CHAPTER SEVEN
My stepfather’s position was that I was eighteen, I had caused too much fucking trouble in the house, and it was time for me to be a man and stand on my own two feet. And you know what? His attitude didn’t really surprise me. I wasn’t doing much around the house except getting high and getting into trouble.
I had to agree with him that it was time for me to go.
JOYCE ROBLES
I was crying the day Tito packed his things. I told him he could stay as long as he was in school. He said, “I don’t want to be in this man’s house.” I think in Tito’s mind, he felt alienated from me as well. For a long time after that I felt that Tito hated me.
So I moved in with my brother Marty and his girlfriend. I agreed to pay him $200 a month in rent and I used the $800 my mother gave me to buy a car. So I had a place to stay and a car to drive around. All I could think at that point was, “Now what?”
For a while I continued to think about college. Paul Herrera had gone off to Ocean View to teach, and I had thought about hooking up with him again. But I didn’t have the money to go out there and I couldn’t get a wrestling scholarship because they were looking at guys who had done a lot better than me. And I knew I didn’t have the grades to get into a decent college.
So I decided to just take whatever job I could get. I did a little bit of construction, but I didn’t like it that much. Then I got a job with Allied Moving Services, which was hard work. I was working sixteen-to eighteen-hour days on an almost daily basis. It was at that point that I started doing methamphetamine in order to stay up and be able to work longer days.
It was also around that time that I began dealing drugs.
I had never really thought about dealing drugs before. Using drugs? Sure, every chance I had. Dealing was a different story. It was like stepping over a line that I wasn’t sure I wanted to cross.
But one day somebody turned me on to some pot and I asked him if he could turn me on to some more because I knew a lot of people who were always looking to score. Then people started asking for meth and that’s when I started dealing meth.
My conscience would bother me sometimes. There were times when I thought I was going down the same road as my parents. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I really didn’t care. I was making money and taking care of business. And I was always very careful and very sharp when I was dealing. Never came close to getting caught. That went on for about a year. I was working, dealing, and once in a while I would steal food or things that I could sell.
For a while I worked as a bouncer at a club called Mazzotti’s. Mazzotti’s was a pretty easy gig for the most part, just checking IDs and monitoring the line and letting people go in and out. Normally, things at the club were pretty cool, but there were those times when stuff just happened.
One night this guy came to the front of the line. You could tell he really didn’t know anybody, but he acted like he did. And he just walked right past me. I stopped him and said, “Hold on, man! There’s a line here.”
He said, “I don’t wait in any lines.”
My response was, “I don’t know you. You wait in line.”
He said, “Whatever,” and then tried to walk past me.
I smacked him down and got him in a front headlock, picked him up off his feet, walked him out the door, and threw him into the street. This guy deserved to be made an example of and, at age nineteen, I was very much into making an example of people and putting them in their place.
Meanwhile, wrestling had gone out the window. I wasn’t training anymore—there didn’t seem to be any reason to.
It was around that time that I reconnected with Kristin.
We ran into each other at a house party one night and started talking. Not too long after that we started hanging out regularly. But just as friends. It went on like that for about a year. Then in 1995 we went to the movies to seeInterview with a Vampire . Right in the middle of the movie I started getting real nervous. I was thinking,Holy shit! We’re on a date right now. We went back to her apartment afterward and fooled around, but we didn’t have sex. We both knew that we were falling in love. We were with each other every single day after that.
Everything about being with Kristin just felt right. She came from a really good family. Her parents were straitlaced. Her father was a CEO at a hospital and her mother was Mary Poppins. I felt that Kristin might have been acting out a lot because of her family background.
Although we were always together, we would not live together until 1996. Her parents were paying for her apartment. I still had to worry about coming up with rent money. I was still working at Allied Moving Services and dealing and she was working at a sandwich shop. We were both partying a lot. I still had no direction and no clue about what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. But I was in a serious relationship for the first time in my life with somebody I loved. That felt good.
