CHAPTER NINE
High on wins, I wanted a shot at the UFC title.
Yeah, I may have been a little arrogant. After all, I had only had three professional fights. But even at that point, I thought I was one of the best in the business. I wanted to take on the champ. I wanted Frank Shamrock.
And the trash talking had already begun.
We ran into each other at a UFC event, and I walked right up to him and told him that I would love to fight him and take his belt away. Frank said, “Yeah, whatever, kid. You never will.” All of a sudden the UFC gets in the middle of all our talk and says that there’s going to be a title fight.
People outside the business thought that fighters were making big money. But the reality was that when I signed the contract to fight Shamrock for the championship, I was getting $25,000 for the fight. And for fighters at that time, that was good money. But the money really wasn’t the most important thing to me. I fought for the love of fighting and for the attention that I never got as a kid.
I was stoked to be fighting for the title, and I immediately got into a real hard-core level of training. But I still didn’t understand what it meant to train on a professional level, and that training would have to be my job for the next three months. I was training as hard as I knew how. A little more than a month before the fight I thought,Well, I’ve been working my ass off. I think I’ll take a couple of days off.
So I went down to Mexico for a couple of days with a friend of mine to do some fishing. While I was there, I was also drinking a lot and smoking pot. It was still six weeks out from the fight with Shamrock, and I didn’t think it was going to hurt me. I came back and got right back into training. I felt I had prepared myself well for the fight.
This was around the time that my relationship with John began to get even more strained. I had never used steroids or performance-enhancing drugs of any kind and had no interest in doing so. I was a firm believer in developing my body naturally. But as the fight with Frank Shamrock got closer, John was encouraging me to take steroids and insisting that they would give me the edge in a fight with Shamrock. I kept saying no, and he was upset that I wouldn’t take them. Needless to say, our relationship at that point was not good.
The “There Can Only Be One Champion” fight between Frank Shamrock and me took place on September 24, 1999. I came into the fight thinking I was just going to bulldoze him. And I’d like to think that for the first three rounds I did.
When the fight started, I was dominating him, taking him down and beating him down. But by the fourth round my stamina just went out the door. I had been giving a hundred percent from the start and I just got fatigued. I had pushed and pushed and pushed, and then I didn’t have anything left. I think if I had relaxed a bit during the course of the fight I would have beaten him. But I was new to all this and had just decided to go hard the whole way.
It was during the Shamrock fight that I discovered that John had decided to get even with me for my perceived disrespect for him by hanging me out to dry. John was my cornerman, but during the fight, he never said a thing to me. He never told me how much time was left and he told everybody else in the corner to be quiet and not to say anything. He really left me to go out there and fight by myself.
Shamrock was a pro who had defended his title five times already, and he knew just how to take the wind out of me. In the fourth round, he caught me with a choke hold. I got out of it. Then he hit me in the back of the head and I couldn’t defend myself, so I tapped out.
Of course, I had a Frank Shamrock T-shirt all ready to go. I had met him a couple of months earlier and had him sign it.
And when he beat me, I put it on and walked around the ring in it. He had beaten me fair and square. But in some ways that loss was like a win for me because I came out of the fight realizing that in the future I would have to pace myself.
Losing that match brought me crashing back to earth. I just couldn’t believe I had lost. My trainers told me I had done a good job, but I was bummed. All I could think of was that I had lost my chance to be world champion.
The sad thing was that I decided to let John go after that fight. His pushing the steroids was part of the problem, but it basically boiled down to not being able to trust the guy anymore.
Right after the Shamrock fight, Saul Garcia and I also parted company. What it came down to was that Saul was in over his head. Yeah, he got me a couple of fights when I first started, but I was basically doing a lot of the work myself.
As far as I was concerned, Saul was making bad business decisions and costing me money. When I fought Frank Shamrock, I was supposed to get $25,000. I only got $10,000. After signing the contract, I found out that the UFC said they were cutting my fee and Saul didn’t have the balls to go up against them. When I saw that, I said this isn’t going to happen again.
The split was amicable at the beginning. But then I found out that Saul had gone out and made a DVD that said that he had made my career. He claimed that he was the one who told me to bleach my hair and to start wearing the T-shirts. The guy was just full of shit. He was telling nothing but lies, and I had to spend a lot of time in interviews disputing all the things he said.
Some good did actually come out of the fight with Shamrock, though. That fight put me on a course to my first non-fighting business venture.
After the fight a kid came up to me and asked if I had a T-shirt for sale that had my name on it. I told him I didn’t, but I thought about it afterward and it sounded like a pretty good idea. So I went home and got together with my brother Marty. He was raving about the punishment I had given Shamrock, and the word “punishment” kind of stuck in my head. I looked up the definition of the word and found that “to punish” meant to threaten or cause severe damage. So I got the idea to put the word “Punishment” on a T-shirt with TitoOrtiz.com under it. I kicked in $500 to get it going, and we printed the T-shirts on a silk-screen machine my brother Marty had in his garage. Kristin understood the business and marketing side of things, and she stepped in to help. I started selling T-shirts, and within the first year, we cleared quite a bit.
