Tito Ortiz knows that the attention his incident with Stephan Bonnar brought upon their Nov. 15 fight in San Diego is both good and bad.
“It’s a double-edged sword,” Ortiz said on Monday’s edition of The MMA Hour. “It helped, and it didn’t help. Helped to sell the fight, 10 days after we’re still talking about it. A lot of fans, maybe they didn’t like it because of the pro wrestling side of it, I didn’t like it, The fact of him talking about my family, I didn’t like it. Like I said, it’s a double-edged sword.”
By now, anyone who pays even slight attention to MMA knows about what went down inside the cage at Mohegan Sun Arena, live on Spike TV. Bonnar brought Ortiz’s former training partner, Justin McCully, into the cage, underneath a mask. An exchange of words led to an altercation. And the MMA world went into a tizzy.
“The only thing I knew was that we were going to get in the cage, and we were going to get into a faceoff for the fight,” Ortiz said. “Do a pre-fight thing and that was it. I’ve seen some guy with a mask was with him, and, I don’t know. It just kind of caught me off guard I was like ‘who’s this guy.’ Then I was like, OK, he must think I’m going to smack him or something. He’s got security with him.”
Ortiz says that as soon as Bonnar started referencing his family, particularly ex-wife Jenna Jameson, he tuned out everything else.
“He stepped into the cage,” Ortiz said. “And he started talking and he started saying something about my family and he started talking about the fans and all of a sudden I just blinked and I’m seeing red.”
“[Bonnar] started talking smack saying I need money to pay for my family because my chick took all my money or my ex-chick took all my money,” Ortiz added later. “You don’t say s– like that, dude. Seriously. All the same, none of it was true for one. You’re saying lies about a person you don’t even know about. And it ticked me off.”
Ortiz, who made his Bellator debut in May with a first-round finish of the company’s middleweight champion, Alexander Shlemenko, said he was offered either a shot at the light heavyweight championship currently held by Emmanuel Newton or Bonnar for his next fight.
“[Bonnar] saying Dana [White] is going to release him to kick my ass, I was just like ‘excuse me? Who are you, dude? What fights have you won? You’re known worldwide for getting your ass kicked, and for him to say the things he said about me?” … then when I heard he was coming to Bellator, it was, OK, cool. How do I get this fight? What do I have to do to get this together?” And it got done, and he continued on.”
The former UFC light heavyweight champion railed at length against McCully’s character, then dismissed the notion having Bonnar will pick up anything useful by working with McCully.
“How much of a secret weapon can there be if there are 17 years of fight videotapes?” Ortiz asked. “You can go back and watch all my fights. There’s no secrets. He knows what I’m going to do. I’m going to punch him in his face. I’m going to take him down. I’m going to put elbows in his face.”
Ortiz also scoffed at the idea Bonnar has more where McCully came from.
“I hope he does have more in store,” Ortiz said. “He needs as much ammo as possible, because that’s only way he’s going to win the argument side of it. He’s going to say as many lies as he can and keep talking the talk, because when it comes to Nov. 15, he has to get in the cage with me. It’s nobody else beside himself. No Gimp behind him, no training partners behind him, there’s nobody besides himself. He’s the one that’s going to stand in front of me when it comes to getting punched and kneed in the face. That’s what he’s in for. I’ll sit back and let him talk his talk, and get as much hype and notoriety and just talking.”