CHAPTER EIGHT
KRISTIN ORTIZ
Tito had just fought for the first time, and right away I began to notice a change in his personality. He got a little bit of fame and a little bit of money, and the friendship as well as the relationship started to suffer a little bit.
I finished my second year at Golden State College with a perfect 28–0 record. We won the state title again. But it was just like it had been in high school: I was partying and drinking and doing drugs.
Mostly pot, which I was still dealing to make money. I was still doing meth but not as much as before—sometimes every other week, sometimes once a month. Kristin and I were very into school, and you couldn’t do meth and go to school. When I got into Golden West, meth was something I knew I would have to stop, so I actually quit and had withdrawal symptoms. But it was never anything really heavy. All I would do was sleep it off for a couple of days and I would be fine.
When I finished my second year at Golden West in 1996, I was looking to transfer to a four-year school for my junior year. The University of Bakersfield was looking at me. Arizona State was looking at me. Nebraska was looking at me. Nebraska was too cold. Arizona was too hot. And Bakersfield was only a couple of hours away. It was out in the middle of the desert and kind of isolated, but I would be able to wrestle.
Kristin and I discussed my going to Bakersfield. She was working, and so we decided that I would go by myself and that she would join me at the beginning of the second semester.
KRISTIN ORTIZ
I was always paranoid that Tito was probably cheating on me. I began to catch him in lies. He finally did cheat on me and we broke up. We were basically apart for two months. It was horrible. I was devastated. So was Tito. He would write me letters and call my family and friends. He was trying real hard to patch things up with us. So of course, eventually, I forgave him.
Well, the second semester came around and Kristin still wasn’t sure about coming up. Bakersfield was okay. I had some friends up there. I was doing okay in my classes and, of course, there was wrestling. But I was missing Kristin and I was kind of lonely.
That’s when I cheated on her for the first time.
The girl was a fitness chick. She trained, so we had something in common. This went on for a while. Then Kristin found out. She was pissed. All I could think of to say was it happened because she was never around. Finally she said, “I’m going to move up there with you or you’re going to lose me.” I didn’t want to lose her, so finally in the third semester, she joined me.
KRISTIN ORTIZ
I went back with him even after I found out he had cheated with somebody at Bakersfield. It was rough and it took a while to heal the relationship, but we got through it.
That was the first time I cheated, but I was tempted all the time. For a long time I just could not bring myself to do it. I was very persuasive and persistent in trying to convince Kristin that it would never happen again. I knew I had made a mistake.
I was continuing to make a name for myself at Bakersfield, and word of my two UFC fights was getting around. One day this guy named Saul Garcia came to one of our practices. Saul was one of those guys who had been around the business a while and claimed to know people. I know, you hear that all the time. But what did I know?
Anyway, he came up to me after practice and introduced himself. He was real encouraging. He had heard about my fights and said that I could probably still beat a lot of those UFC guys. He said if I moved back to Los Angeles to fight, he would help me out. He was basically offering to manage me.
I was more interested in continuing my education than becoming a professional fighter. But I told him I would keep it in mind. Saul had this gym in Bakersfield, and I would go down there sometimes to work out and check out the other fighters.
I would also occasionally go back to Huntington Beach to party or hang out. And on one of those occasions I landed in deep shit.
I had gone to a house party in Huntington Beach with a few of my friends. Things started getting rowdy, and at one point one of my friends got hit in the face with a beer bottle by some skinhead guy. I stepped in the middle of it to defend my friend, and the skinhead tried to take me down. I got him in a choke hold while three of his friends were trying to hit me in the head with beer bottles. I kept choking the guy until he was pretty much out.
Finally, I let him go and he was unconscious. I stomped him a couple of times and then I turned around and everybody was yelling at me to leave, so I took off out the door. Then somebody called the cops. I was hiding in a bush near the house and I thought I was going to get away with it. But then a police helicopter spotted me and the cops chased me down. This one cop came up to me with his gun drawn and yelled at me to come out. It turned out that the cop with the gun was an old friend of mine named Brian Rainwater.
