and walked out.
KRISTIN ORTIZ
I remember the day it was finally over. We started screaming at each other. All I could think of at that point was,He doesn’t like us, he doesn’t want to be here.That’s when I hit him in the face and he threw the water at me. Then he left.
To be honest, I was relieved, and my guess was that Kristin was, too. Our relationship hadn’t been working for a long time. She would always be a part of my life, personally and professionally. She was good at handling my business, and I wasn’t going to be one of those guys who splits with his woman and leaves her with nothing. Kristin would always be taken care of.
KRISTIN ORTIZ
A week after Tito walked out, we sat down and talked. We realized that we had to separate. He insisted that he would cover things financially and take care of all the bills. Later on I would realize that this was his way of taking care of the guilt he was feeling about the end of the relationship.
JOYCE ROBLES
It broke my heart when Kristin and Tito broke up. I thought they were going to be together forever.
We were not separated at that point, but we were essentially living two separate lives. And I no longer had to make any pretense about cheating.
For the next year and a half I would date a lot of different chicks. I began to pull away from Heather. I know for a fact that she was with other guys when I wasn’t with her. When we were together it was only about the sex. I never for a moment saw any kind of real future with Heather.
I went through a lot of shit over the next few months. Even though Kristin and I had for all intents and purposes split up, we were still arguing. Right in the middle of all that, the UFC called to tell me they wanted me to fight Patrick Côté.
This was Côté’s first UFC fight, and with all the experience I had it seemed like a pretty easy fight. But with all the personal distractions in my life and the fact that I had suffered back-to-back losses, I actually had more to lose, so this fight was a bit of a risk.
There were just too many distractions in Los Angeles and I really didn’t feel like going up to Big Bear, so I packed all my stuff and moved to Las Vegas to train. While I was in Vegas, I decided to switch trainers. My longtime trainer wasn’t too happy with my decision, but I hooked up with another trainer, Master Toddy, and we worked well together.
Côté definitely put up a tougher fight than I expected. In the first round he hit me with a solid right that knocked me to my knees. Trading punches with him was going to be tougher than I thought. I stepped up the elbow and forearm smashes. It was more of the same in the second round—a lot of punches. By the third round I was definitely trying to ground and pound rather than beat him with a submission. But he hung in there.
It was a real tough fight. I had to hand it to Côté—he put up quite a battle. But I felt I had beaten him. I ended up winning a unanimous decision against him. It was not my best fight, but it was a win. I celebrated for a while like I usually did after a fight, but then there were some realities I had to deal with.
Now, all of a sudden, I had no trainer, my personal life was a mess, and I was right in the middle of trying to renegotiate a new contract with the UFC without a manager.
Life had been better.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Crash and Burn
The last fight on my contract with the UFC was coming up soon. They were after me to re-sign and I refused.
I was not about to renegotiate at that time, because they were offering me shit—worse than my previous contract. They knew as well as I did that if I won the last fight on my contract, I would be holding all the cards. They also knew how important I was to the growth of the UFC.
I had been a champion for four years, and the UFC pushed me out in front and used me as the poster boy for the organization. I had the right image, the charisma, all the things they wanted to see in one of their fighters. I was articulate. I spoke my mind. I did promotion. I did charity work. I was the star they wanted to help push their sport. And now they were giving me shit.
After the Côté fight, I was on my own. I had no trainer. I had pretty much had it with my management. Kristin and I were barely speaking. So I moved to Huntington Beach and got an apartment with a friend of mine. And then the UFC announced that my last fight on my current contract would be with Vitor Belfort.
Belfort was a good fighter. He was a former lightweight champion. And as it always seemed to be, I needed the money from this fight very badly. My contract at the time indicated that I would get fifty percent of my purse if I showed up and fifty percent if I won the match. So if I lost the Belfort fight, I stood to lose eighty grand.
Needless to say, I was not going to lose that fight.
The only problem was that three months before the fight I had not done any training and still didn’t have a trainer. At the suggestion of one of my friends, I called up a trainer named Saul Soliz and asked him if he would step in and train me. He said he would love to do it.