And everywhere we turned in our Huntington Beach neighborhood, there seemed to be music. Hard-core music.
I had always been into punk and the really heavy hardcore and metal. When I was in high school I would always have songs by the likes of White Zombie and Pantera blasting in the background when I was practicing my wrestling moves.
There was this band that used to practice near Huntington Beach that everybody said was fucking good called KoRn. One day Kristin and I grabbed our fake IDs and went to the Club 5902 to hear them play. We were standing in line when all of a sudden Reggie, a guy from my block, walked by. I yelled out his name and he turned around. We started talking and we told him that we were there to see KoRn. Reggie said, “KoRn is my band. I’m the bass player.” He got us right in.
The band started playing and a mosh pit immediately formed. I was right in the middle of it, knocking people down. I got real tight with the band after that and we would show up at their gigs at places like the Whisky or Fullerton College. The guys in KoRn were all party guys and we would always party together. Then they got real big and next thing you know they were driving around in BMWs and Mercedes. I was real impressed by their success. It was my first contact with people who had gone from nothing to being millionaires with lots of money and big cars. I wanted to know how I could get all that.
Kristin and I continued to make ends meet. I had this feeling that somehow I wanted the spotlight. And I knew that it wasn’t going to happen by moving furniture and dealing drugs.
KRISTIN ORTIZ
At first I didn’t know that Tito was doing drugs and involved in illegal activities. I came from a good family, and I guess I was kind of naïve. I always liked the bad boy. Maybe I just tried to avoid knowing. But I learned about six months into our relationship when Tito borrowed my car to go get me a birthday present. When he came back to the house he had this huge bubble-gum machine with him. I realized then that he might have stolen it. The next day my mom got a phone call from the Huntington Beach police department. A notebook of mine had fallen out of the car at the restaurant where he had stolen the bubble-gum machine. My mom was so angry that she grabbed Tito by the ear, made him return the bubble-gum machine, and then made him turn himself in to the police. He was charged with a felony and spent two weeks in jail.
Later that year I was in a bar when I ran into Paul Herrera. We started talking and catching up on old times. He wanted to know what I was doing and asked me if I ever thought about wrestling again.
I told him I would love to but I would have no way of paying for it. He said, “I’ll tell you what. I can guarantee you we can get you some financial aid. You’ve been on your own for the past two years and supporting yourself. And being Mexican, that should help you out a bit. I’ll call Raoul Duarte, who is the wrestling coach over at Golden West College, and we’ll see what we can do. Why don’t you come down to the college tomorrow and meet with him.”
I told Paul that I was working the next day and couldn’t make it.
Paul just looked at me for a second and then said, “Well, take your choice. What do you want to do?” I went home that night and went to bed, but I couldn’t sleep. I stayed up all night thinking about what Paul had said. I got up the next morning, looked in the bathroom mirror, and I didn’t recognize myself.
I was six foot two, one hundred eighty pounds, and I was out of shape. I had black circles under my eyes, pimples all over my face. I looked like a drug addict. It was all the meth and the alcohol. I really didn’t know the person who was staring back at me. At that moment I had a reality check.
I called my boss Monday morning and I told him that I couldn’t come in that day.
“What do you mean you can’t come in today?” he yelled. “We need you here. We don’t have an ass to fill your spot.” I told him that I had to talk to some people at school, that I might have an opportunity for a scholarship. My boss said, “You don’t come in today, don’t worry about coming in again, you’ll be fired.”
“In that case I quit,” I said, and hung up the phone.
So I went down to the school and walked into Raoul Duarte’s office. We talked for a while and I told him I wanted to see what we could do about getting me into school. We went down to the financial aid office and pretty soon I had financial aid that was paying for my tuition, my books, and part of my rent. All of a sudden I had another chance to come back and wrestle.
I started at Golden West College in the fall of 1995. I moved to a place that was closer to school. My major was physical education and my minor was special education. At that point I wanted to be a teacher. I thought it would be cool to be able to give something back to kids.
