Following their Bellator 170 clash and Ortiz’s first round submission win over Chael Sonnen, the “Huntington Beach Bad Boy” says he and Sonnen still have beef the Chael needs to squash publicly.
In the lead up to Bellator 170, a lot of things got said. What may have started out as a friendly rivalry between longtime mixed martial artists and former college wrestling foes, became a bit more personal as the fight drew nearer. That’s in no small part due to Chael Sonnen’s penchant for needling trash talk.
“Tito always says I’m using my mouth to get my opportunities,” Sonnen said in the lead-up to the January 21st bout. “The only person that I know that made money using their mouth is his ex-wife.”
“This show is free on Spike TV,” Sonnen added later at the same eventlater at. “That means everyone can afford it. Except for Tito, Because he’s broke. Get it?”
Apparently comments like those weren’t well received by Tito Ortiz, Sonnen’s opponent. And while Ortiz may have ended the fight, submitting Sonnen in just over two minutes with a rear naked choke, that doesn’t mean that he’s ready to forgive the trash talk leading up to it.
Shortly after the bout, Ortiz told Fight Hub TV that if Sonnen wanted to squash the beef between the two fighters, he’d have to do more than just glad-hand him behind closed doors. Sonnen would need to make a public apology (transcript via MMA Fighting).
“I didn’t say anything after the fight. He came to my dressing room and said, ‘Good fight, it was an honor, da da da’ and I go, ‘You’ve got to apologize to me in public.’ So we’re gonna see if he has enough balls to apologize to me in public.”
…
“I’m a kid who has a lot of respect. I believe in respect. Talking about another person’s family is something wrong to do and for what he did, that’s just the wrong thing to do. That’s always my three rules of s**t-talking: You don’t talk about a person’s family, you don’t talk about a person’s country, and you don’t lie about a person. He did all three of those things, and the big man upstairs took care of it.”
Perhaps that attitude played into Ortiz’s willingness to keep his choke on Sonnen locked in past the point of Sonnen tapping and the ref trying to separate them.
“I kinda held onto it because I have ill will towards him. But that’s just me. When someone talks about my family, someone talks about my character, I have bad will towards a person,” Ortiz said during the post fight press conference.
No word yet on when Tito can expect his public apology.