This Is Gonna Hurt (7 page)

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.

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.

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.

H
igh 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!

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.