We went up to Big Bear about six weeks before the fight. Big Bear was a miserable place to train at that time of year. There was a major snowfall, and everything was frozen. We had to drive all over the place just to find a place for me to run. It was hell.
But by the end of those six weeks I felt I was ready for Belfort.
The fight was held on February 6, 2005. It was called UFC 51: Super Saturday. I had come into the arena carrying both the American and Mexican flags to honor my mixed-race heritage. The crowd was going crazy. My recent losses had clearly not diminished my support among the fans.
All I can say is that Belfort and I had a real good scramble.
I started the match by taking him down. Then we went back and forth for a long time. At one point he hit me with a left hook and broke my nose. I scrambled out and took him down. I was on top of him and there was blood streaming out of my nose and all over him.
I was thinking,Holy shit! I’d better keep hitting him before the referee stops this thing. So I kept punching him and then the round was finally over. In the corner after the first round my cut man was working on me, wiping the blood off and checking on the break. He said it wasn’t that bad. I went out and dominated the second round. In the third round I finally gassed him out. He had nothing left, and I ended up winning a three-round split decision.
After the fight ended I put on my now customary victory shirt. But this one was different. Rather than saying something derogatory about the fighter I had just beaten, it read: “Bring Home Our Troops!” Then I picked up the flags I had come into the arena with and ran to the top of the balcony, waving the flags over my head as the crowd went nuts.
I don’t remember making a conscious effort to begin to clean up my image. I’d like to think that what I did that night was just my way of supporting the troops. But however people took it, they sure noticed.
I was on top, and everything was in my hands now. Unfortunately the UFC did not get the message.
After that fight, we got down to some serious contract negotiations. I felt that I could negotiate my own contract, so I went in without anybody representing me. I really didn’t need any help because I knew exactly what I wanted. But as it turned out, the UFC and Dana White were very mean and disrespectful toward me.
They took me off the UFC website completely. They blurred out anything on the website or advertisements that mentioned Punishment. I was taken out of all their commercials. It seemed as if their answer to my asking for a fair contract was to pretty much wipe me out of UFC history. Then things got really nasty.
Dana turned into a complete and utter asshole.
He would say in interviews, “I made Tito Ortiz and I’ll make him forgotten.” The whole situation seemed to go from bad to worse. Dana was playing hardball, but Lorenzo Fertitta made it clear that the UFC did not want to lose me. And so the negotiations dragged on, not really getting anywhere.
And I was faced with fighting a billion-dollar company.
Word had traveled fast that my contract with the UFC was up, and I began getting offers from competing organizations. Pride out of Japan made an offer for a six-fight deal, but it was essentially the same money I was being offered by the UFC. Besides, the competition was a lot stiffer with Pride and there was a good chance that I would be fighting out of my weight division, so I turned it down.
The WFA (Wrestling Federation of America) was offering me what I wanted. But if I was going to basically help build the company from the ground up, I wanted a piece of the company, which they were not willing to give me.
Finally I decided that it was time to take the biggest chance of my career—I forced the UFC’s hand. I said, “Okay, I’ll sit out and we’ll see how you guys do without me.”
My walking away from the UFC was big news. The press was all over it. The fans seemed to like the idea of my going up against the UFC, and that made me feel kind of good.
But I was smart enough to realize that if I sat out and did absolutely nothing, people would begin to forget about me. That happened a lot to fighters—once they stopped fighting, they were forgotten. That wasn’t going to happen to me. I hired a publicist and began to do other things to keep my name out there.
For the next year I was not involved in mixed martial arts with the UFC or any other fighting organization. But that did not mean I wasn’t busy. I did some talk shows and some other things for the publicity. I did a series of fighting technique seminars that were pretty much paying the bills at that point.
In May 2005, I sort of got back into the fighting game when I signed an agreement to appear with Total Nonstop Action Wrestling. But not as a fighter—at least, not directly.
On May 15, 2005, under the name Hard Justice Ortiz, I served as a special guest referee in the NWA (National Wrestling Alliance) World Heavyweight Championship between Jeff Jarrett and A. J. Styles. At one point in the match, Jarrett shoved me and I knocked him out, which allowed Styles to win the fight. I refereed a second match in October.
