CHAPTER THIRTEEN
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.
I had a chance to experience that whole side of professional wrestling as entertainment. It was fun and it kept me in front of the camera, which was the important thing…because nobody was telling me that they wanted me to fight again.
One night I had been watching a UFC event on TV and was feeling left out. All of a sudden, it was like I didn’t exist. I was feeling pretty sorry for myself. I already had too much to drink, but now I was ready to go out and party. I shouldn’t have been drinking and driving, but I had crazy thoughts in my head—I guess you could call them suicidal.
I was thinking about how cool it would be if I just crashed.
I hit the center divider. My car was launched into space and tore into a light pole on the other side of the street. The light pole went down, but the car kept going. It hit a wall and then it slid into a pine tree. The impact of the crash compressed the entire car on my legs. Luckily I had friends following behind me in another car, and they called for help.
There were chunks of my car everywhere, and blood was pumping out of me. The ambulance and the fire department showed up. It took forty-five minutes using the Jaws of Life to pry me out of the car. They took me to the hospital. Fortunately, it all looked a lot worse than it turned out to be.
I had some cuts and bruises, but I guess I just got lucky. I didn’t realize how lucky until later in the evening when I went back out to the wreckage to get some of my belongings out of the car. The tow truck driver was there. He said, “You don’t know how lucky you are. Most of the time when I come to an accident this bad, the driver is usually dead.”
When the tow truck driver told me that, I was stunned. I looked upon that accident as a sign.
I knew I had reached a point where I was being very careless with my life and that I really didn’t give a shit anymore.
A friend of mine drove me back to my home. Kristin was at the door when I showed up and she said, “Oh shit, you were fighting!” I told her that I totaled my car and almost died. Then I broke down and started crying uncontrollably. A lot of shit in my life came pouring out of me. That night Kristin and I talked about a lot of stuff. We both knew that our relationship had been over for a long time. Kristin wasn’t happy. I sure as hell wasn’t happy. I was an emotional wreck. All the guilt and sneaking around and lying had ground me down.
Kristin deserved a whole lot more than what I was giving her, and that became crystal clear the more we talked. I only had one thing to say to Kristin that made any sense.
I told her I wanted to start my life all over again.
KRISTIN ORTIZ
After a year apart I realized that Tito still loved Jacob and me in the best way he knows how. I knew he would die for us. All of a sudden we became friends again. I was past the hurt.