This Is Gonna Hurt (8 page)

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 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.

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.

W
e were married in Huntington Beach in June 2000.

I had finally made my love for Kristin official, and I felt really good about it. We left for our honeymoon in Bermuda on June 25. The first day there we were watching people riding all over the place on these mopeds and it looked like a lot of fun. The next morning Kristin and I decided to rent a moped, and we spent a good part of the day driving around, doing all the tourist stuff. We were on our way back to the hotel in the afternoon when we got to a stop sign. It was a two-way stop at a three-way intersection. I came to a stop. A car went by. Another car was coming from the other direction and stopped. The driver waved me to go ahead. I looked left and pulled out.

Boom!

Right before the crash, Kristin yelled at me to watch out.

Then the bus hit us. It had to have been going thirty miles an hour, and the impact threw me about twenty feet in the air. I hit the ground, rolled, and slid right into oncoming traffic. I remember lying there, screaming at the traffic to stop.

Kristin was caught underneath the bus, and it dragged her for about eight feet before it stopped. The bus tire was about three inches from her head. I yelled, “Kristin, are you okay?” When she said no, I flipped out. I got up and went to grab her when a lady yelled and told me not to touch her. I was dizzy, my head was spinning. I sat down and fell over. I got up and went to Kristin. An ambulance had arrived and they were trying to pull her out from under the bus. She was saying that her back hurt. Then one of the ambulance guys looked at me and said, “Oh my God! Are you okay?”

I had road rash all up and down the left side of my body. I looked over to where the bus had stopped, and there was my body print on the bus. The ambulance took us to the emergency room. I was a mess, but Kristin was a lot worse.

She had crushed one of her vertebrae, fractured four others, broken three ribs, and had road rash all over her body. It was the first day of our honeymoon, and we were lucky to be alive.

I was trembling. I was scared. I thought I had lost her. I was just thankful that somebody was looking out for me and that they didn't take Kristin's or my life away. I had thought of myself as the toughest man in the world. But there I was, standing on the road, scared like a little kid.

We were in the hospital for three days, and I didn't sleep the entire time. After three days we arranged for a private jet to pick us up in Bermuda and take us back to the States. Kristin was strapped into a gurney on the plane. During the flight she said, “I'm glad we're okay.”

I smiled. “I'm glad we're okay too.”

All of a sudden the plane started shaking. We looked out the window and there was a thunderstorm on the left side of the plane. Kristin started crying. She said, “I don't want to die in a plane crash.”

I said, “We just got hit by a fucking bus. If it was our turn to die, we'd be dead by now.”

We landed safely, and when we got back to Orange County, Kristin was in a back brace for six months. I cried every time I saw her like that. I felt like the whole accident was completely my fault because I hadn't been paying attention. I really took it hard. I could barely get myself to train even a little bit. I was depressed. Plus the wounds I had were so bad that I basically had to take two months off to let them heal.

During the time that Kristin and I were married and, literally, recovering from our honeymoon, a lot had changed. After the Fertittas had bought the UFC, the talk was that John Lewis would become the new UFC president. But the next thing I heard was that Dana had swooped in and taken the job right out from under him. Personally I thought it was a cheap move on Dana's part. He called to tell me that he'd just been named president of the UFC and that he couldn't be my manager anymore because it would be a conflict of interest.

At the time, we were working with an attorney named James Gallow, and Dana told me he was going to appoint him as my new manager. This didn't sound quite right to me. I told Dana, “Well, Gallow's an attorney. He knows nothing about managing. How is he going to take over for you?” Dana said not to worry; everything was going to be fine.

I trusted Dana. I trusted him without a doubt. I wasn't the most business-savvy guy, but I felt everybody was looking out for my best interests. So I agreed to let James manage me. However, in the back of my mind, I was thinking there was still a conflict of interest.

Nevertheless, I said yes and got back to fighting.

Not long after we returned from Bermuda, I got a phone call from the UFC. They asked me when I wanted to fight again. I needed the money real bad, so I said I would defend my title. It was July when they called and they wanted me to fight in December. I was to fight Yuki Kondo in his homeland, Japan. I knew immediately that this fight wasn't going to be easy.

Yuki Kondo was the king of rings, a very good fighter. He had beaten Frank Shamrock. He was capable of taking everything I could give him punchingwise. I knew I was going to have to get a submission hold on him, because that was the only way I was going to stop him.

I started training in September, and I was taking it very seriously. I felt bad about leaving Kristin even for a little bit to train, but by that time she was beginning to recover. She was going through hell and yet she was sucking it up. I figured I had to do the same.

I remember liking Japan immediately. The country was so nice and clean. There was no graffiti, no trash. It was just a very clean environment. I felt out of place there, but I kept it together by focusing on the task at hand.

Which was to impose my will on Yuki Kondo.

The fight was simply billed as UFC 29: Defense of the Belts. The arena was packed with people screaming and hollering. It was obvious that Kondo was the fan favorite. But I did get my share of the applause when I came down to the cage.