Not long after the shirts began selling, I decided to expand the line to include a version of the flame shorts I fought in. The first ones we made didn’t really look very good, but they sold. That was pretty much the moment Punishment Athletic Wear was born. I gave Kristin fifty-percent ownership in the company. I was doing my own thing, and the money I was making off the shirts and shorts was like icing on the cake.
After taking a couple of days off to wind down from the Shamrock fight, I went back to work at Spanky’s. As soon as I walked into the office, the boss asked me to have a seat. He said flat out, “I don’t think this job is for you.”
I said, “Fighting? I love fighting!”
He said “No, I mean working here. I think there’s something better for you out there.”
I thought I was being fired.
Then he said, “You do what you need to do to get your work in and I’ll pay for your rent and your cell phone, and give you a per diem for six months.” The only condition was that I had to put “Spanky’s” on my shorts and he even gave me extra money for that.
I got back into training full on. And there was only one thing I was training for—a rematch with Frank Shamrock. I wanted that rematch badly. So did the UFC. As it turned out, the only person who didn’t was Frank Shamrock.
Shamrock said the money wasn’t good enough for him to fight me. So he gave up his title and retired. That left the title vacant. I felt I would be in line to fight for it at some point, so I knew I’d better be in good shape when the call came. And I figured the best way to learn was from somebody who beat me, so I called Frank Shamrock and asked him if I could come up and train with him. He said sure.
I trained with him for a couple of weeks and I got to see what it took to be a top contender. He taught me a lot about cardio and the importance of rest and recovery time. I watched tapes of his fights and saw that he could be super dangerous.
Around that time I received a phone call from some people in the United Arab Emirates who were putting on something called the World Submissions Championships in Abu Dhabi. It was a competition in which no strikes were involved, just wrestling submissions. I was a big enough name that they invited me to compete, but they figured I wouldn’t do well because this match was just about wrestling and not about striking. What they didn’t realize was that I was good at submissions.
I also realized that there would be a time difference to overcome, so I changed my training schedule before I went overseas. Normally my workouts would start early, like around four in the morning. But before I went to Abu Dhabi I did all my training around midnight, which would allow me to adjust to the time change when I was there.
I went and took third in my weight and took fourth in the absolutes, which was all the weights combined. It was a confidence builder. I won four of my five fights against some really good fighters and I showed a lot of people that I could beat world-class fighters with submission holds rather than just going to the ground and pounding. None of this counted on my professional record, but I did end up making $16,000 in cash.
I had never been out of the country before, so being in the Middle East was a surreal experience for me. The people, the culture—I had never experienced anything like that in my life.
While I was in the Middle East I ran into this UFC matchmaker named Joe Silva, who had come over to check out fighters. He told me that the UFC wanted me to fight this guy named Wanderlei Silva.
I knew who Silva was, and he was a badass. He had this intimidating stare. The story going around was that a lot of guys didn’t want to fight him because they were afraid of him. He fought with the Pride organization in Japan, and he was from Brazil. Joe Silva told me that he thought I could beat him. He also said that this fight was for Shamrock’s vacant title and that if I wanted the fight, it was mine.
I had to think about it for a minute. For some reason, I wasn’t really sure if I wanted the fight. Then I said, “Fuck it, I’ll do it.” I signed for the fight and started training again.
I trained for four solid months, and this time I took it seriously. There were no drugs. I brought a lot of guys in to train with me, people like Chuck Liddell and John Lewis.
It was during this training period that Team Punishment was formed. It wasn’t really that big a deal. Chuck Liddell and I had been training together for a while, and we just decided one day that we needed a name for our team. One of my brothers suggested “Team Punishment,” and we got Ricco Rodriguez, John Lewis, and Rampage to join us.
Over the years, different people trained under the team name. They would be introduced as being from Team Punishment when they fought, but it has always been for training and social purposes more than anything else. It’s kind of like being in a gang without the bad stuff…except when Team Punishment members get in the Octagon.
But it was not as simple as all that. Trouble was right around the corner.
At that point that whole mess with that old fight warrant caught up with me.
Somebody at the UFC suggested that I go to Las Vegas for a couple of months and hide out. He said that I could use the excuse that I was going to Vegas to do some promotion for a UFC-Pride fight. But the reality was that there was a warrant out for my arrest. If I had stayed in Los Angeles and got pulled over for something stupid, all they had to do was run my name and I would be going to jail. So I went to Las Vegas and trained for a couple of months, and nobody found me. After a couple of months, I came back to Los Angeles, Kristin’s parents loaned me the money for the lawyer, and I dealt with it.
The fight with Wanderlei Silva took place on April 4, 2000, in Japan. This was my time to shine. I was not going to back down. I was ready to go to war. The fight was billed as UFC 25: Ultimate Japan 3. And from the opening bell, I was in control of the match.
I took him down and dominated on top. In the third round he did hit me with a punch that dropped me, but I got right back on my feet and took him down. At the end of the match, I had taken a five-round decision.