Friend or not, I was still taken to jail and charged with assault with severe bodily harm. I agreed to a plea bargain of guilty for some community service and a few days’ jail time. But I was right in the middle of training and I didn’t think I could take the time out to deal with this stuff. So I chose to just ignore it. That’s when the charge went to warrant. Suddenly I needed a lawyer and I didn’t have any money.
So I turned to Tank Abbott for help. He and I weren’t getting along, but I couldn’t think of anyone else to ask.
I called Tank up and asked him if he could loan me $1,500 for an attorney, and he said no problem—he would help me out. Well, a week went by and the attorney I hired called me and said he needed the money. So I called Tank and asked him if it was possible for him to get me the money right away. I think he must have been drunk when I called him because he said, “I ain’t your fucking dad! I’m not going to take care of you! This ain’t no charity!”
I was shocked. I said, “But you said you were going to help me out.”
He said, “Fuck that!”
I was screwed.
Kristin moved up, and things were going along fine for a while. But the wrestling coach and I were not seeing eye to eye. He was an army brat, a real hard-ass. I could put up with a lot of that because that kind of stuff kind of goes hand in hand with wrestling. But what I could not deal with was that he was very disrespectful to the kids.
David Ochoa, a longtime friend of mine, was also up in Bakersfield and on the wrestling team. David had a real bad stuttering problem, and still does to this day. Coach used to make fun of him. He constantly asked David questions just to make him stutter so everybody would laugh at him. I couldn’t believe he was treating a student like that. If there was a purpose in humiliating him, I couldn’t see it.
Coach was always playing favorites. He loved the guys who won. The guys who lost, he treated like shit.
I remember wrestling at the Midlands Championships during the third semester. It was not one of my better days. I went 3–2 in that tournament and did not place.
After the tournament, we were in a restaurant and one of our wrestlers who had won the tournament ordered a steak. That sounded good, so I ordered a steak too. Well, the food came and all of a sudden the coach was in my face, saying, “What the fuck are you eating a steak for?”
I said, “Excuse me?”
He kept at me. “What the fuck are you eating a steak for? You didn’t place in the tournament.”
I said, “I was hungry and a steak is what sounded good to me.”
He said I didn’t deserve a fucking steak. Now I was real pissed.
I got up, looked him straight in the eye, and said, “This is fucking wrong and you can have your fucking steak!” I got up, went to the bar, and ate my steak in peace. I was ready to quit the team right then and there. But I stuck it out a little bit longer. Which, in looking back on what happened next, was probably a mistake.
We had just finished a tournament in Bakersfield against Arizona, and when we got back to Bakersfield, I was having trouble with my right leg. I assumed it was what they called interior compression syndrome and didn’t think a whole lot of it except that it hurt. During our next training session, when it was time to run, I told the coach I was having trouble with my leg and the pain was getting worse. Coach said, “Tape it up, you’re running.”
We were running up and down the gymnasium stairs that day. I got about halfway through the run and had to stop. There was just too much pain. I went to the coach and told him I couldn’t run anymore.
The coach said, “Go home, you fucking pussy!”
I went back to my dorm room, and my roommate David and another friend, Raphael Davis, were there. I told them that I didn’t feel good. They took one look at my legs and said they’d take me to the health center, that it didn’t look good.
The people at the health center examined my legs and said, “We don’t want to touch this; you’re going to the emergency room.”
So I went to the emergency room and the doctor told me that if I had come in two days later, they’d be chopping my leg off. It turned out that all the muscles in my leg had atrophied because of a lack of blood circulation. The doctor gave me antibiotics and told me to stay off my feet for four weeks.
I was laid up in bed for a month and the coach didn’t call once to see how I was doing. By the time I recovered, the wrestling season was over. I had been ranked second in the Pac-10 when I got injured and probably would have gone on to the Nationals. But the coach not calling was the last straw for me. I quit the team, quit school, got a U-Haul, packed my stuff, and moved back down to Huntington Beach with Kristin.