I remember the announcer rattling off a bunch of Japanese and then saying, “Yuki Kondo.” Then he rattled off some more Japanese and said, “The Millennium Bad Boy, Tito Ortiz.” The audience responded with loud cheers and I remember thinking how cool it was to get such a great reaction from this crowd in Japan.

The fight was close for about the first minute and a half. I came out at the bell, threw a right hand, and missed. He slipped. I went to go shoot and he threw a flying knee that clipped me right on the chin. I fell back, rolled up to my feet, and body-locked him.

I don't remember saying it, but the referee, John McCarthy, told me later that when I grabbed him, I was yelling at him, “Is that all you've got?” I picked him up off the ground, slammed him on the floor, and just beat on him with punches and elbows. He tried to shoot to my legs and I grabbed him with a cobra choke, one of my best submission moves. I torqued it. He couldn't breathe, and then he tapped out.

The fight had lasted less than two minutes and I was still the world champion.

I reached for my victory shirt and put it on. I'm not sure if the Japanese quite understood what the shirt thing was all about, but this one read: “RESPECT I don't earn it I just fucken take it.”

The whole celebrity thing was at an even higher level after the Kondo fight. When I returned to the States, I would love to say that I stopped the heavy partying and the cheating. But every once in a while I would go out, get drunk, and something would happen. I don't know if Kristin knew for sure what was going on, but I think she sensed it.

The whole celebrity thing was at an even higher level after the Kondo fight. It was even more about me and less about her. The impact of my celebrity was definitely starting to weigh on Kristin, and she started complaining about it. She sat me down a few times and told me, “Tito, I didn't marry you because you were going to be a superstar. I married the Tito who was the nice guy and who was nice to me. All of a sudden you're becoming a superstar and so many people are giving you so much attention. It seems like you don't have enough time for me.”

She was right. Things were changing. Personally and professionally.

The new owners of the UFC wanted me to fight again, and fairly soon. They were so anxious to make this happen that they were willing to pay for my training camp up in Big Bear, California. The guy they wanted me to fight was Evan Tanner. He was a former middleweight champion and a real tough guy.

So I went up to Big Bear. I brought Chuck Liddell and a bunch of other guys with me. I must have had fifteen guys up there at one point. It was only about a two-month training period, but I worked real hard, and because it had been so close to the Kondo fight, I felt I was in really good shape.

The fight with Evan Tanner was held on February 23, 2001, and was billed as UFC 30: Battle on the Boardwalk. The fight only lasted thirty seconds, but it was a pretty brutal one. I kicked him. He tried to clinch and grab ahold of me. I clinched his head. I kneed him in the belly and uppercut him to the face. Finally I picked him up and drilled him into the floor. The impact knocked him out. He was unconscious for about seven minutes.

I put on a shirt that said: “If You Can Read This I Just Stomped His Ass!”

By this time my relationship with Kristin was pretty rocky. I continued to cheat on her and I wasn't being real discreet about it.

And at that point I really didn't care if she found out. Cheating was a big mistake on my part, but subconsciously, I guess I wanted to get caught.

Kristin was desperate to save the marriage, and she felt that having a kid would do that. I wasn't sure. I didn't want to make the same mistakes my parents had made. But we continued to talk about it. And the more we talked, the more it began sounding like a good idea.

The idea of starting a family really scared me. And I know it had a lot to do with how my parents neglected me when I was growing up. I would see my mother once in a while, but I had pretty much cut off all communication with my father. To be honest, I still hated them both for what they had put me through.

But a lot of the hostility toward my mother faded when she sent me this long handwritten letter on my twenty-fifth birthday. She told me why things had turned out the way they had and she told me how sorry she was for the way things had gone for me. It took a brave person to do what my mother did and a strong person to make the choices she made so her kids could survive.

Around that time, the UFC was really moving in a new direction. There were more rules and more clearly defined weight classifications. The sport was growing in popularity, and, whether they wanted to admit it or not, I was one of the main reasons for that growth. I had become this flamboyant, charismatic, larger-than-life character, which was what the sport needed. I was also real big on promotion. Unlike a lot of the fighters, I was articulate and media savvy. Yeah, I was full of myself and I talked a lot of shit, but I felt I had the goods to back it up.

Unfortunately, by 2001 I began to think I had made a mistake in agreeing with Dana about James Gallow being my manager. All of a sudden I was flying coach again and I wasn't staying in the presidential suite anymore. I had signed a contract and I was sticking to it, but I began asking for little things, things that on the surface were not that big a deal, but as champ, I felt I deserved them.

Jim was not even close to the hard-charging manager Dana had been. He would tell me, “We shouldn't be asking for things like that. We don't want to get Dana mad. Let's not ask for more. We should be happy with what we're getting now.”

When I started hearing stuff like that, I realized that Jim wasn't really looking out for my best interests but rather for the best interests of the UFC. Every time I asked him for something, he would make out like I was busting his balls. I finally called him on it and said, “Aren't you supposed to be looking out for my best interests?” He assured me that he was, but I soon discovered the real nature of the relationship between Dana and Jim. Things were smooth between them because every time Jim would ask for something, Dana would tell him, “Fuck you! I got you here. If it wasn't for me, you wouldn't be here right now.” That was their relationship, and I was getting screwed because of it.