Tito Ortiz deserved this.
The spotlight, the pageantry, the praise.
MMA doesn’t usually work out that way. The ending is usually cold and ugly and depressing. Just ask BJ Penn. Even the pioneers get booted out rather than feted.
On a few rare occasions, though, the clouds part and the MMA gods smile down, and one of the trailblazers is allowed to ascend to Valhalla happy.
Saturday was one of those nights, with Ortiz headlining Bellator 170 before family and friends just a few miles up the road from the place his legend was born and able to celebrate with them on the last night of his fighting life.
“This is how a person’s career should end, on top of the world,” Ortiz said in the post-fight press conference after choking out Chael Sonnen.
It was an ending that, for a long stretch of time, seemed unlikely ever to happen.
For a big portion of the last decade, Ortiz has been used as a punchline for any host of reasons. His long stretch of futility (he won just once between 2006 and 2012), his verbal gaffes (not hard to find), his ongoing, one-sided feud with Dana White and the UFC.
It was the last of those things that unfairly painted Ortiz in the most unflattering light, as though he were greedy for fighting for every dollar he felt he was worth.
This started around the time that White largely controlled the narratives in the media. His sheer force of personality and omnipresence made his declarations seem to many like law, no matter how outlandish.
In reality, Ortiz had as strong a case as anybody to push the salary bell curve upward past any level it had ever seen. Even then, he was one of the most important figures in mixed martial arts history. His ability to get an audience invested in his fights was something of a breakthrough in the early days of the sport, when the UFC’s promoters struggled to pull attention to their spectacles.
He broke television ratings records, he pulled in pay-per-view audiences and he drew money. He became the bellwether of an entire division, then the building block for an entire promotion.
For his efforts, he was often disparaged, particularly after he fell out of favor with UFC management for the cardinal sin of fighting for a larger share of the financial pie. Remember when the UFC produced a 90-minute special on a proposed boxing match between White and Ortiz that he pulled out of after they refused to compensate him for it?
In the UFC, disrespect might as well have been part of his contract terms. Purse, win bonus, diss track.
And too many people laughed along.
This was different. Maybe because he announced he would be hanging up his gloves after the match, the fight world came out to embrace him.
Just as importantly for Ortiz, the promotion embraced him.
When Ortiz talks about his UFC roots, you sense there remains lingering hurt for the way he was thrown away. On Saturday, Bellator celebrated him. They presented his retirement fight with a video package. They allowed him to walk out to the cage with his teenage son, Jacob. They treated him in a way commensurate with all he had given the sport.
“I’ve been respected the right way,” Ortiz said in the post-fight presser. “I want to thank everybody at Bellator, at Spike. This is the way it should have been when I left the UFC. But everything happens for a reason, the ups and the downs. If it did happen at UFC, this wouldn’t have happened.”
His happiness came across as genuine, allowing fans to turn the corner on a fight buildup that felt a bit manufactured.
Almost to the end, Ortiz refused to step away from his character. All the prerequisites were there: the sneering intensity, the outrage, the personal vendetta. Was it real? Developed? Contrived? With him, no one could ever say for sure.
As a going-away present, he got the one man on the Bellator roster who would not just play along but take things further than they probably should go.
A million years ago…or in another life…or before they became professional fighters, Ortiz and Sonnen competed in an amateur wrestling match. The 44-second encounter won by Sonnen—recently dug out of the archives by FloWrestling—was supposedly the fuel for the fire these two were trying to create.
As a pure MMA bout, the match had almost no stakes. Sonnen was competing after more than three years away, much of it spent serving a two-year suspension for using performance-enhancing drugs. He’s pushing 40 and, on top of it, had lost three of four before his extended absence.
Ortiz’s break hadn’t been quite as long, but it had been over a year since he competed, losing to Liam McGeary in a bid to earn the Bellator Light Heavyweight Championship.
As it turned out, that backstory was mostly unnecessary, except for Ortiz, who swore up, down and sideways that he used it to push him forward in camp.
He couldn’t lose his swansong, not to a guy who beat him in college and who later usurped his trash-talk throne.
And he didn’t. Twenty years after he started, Ortiz has finally stopped.
Maybe with hindsight, Ortiz will get his fair due. He may not have won every fight, he may have had his battles with management and he may have been polarizing. But after all this time, things come into view a bit clearer.
He made fights fun. He warned everyone of the fighter unrest to come. He pulled in money and interest. He did everything you would want from a star. On Saturday, Ortiz took his final bow, and like a great showman, he made us recognize all that came before it.
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