When I first got to school, I knew I wanted to stick with it and make it work. Kristin was totally in my corner. She enrolled as well, and we ended up taking some classes together. She would pat me on the back and support me. And it was working. I was doing my homework. I was showing up for school every day. Once in a while I would be late, but most of the time, I was on time.
I like to think that I was using the opportunity to learn some things rather than just use college as an excuse to wrestle. Looking back, it was like I was taking classes that I sensed would help me at some point in the future. The big thing for me was the speech classes I took. Those classes taught me how to be comfortable speaking in front of large groups. I learned that if I could engage people in a way that made sense to them, then they would listen and then, hopefully, the next time they would understand.
KRISTIN ORTIZ
That first year in Golden West was great. We went to school together, we even took a couple of classes together. I would help him with his homework. For the first time in his life, Tito was focused on school.
I was real excited the first day I showed up for wrestling practice. So was the coach. Until he saw the monitoring band around my ankle. At first the other wrestlers thought it was some kind of jewelry. It was really the result of my latest brush with the law.
Shortly before I started at Golden West College, I was arrested for burglary. A friend and I had gotten drunk one night and decided to go hit some cars for stereos. This time we got caught. I was given five days in the Orange County Jail, which I served without any problems, and then was given thirty days of house arrest. I couldn’t go more than a hundred yards from my house unless it was to go to school or wrestling. Kristin was pissed. She really busted my chops on that one. She kind of understood, given my upbringing, but boy, was she mad at me for jeopardizing my chance at having a future.
The coach had no complaints once he saw me wrestle. I would cover the ankle monitor with a protective pad during practice. I actually shorted the monitor out one time because of all the sweat getting into it and it had to be replaced.
Once I started wrestling, I began to do things that pointed to the beginning of the larger-than-life Tito Ortiz. I started dying my hair a different color before each tournament. I did that just because I wanted to, but I found out that people who didn’t normally go to wrestling tournaments started showing up for no other reason than to see what color my hair was that week.
I was awesome that first year. I did well in the state and regional meets and had the most pins. I went undefeated and I won the state title. It was hard work, but I really dedicated myself.
To the point where I almost killed myself.
At one point during the season, I had to drop down from my walking-around weight of 205. So I started running. I ran for days trying to get that weight off. One day I was out running and I told myself, “I can’t run anymore.” I collapsed in front of a Taco Bell and just lay there. I called Kristin to come and pick me up. She pulled up and just stared at me laying on the ground.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
I was fine, but losing that weight was such a hard cut that I decided that whatever my walking-around weight was, it was going to be the weight I would wrestle at from now on.
Although I put a lot of my energy into the sport, the reality was that I had no real interest in pursuing it professionally at that point. My plan was to get my degree in physical education and work as a wrestling coach and as a special education teacher. During my first year at Golden West, I received a phone call from a friend of mine who was a wrestling coach at Marina High School. He wanted to know if I was interested in being his assistant. Since my career was going in that direction, it seemed like a way to get my foot in the door.
I was passionate about working with those kids and making them better both as wrestlers and as people. I was only a bit older, so they could relate to me. I was their confidant; if they had problems with girlfriends or things at home, they would come to me. It was funny, the first person to ever give me a bloody nose in a wrestling ring was one of those Marina High kids.
Around that time I got hooked on this television program calledUltimate Fighting Championship. It was like a combination of boxing, martial arts, and street fighting. I was amazed at what I was seeing. The stuff was crazy, and the guys who were doing it had to be nuts. Ultimate fighting, or, as it’s sometimes called, mixed martial arts, was in its infancy at that point. Not a lot of people knew about it compared to mainstream boxing or professional wrestling, and a lot of people put it down as being a barbaric blood sport. All I knew was that I was fascinated.
I became even more interested the day I was watching a UFC fight on television when all of a sudden I thought,Damn, that guy looks familiar. It was Jerry Bohlander. All I could think of was,I manhandled that guy in high school and now he’s doing this stuff?