We found an apartment, and my older brother Marty helped me get a job as a clerk at Spanky’s Adult Novelty Store, which was run by this cool guy named Ron Haskins. I was making fifteen dollars an hour and fifteen percent commission on anything I sold.
Working at Spanky’s was nasty sometimes. I would have to chase guys out of the store who would come in to masturbate to the video and toy box covers. Girls would come in with their girlfriends and try and play with the toys. Drugged-out people would wander in and try and steal stuff. It was crazy.
Even before I started working at Spanky’s, I already knew in my head that I was ready to give this fighting thing a shot. It seemed like the only thing that mattered was to keep my head straight and to dedicate myself to the sport. I figured if I gave Ultimate Fighting the same dedication I had given to high school and college wrestling, I would do pretty well.
Saul was the one who got me back into it and got my mind working. He became my first manager.
I would work at Spanky’s during the day and train at night. By all rights I should have been having my first professional, paying fight in the UFC in 1998.
But that was when Tank Abbott decided to stab me in the back.
Suddenly the UFC didn’t want me and it was because Tank Abbott said he would not fight in the UFC if they used me. They wouldn’t book me because of Tank, and that went on well into 1998. He carried enough weight at the time to be able to get away with that shit.
He shafted me; because of what he said, I was blackballed by the UFC. Yeah, I was angry at Tank and the UFC, but I was really frustrated because I wanted to fight. So I took my first professional fight—and this time there were no excuses.
I was fighting a totally illegal fight in a warehouse in Los Angeles. Once again, it was not sanctioned. Which meant anything could happen. And it did.
I showed up for the weigh-in and found out that the guy I was supposed to fight had dropped out of the match. I went to the promoter and told him that I really wanted to fight. The promoter said, “Well, I have this guy, Eugene Jackson.”
I said “Cool. How much money will I get?” The promoter offered me $200, and I told him I’d do it.
It turned out that Eugene Jackson was no bum off the street. He was an EFC (Extreme Fighting Championship) fighter and had been some kind of Hawaiian champion. The fight lasted all of eight minutes and ended up being a draw because this was not a sanctioned UFC fight, so there were no points awarded. But I dominated that fight. In fact, I hit the guy so hard that I almost broke my hand on his face. Once again I proved to myself that I was ready for the UFC.
But thanks to Tank Abbott, the UFC still would not give me a shot. Every time I talked to Saul, he told me the same thing: “I’m calling the UFC all the time and they’re not returning my calls.” Finally, he suggested that we just go to a UFC event and present ourselves to the people in charge. He was convinced that would get us an in. I thought it was as good an idea as any and asked him where the next event was. Saul told me Brazil.
Ron Haskins, the owner of Spanky’s, offered to sponsor us and pay our way to Brazil. So I made up these fighter cards, pictures of me along with my record, a list of who I had fought, and contact information. Saul and I went to Brazil and I presented myself to John Peretti, who was an official with the UFC. I went right up to him, gave him my card, and told him that I felt like I could beat a lot of the guys he had fighting that night. Peretti wasn’t an easy sell. He wanted to know who and where I had fought. I told him I had fought twice on UFC 13, had beaten Wes Albritton, and even though I lost to Guy Mezger, I had given him an ass whipping.
Peretti would later tell me that I had come across as being very professional and that having a manager helped. He went back to the States and took a look at the tape of my fight with Mezger. Not long after we got back, Saul called me up and said he had gotten a call from the UFC. They had a fight for me.
Against my old high school opponent Jerry Bohlander.
When the fight with Jerry Bohlander was officially on, I was offered $7,500 for the fight. Now, for a former college kid who was used to getting by on Top Ramen, that was a huge amount of money. So I signed the contract without hesitation.
I began training for the fight at the Los Angeles Boxing Club. I ended up training hard for eight months because I did not want to lose.