My victory shirt for that fight read: “I Just Killed an Axe Murderer.”
After a year and a half of professional fighting, I was now the lightweight champion of the world. I swear, when they announced that I had won, I had an out-of-body experience. I had come to realize that all the hard work and determination I had put into this sport had resulted in my becoming the best fighter in the world.
I thought,Wow! This is really happening!
JOYCE ROBLES
When I found out that Tito was fighting for a living, I was scared to death. I didn’t like the idea of anyone hitting my son.
When I came back from Japan, I slept with that belt for at least a month. I knew I had succeeded. I had worked hard and had gotten the ultimate prize.
It was at this point that Dana White came into my life.
One of my trainers at the time, John Lewis, had been training Dana White in jujitsu. Dana was a huge fan of the sport and had watched me fight a lot. John and Dana were talking one day, and the subject of who was managing me came up. By that time Saul and I had called it quits, and for all intents and purposes, I was managing myself. Dana wanted to know what he could do to get me to let him manage me.
Dana and I arranged a meeting. John introduced us, and we just started talking. He told me that he had worked with Floyd Mayweather Jr. and a lot of boxers, that he kind of knew the business, and that he thought he could help me out.
At that point I was a bit skeptical. I felt that anybody who talked to me about money was full of shit. I really didn’t know what to think. Then Dana called again and said, “I want to come down to Huntington Beach and sit down with you and do this deal.” He said he was signing Chuck Liddell as well and that he was anxious to bring me on board. I still wasn’t sure. But then a friend of mine whose opinion I respected, Wayne Harriman, said that Dana was a really good guy and that I should go with him.
So Dana flew down and came knocking on my door. He sat me down and asked me what I wanted to do with my future. Then he described how he was going to help me and basically promised me the world. I asked Kristin what she thought, and she said that it sounded like a good deal. So I signed up with Dana to manage me.
Now that I was world champion, there was a lot of press and media interest in me. And, of course, I loved the attention. But I don’t think Kristin did.
I remember one night we had gone to see a show at the House of Blues in Hollywood. After the show I was surrounded by all kinds of people wanting to get autographs, have pictures taken, and do interviews. Kristin was standing off to the side, essentially being ignored by everybody, including me. Every once in a while she’d come up to me and say, “Let’s go home and go to bed.” But I would stay until everybody that had come up to me had been taken care of. I’ve always been an outgoing kind of person, and when people are giving you all this attention, you want to suck up as much of it as possible—at any cost.
KRISTIN ORTIZ
There were so many incidents like that night at the House of Blues. Fans tended to look at Tito like he was God and not a real person. And nobody knew who I was. I was always getting knocked over and pushed out of the way. That’s just the way people are when they see somebody like Tito. It was exhausting being around him in public because he always had to be on.
Kristin was helping me out quite a bit; she was handling a lot of my business and helping to pay taxes. And I needed the help because I wasn’t making a lot of money, despite the fact that I was a champion. Even though Ultimate Fighting was evolving and reaching more and more people, the public perception was that it was a barbaric sport, stuck in the Dark Ages. Ultimate Fighters were considered crazy guys who did crazy shit.
Luckily my manager, Dana White, knew how to negotiate. He knew how to push without pushing too hard, and he wouldn’t budge on the important deal points. When it all came down, I had a great new contract, which was surprising, considering there wasn’t any pay-per-view back then and UFC merchandising was almost nonexistent. Before Dana, I was making maybe $50,000 tops for a fight. With my new contract, I was making $80,000 to $100,000 per fight.
Less than a year after Dana took over as my manager, there was a big change in the UFC.
The Fertitta brothers had been following the organization’s progress for a while and they recognized its potential—potential that was not being realized with Bob Meyerwitz at the helm. Bob was tired of the grind and was ready to sell, so the Fertittas bought the UFC from him for $4 million and then put about $25 million into the organization.
The impact on the fighters and the UFC was immediate. I was bound by my existing contract, but now I was flying in Learjets and staying in presidential suites…and loving every minute of it.
And, as always, I slipped right back into my crazy ways after winning the championship—running around, disappearing for days on end, and partying real hard, which was putting a real strain on Kristin and on our relationship.
We had been together for quite a while, and Kristin really didn’t want to do the single thing anymore. So she gave me a choice: either marry her or leave her. I didn’t want to lose Kristin because she was a really good girl and I cared about her deeply. But we were arguing a lot more and it was taking a toll on me. All the same, I still went out and bought a ring, and I was getting ready to take that step.
KRISTIN ORTIZ
Our relationship was on the rocks. There were all these red flags that Tito was not being faithful, but I was young and naïve and I didn’t want to believe it. Even if he was cheating, I didn’t want to lose my best friend and so I didn’t really want to know. He was always a good liar and I believed him.
One night I came home and Kristin started in on me. She was yelling and crying and we really got into it. And then, right in the middle of this wicked fight, I looked at Kristin and thought,I really love this girl. All of a sudden it just came out. I went to the bathroom and came out with the ring.
I said, “Will you marry me?”
And just like that, we were engaged.