Not long after wrestling season, Paul Herrera got ahold of me and said there was this Ultimate Fighting guy named Tank Abbott who was looking for somebody to train with and would I be interested? Paul suggested that since I was doing so well in college, I might be interested in giving mixed martial arts a try.
I hadn’t really given much thought to the idea. I was doing well in the amateur wrestling ranks. But I wasn’t planning on turning pro—nor was I being asked to—so I figured as long as this guy Tank didn’t hurt me, I guess I could train with him. So I went and worked with him for a few weeks.
At the time I thought Tank was a pretty cool guy. I was his wrestling partner and that was it. I didn’t put on the gloves and spar with him. We just did jujitsu and wrestling, so I didn’t have to worry about throwing punches and kicks. He really didn’t take too well to the wrestling part of mixed martial arts. I was taking him down at will and he was getting frustrated. Wrestling was his weakness, and he took what I was trying to teach him grudgingly.
But he taught me a lot about molding the persona of a fighter. He taught me that if you talk the smack, when it comes down to fight time, it doesn’t matter if you win or lose. You talk the smack to make people either love you or hate you. Once they love you or hate you, then they’ll talk about you. If they stop talking about you, then you’ve got problems.
I had a good time with Tank and worked with him through the summer. Then I went back to school in the fall of 1996. I had another good season, and I went on to win the state title again.
Then in March of 1997, I got a call from Tank Abbott. He wanted to know if I wanted to fight on an Ultimate Fighting Championship card. At first I wasn’t sure. I knew how to wrestle and to street fight a little bit. But I had never done anything with punches and elbows before.
The owner of UFC at the time was a guy named Bob Meyerwitz. The events were typically selling out ten-thousand-seat arenas, and the pay-per-view shows were typically getting a half-million buys, which was not too shabby.
The organization seemed to be coming into its own slowly but surely. But then Bob got a little arrogant and told Ted Turner that he was going to be the biggest thing in sports and that he didn’t care if Turner carried the show on cable or not. Turner’s response was, “Okay, we’re going to stop you.” And since UFC basically didn’t have any rules at the time, it became an easy target. Senator John McCain started speaking out against it and pretty soon UFC was off the bigger cable channels and regulated to basic channels. But even though I knew enough about the history of the organization to know that it was on a downhill slide by that time, I was still interested in getting involved.
They approached me to fight as an amateur, which was the only way I would even consider fighting. I was on a scholarship for wrestling. I would’ve lost that if I had fought for money. So as long as I could fight as an amateur, I thought I’d give it a shot.
I started training with Tank Abbott late in 1997. Training for my first fight took six months. We would practice wrestling and jujitsu, we’d do a little bit of sparring like boxers do, and we’d run and lift weights. It was hard work, but I picked up on it really quickly.
In a sense I had become Tank Jr. But as we continued to train, I found that there were some definite differences between us. I brought the hard training and the work ethic to the relationship. I worked my butt off, but Tank was always looking for the easy way out. He partied all the time. Tank’s attitude was always: “I’m going to fight and kick people’s asses, then go out and get drunk, and then go fight some more.” He was a fighter; he was no martial artist. His style was that of a bar brawler.
A lot of people who have followed my career think that it began with the UFC. But they’re wrong. I just haven’t talked about the very first fight I had until now. It wasn’t really a legal, sanctioned fight, and it does not count on my professional record, but here it is…
A few weeks before my UFC debut, I accepted an offer by a promoter named Larry Landis to fight this jujitsu guy in a high school gym in Rosemead, California. I took the fight as kind of checkpoint: I figured if I was going to fight in the UFC, I’d better see what I had at that point. The fight went to a draw—the main reason being that I was not real good at submissions back then and these jujitsu guys could take a pounding really well. But I can tell you that I gave this guy one of the worst beatings that he’d ever had in his life. And after that fight, I knew I was ready.