When I wasn’t thinking about fighting, I was usually thinking about the money that I could make by fighting. Growing up, I used to watch pro boxers and rock stars very closely. Many of them didn’t invest their money and they didn’t look out for themselves. Then a manager would take over and they would always lose out. I mean, look at Mike Tyson. That guy made $400 million and he ended up bankrupt. For me, something like that was impossible to imagine. So as I started getting into the fight game, I felt that mixed martial artists should be getting at least as big a chunk as boxers. In the beginning, I was getting decent money for a fight, but even at that point I knew I wanted more. Money was always on my mind.
I continued to train and I felt that I was in the best shape of my life. But while I was confident on the surface, I knew there was some risk involved. I could have come back to Huntington Beach, lost my first three fights, and it would have been horrible. I could have been one of the worst fighters in UFC history. But I really didn’t believe that. I had enough confidence to take the chance and see what happened.
Even with the Bohlander fight coming up, I was anxious to fight and prove myself. I wanted to fight somebody right then and there. It didn’t matter who.
About a month before the Bohlander fight, on December 8, 1998, I fought on a card for something called the West Coast NHB (No Holds Barred) Championships against a fighter named Jeremy Screeton. There really isn’t much to say about Jeremy—he had a total of five professional fights between 1998 and 1999 and he ended up with a record of 2–3.
But as soon as it was announced that I was fighting this guy, I started getting frantic phone calls from the UFC, warning me not to fight him. They said if I lost to him, they would have to cancel my fight with Bohlander. I told them not to worry about it, that I was not going to lose.
But I was scared and intimidated the night of the fight. I really didn’t know this guy, and who knew what might happen. Friends from all over Huntington Beach were in the audience, including my buddies from KoRn, as I entered the Octagon to their music.
The fight with Screeton lasted a total of sixteen seconds. He threw a punch. I threw a punch. He shot in at me in an inside cradle. I kneed him in the head a couple of times and he tapped out. I was ready for the Bohlander fight.
I saw the irony in fighting Jerry. I had beaten him years earlier in high school, and seeing him fight in the UFC was the thing that made me think that I might be good at this. And now I was fighting him again.
Jerry Bohlander was a decent fighter. At the time he was ranked top ten in the world and was in the same stable as Guy Mezger and Ken Shamrock. I was the definite underdog in the fight. To most people I was just this young kid. Then I started hearing all these interviews that Bohlander was giving. He was saying I was a nobody, that his grandmother could hit harder than I could, and that he was going to give me an ass whipping.
I thought,We’ll see whose ass gets whipped.
The Bohlander fight took place on January 8, 1999. It was part of UFC 18: Road to the Heavyweight Title. I was pumped. The fight lasted 14 minutes, 31 seconds.
I punched him. I took him down. I punched him some more. Then I punched him some more. The referee finally stepped in and stopped the fight. Bohlander’s face was cut and swollen.
Bohlander had beaten a lot of decent guys, and I had made him look pretty bad. Suddenly I was right in there with the best fighters in the middleweight division.
That was the night I earned my reputation as the Huntington Beach Bad Boy. Back in my junior college days, when I beat an opponent, I would pretend my fingers were guns, fire them, and then blow on the barrels. It was a showboating thing for sure. That’s what I did that night. But I wasn’t finished with my act.
Shortly before the fight, I was approached by this porno production company called Extreme Associates. They said, “We’ll pitch you a couple of grand if you wear this T-shirt after the fight.”
The T-shirt said, “I Just Fucked Your Ass.”
I said, “Cool, I’ll do it.” And my reputation was cemented.
KRISTIN ORTIZ
We blew Tito’s winnings from that first fight in a few months. We went on a vacation to Cabo and we bought a lot of toys. For us, at the time, that was just an amazing amount of money.
After the fight I went back to work at Spanky’s and started partying and hitting the clubs. Everybody was giving me high fives and I was being recognized. I had some celebrity status, and it was starting to put a strain on my relationship with Kristin.
The groupies started coming around and all that. I was away a lot, and I was basically doing whatever I wanted to do. I cheated on her or I wouldn’t show up at home when I told her I’d be there because I was out partying with my friends. But we were holding out for each other.
