There’s no doubt that Tito Ortiz deserves his place in the UFC Hall of Fame, and if there’s ever an MMA Hall of Fame, he’ll surely be enshrined there as well. Through a career that lasted 15 years, he established himself as one of the greatest light heavyweights in the history of the sport.
However, there was another side of Tito that was slightly less “Hall of Fame”—his penchant for rolling out an endless litany of excuses whenever something didn’t go his way.
Ortiz last fought in the UFC back in July 2012, dropping a unanimous decision to Forrest Griffin in the third meeting between the two fighters. The loss brought a close to Ortiz’s career, but, alas, it has not brought an end to his excuse-making and finger-pointing—and he’s seemed to have saved the best for last.
Ortiz’s normal list of excuses for losses usually revolved around undisclosed injuries in the past, but for the Griffin loss, he’s pulled out the big guns. Speaking to Ground and Pound TV, Ortiz pretty much accuses the UFC of fixing the fight:
I thought I won the fight, when you drop a guy twice, you take him down four times and you dominate by doing it. He never took me down. He never hurt me. For the first time ever in UFC history, they showed strikes attempted; not strikes landed, strikes attempted. When do you ever show somebody with strikes attempted? He never hit me, I blocked all of them.
After him (Griffin) running out of the fight, that shows that he lost and for Dana (White) to go back and run and get him to come back, there’s something fishy going on here. How does Dana know how things are going to turn out? I thought something was fishy about that. Was it premeditated? Was it pre-planned out what the answer was going to be? If I didn’t knock him it, if I didn’t submit him, they already knew who was going to win.
If, as Ortiz proclaims, this fix was in, it went pretty deep, as the FightMetric numbers for the fight show that Griffin outstruck (and, yes, out-attempted) Ortiz through the three-round battle, landing 104 of an attempted 280 strikes to Ortiz’s 68 landed strikes.
One can argue that the decision should have gone Ortiz’s way in the bout, but to say the fight was fixed is a reckless statement at best and one I would not expect UFC president Dana White to let slide without at least some type of comment.
Never change, Tito, never change.
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