The first time I fought in an Ultimate Fighting Championship event was on May 30, 1997. The event was called UFC 13: The Ultimate Force and I was fighting for Team Tank. When I entered the arena that night, I didn’t really know what to expect. There were about ten thousand screaming people in the stands, and the atmosphere of the place was just crazy. At that point, people saw UFC fights as human cockfights with no rules and no time limits. But there were rules, and each fight consisted of one fifteen-minute round.
I remember climbing into the ring and pacing back and forth in the corner of the Octagon. I was thinking,Holy shit! I’m here! Don’t make a mistake.
The guy I was fighting that night was Wes Albritton. Wes had a fifth-degree black belt in karate but no wrestling experience. The way the fight was promoted, Wes was on the striking side of the sport and I was on the grappling side of it.
The fight lasted twenty-two seconds. I remember the bell ringing and I immediately got into a clinch. I grabbed a double underhook on him, body locked him, and threw him to the ground. Then I sat on his chest and started laying in punches. I won with a technical knockout for strikes.
I was pumped. For me, it was a competition; I was competing to see who was the better man. That’s how I felt about it. The experience was really cool. Since it was on television, all my friends got to see me beating somebody up and I wasn’t getting in trouble for doing it. I was real pumped when we went back to the dressing room. And then I found out that I was going to have to fight again!
It turns out that one of the four guys who was supposed to move on to the next round had gotten injured. I had been named his alternate, so before I could catch my breath, they put me back in and I was fighting in the finals.
When I got back into the ring later that night, I was facing this guy named Guy Mezger. I remember walking back out and thinking,Oh shit! Who is this guy? Mezger was a pro. He had been fighting out of Japan for a time and he had championship credentials. I was still pumped from my first match, and my feeling going into this fight was that I was going to hit him real hard and get this thing over with.
The fight started and I was dominating him. I had him in the position to cradle and I was kneeing him in the head. Suddenly the referee stepped in and stopped it. Mezger was bleeding, but at that time, the UFC never stopped a fight for bleeding. Unfortunately, the perception of Team Tank was that we were all thug guys who talked shit and started trouble. And because I was on Team Tank, the referee automatically didn’t like me much.
So he stopped the match, checked the cut, and then restarted the match. Mezger threw a punch and hit me. I stepped back and took a shot at him, but when I did that I left my neck exposed. He got a choke on me, pulled on it, and fell on his back.
I tried to pull out, but I didn’t know how. I was just too inexperienced—I didn’t really know how to train in a professional way. I was new to the fighting techniques and just about everything connected to the sport.
All of a sudden I couldn’t breathe anymore. I tapped. The match was over. I lost.
I was so pissed off I got up and started yelling. I was so mad. I thought the way the referee handled the match was bullshit. To this day people come up to me and say that they shouldn’t have stopped the match and that I should have won. They may have been right. But at that point, what did I know?
Yeah, I was disappointed. I never liked to lose at anything. But now I had a taste for the UFC. Everything about this kind of fighting excited me. I was still bummed after the fight with Mezger. But back in the dressing room Paul Herrera came up to me all excited.
“You did an awesome job,” he told me. “You showed an awesome fight! People loved that fight! Don’t be bummed about anything!”
That cheered me up a little bit. But to my way of thinking, a loss was still a loss.
After the fight I went home to Kristin and we decided to go out. We went to a club called the Rhino Room down in Huntington Beach and, as always, we were waiting in line for the door guy to let us come in. All of a sudden, this big security guy comes up to me and says “You’re Tito Ortiz! Come on, man! You don’t have to wait in line.”
When he said that, I was kind of surprised. I had never had a problem waiting in line to get into a place. But being called out like that in front of a lot of people was something new to me.
So we went in and I was thinking that it was pretty cool to be recognized. We went to the bar and I’m about to order drinks when all of a sudden I hear a loud “Hey, Tito!” from the other end of the bar. Everybody in the place turned to look at me. Then this guy comes up to me and says, “Don’t worry about it; this drink’s on me.” I thought,This is rad—people recognizing me and buying me drinks. This is the attention I’ve always been looking for. This is cool! Right on!
All of a sudden I was fighting and people were loving me for it.