We were in love, but there was something more. We were best friends.
We had gotten through some hard times and we were going through some more hard times.
KRISTIN ORTIZ
I was nervous about the fame and what went along with it. The girls coming on to Tito. We had just rekindled our friendship and we were really close. I had gotten to the point where I trusted him again. Now I wasn’t sure what was going to happen to us.
After the Bohlander fight, I was pretty much out of control. I continued to work at Spanky’s because the money was pretty good. By 1999, I had definitely fallen back into some bad habits and was not being very professional when it came to fighting. Basically I was on a rampage. I was partying. I was smoking pot, doing a little crystal meth, and drinking a lot. I wasn’t an alcoholic, but I would party nonstop, drinking every day. It was fun for me. It was my getaway.
But while I was still a loose cannon when it came to my personal life, my attitude toward being a professional wrestler, despite my best efforts to the contrary, was maturing. I had loved Tank Abbott like a brother at one point. But when he refused to help me out, that was the end between us. Besides, I felt it was time to grow and become a better fighter by learning from others. I went to train with another wrestler, John, who was very good with submission holds. He was a good addition to my training team, and he worked me real hard.
But what I had yet to learn was that fighters had egos and feelings. Respect was an important element of a fighter’s makeup. And any perception of disrespect could have dire consequences. I learned this the hard way when it came to John.
John had fought Frank Shamrock around this time and had been pretty much dominated. Not long after his fight, we had gone out partying and drinking and getting really wasted. At one point in the evening, I went up to John and told him I thought I could beat Frank Shamrock. I wasn’t trying to be disrespectful to John or to put him down. But I honestly thought that I had more to give in a Frank Shamrock fight than John did. But I think I may have hurt his feelings, because things started to get a bit strained between us.
Right in the middle of my renewed dedication to the sport, I got a call from the UFC. Vitor Belfort had been scheduled to fight Guy Mezger, but he had to pull out at the last minute. They wanted me to fill in and fight Mezger. I hadn’t been training much and I wasn’t really in shape, but my manager said he was sure I could beat this guy. And up to this point, I had to admit, Saul had not steered me wrong, so I agreed to do it.
So I jumped back into training full-on three weeks before the fight and hoped for the best. I put my running shoes on and ran for a week. I sparred a little bit. It was kind of a payback thing. Mezger had beaten me before I turned pro and before I really knew a lot about the fight game. But I had always felt that I had been robbed in that match. Now that I was doing this for real, for money, I really wanted to beat this guy. I wanted payback.
I fought Guy Mezger on March 5, 1999, in the event titled UFC 19: Ultimate Young Guns. From the opening bell I just bombarded him. I hit him with everything, and the referee stopped it thirteen minutes into the fight. I had another shirt ready for the occasion.
It read: “Gay Mezger Is My Bitch.”
Mezger had talked a lot of shit, put his foot in his mouth, and then couldn’t pull it out. So when it was over and done with, I felt justified in wearing the shirt.
But I was still a young kid and I got caught up in the moment. I flipped off Guy Mezger and I flipped off his corner. Ken Shamrock was in his corner. Looking back on it, I would have to say that flipping off Shamrock was probably the beginning of our feud.
The crowd went wild, but I would get a lot of heat for it later. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I probably pissed off a lot of fighters that night. Ken Shamrock was really pissed off. His attitude was, “Who is this fucking kid?” But I knew who I was.
I wasn’t really aware of the image I was projecting. I was interviewed after the fight, and the interviewer asked me if Mezger should be mad about the shirt. I said of course he should be mad. Then I kind of threw down a challenge when I said, “And Ken Shamrock should be mad too. I just beat his number one and two guys back-to-back.”
I was following the way Tank Abbott went about his business—he talked a lot of shit, but then he backed it up when he fought. I felt like that’s what I was doing.
But I have to admit that this character I had become was all very new to me. I didn’t really know who this character was, but I kind of liked him.
I liked being the bad boy.