Tito Ortiz lost badly against Antonio Rogerio Nogueira in their bout at UFC 140. Afterward he claimed he had one match left on his contract and he hoped Dana White would let him compete one last time.At this point there aren’t too many options left for…
Tito Ortiz lost badly against Antonio Rogerio Nogueira in their bout at UFC 140. Afterward he claimed he had one match left on his contract and he hoped Dana White would let him compete one last time.
At this point there aren’t too many options left for Ortiz. He has fought almost every name in the UFC who might be competitive with him as he gets older. Everyone else is so young they would just give him another beating.
There is one option he could try: a trilogy with Forrest Griffin.
In that fight he wouldn’t get beaten as badly as he would if he fought someone like Phil Davis or Alexander Gustafsson, though he would still get beaten terribly by Griffin. It would just be the lesser of two evils at this point.
Griffin has lost the edge that made him the winner of the first season The Ultimate Fighter and a light heavyweight champion. He is gearing up toward retirement himself, and who can blame him? He is easily a millionaire thanks to the UFC, and at a certain point your body breaks down more and more and relaxing and enjoying life makes more sense.
If they both decide to have one last match against each other Griffin will prove that for as much as he has lost, Ortiz is worse.
Griffin was able to split a decision over Ortiz in their fight at UFC 106, but that was back in late 2009. Since then Griffin has beaten Rich Franklin by unanimous decision and then was knocked out by Mauricio “Shogun” Rua in one round.
In the same amount of time since their bout, Ortiz lost a decision to Matt Hamill, rebounded with an impressive submission win over Ryan Bader, got knocked out in the second round in a rematch with Rashad Evans and lost by knockout in the first to Nogueira.
Ortiz is also four years older than Griffin at 36 years old.
Griffin has been in enough wars that at 32 his body may be stalling, but Ortiz’s has finally given out. Whatever Ortiz had left in the tank after their match at UFC 106 he left in the cage with Bader.
Now he is spent, while Griffin has a little left to beat down Ortiz and either walk out of the cage with a win or continue to fight on.
No matter what either man does, if they decide to face each other Ortiz will need to pray for a miracle. At this point, it is the only thing that could get him a win.
Matthew Hemphill writes for the boxing, MMA and professional wrestling portion of Bleacher Report. He also hosts a blog, elbaexiled.blogspot.com, which focuses on books, music, comic books, video games, film and generally anything that could be related to the realms of nerdom.
After a resurgent victory over Ryan Bader in July, former UFC champion Tito Ortiz again finds himself on the brink of the end after suffering a two-fight skid.In his last couple of outings, Ortiz was stopped on strikes at the hands of rival Rashad Evan…
After a resurgent victory over Ryan Bader in July, former UFC champion Tito Ortiz again finds himself on the brink of the end after suffering a two-fight skid.
In his last couple of outings, Ortiz was stopped on strikes at the hands of rival Rashad Evans and former Pride star Antonio Rogerio Nogueira. The Brazilian wilted the fighter formerly known as “The Huntington Beach Bad Boy” with a knee to the body followed by mounting ground-and-pound blows.
The slow demise of Ortiz is not unlike any other fighter of his era. Former champions Randy Couture, Chuck Liddell and Matt Hughes have all exited the sport on the crux of their own respective careers, with each succumbing to knockout losses in their final bouts.
Ortiz has no delusions of grandeur. The would-be UFC Hall of Famer foresees his own end. However, he calls for one last bout before he hangs up his gloves once and for all.
A battle between Forrest Griffin seems to be the most logical of choices, since both men have split two contentious decision wins between one another. A rubber match would seem to be a fitting end for either man, with the original Ultimate Fighter having since discussed his own looming exit from the sport.
While exceptionally well-rounded, Griffin has always had trouble with adept wrestlers. Ortiz may not have the same decisive and explosive power double which characterized his early accomplishments, but he still wields an unbridled strength which rivals most in the division.
Given his expert-like ground-and-pound blows and Griffin’s inability to come out of any fight unscathed, Ortiz will be able to muscle down the wilting fighter to the mat where his devastating array of punches and elbows will be enough to roll over the former world champion.
Whether the fight ends quickly or goes the distance will be irrelevant. If Ortiz wants to be among the few fighters to leave the Octagon with a win intact, he will do his best to close the final chapter of his career with no regrets.
Most fighters who have won just once in the past five years no longer have a career in the UFC. Not only is Tito Ortiz still under contract for one more fight, he seemingly is going to get to have a say on who his final fight will be against.There have…
Most fighters who have won just once in the past five years no longer have a career in the UFC. Not only is Tito Ortiz still under contract for one more fight, he seemingly is going to get to have a say on who his final fight will be against.
There have been numerous rumors of Chuck Liddell and Rampage Jackson, but the one that has the most legs is that of Forrest Griffin.
Ortiz and Griffin have faced off twice before. In 2006, Ortiz won via split decision. Griffin returned the favor at UFC 106 in 2009 with a split decision win of his own.
When fans think of Griffin, they either envision the classic fight against Stephan Bonnar at The Ultimate Fighter 1 Finale or they think of the man who was embarrassed by Anderson Silva. Many are saying this could be Griffin’s last fight as well.
A date hasn’t been set, nor has the fight contract even been signed. However, it’s never too early to breakdown a potential fight to settle the trilogy between these two UFC veterans.
Heart and Desire
If you follow Ortiz on Twitter or just listen to his tone in interviews, you get the sense that he may not even want to go through the motions of training for this last fight. His emotions peaked when he beat Ryan Bader, but two straight losses have put Tito back on a losing streak. Let’s face it, he’s been doing a lot more losing (six times) than winning (once) since 2006.
Griffin has never taken himself seriously. His attitude toward his UFC career is as goofy as his face. At times it looks like he doesn’t want to be a fighter and other times he is as amped as anybody we’ve ever seen. We’ll know within the first two minutes of the fight how bad Griffin wants to win.
Overall Skill Level
When you watch Ortiz fight against today’s top opponents, it has become increasingly evident that the sport has started to pass him by. Ortiz made his most impressive run as a fighter from 2000 to 2006. At that time, to have great wrestling skills along with decent striking was enough to be successful.
Today’s successful fighters demand so much more. Griffin has also been humbled by how well-rounded the rest of the UFC roster have become. He came into the UFC as somebody who would rely heavily on throwing haymakers. As time went on and the sport evolved, he was able to keep up by evoking more leg kicks and falling back on his good ground game.
Now at the tail end of their careers, both fighters get banged up easier early on in fights. Griffin’s chin is one step away from being that of Chuck Liddell’s, and Ortiz can’t seem to sustain blows to the body like he once did.
This fight, should it come to fruition, will by no means be a “cane and walker” fight. I just wouldn’t suggest you bank on them going at it with guns blazing for an entire three rounds.
What Tito Ortiz Needs to do to Win
The Huntington Beach Bad Boy/People’s Champ will need to capture lightning in a bottle like he did against Bader to beat Forrest Griffin.
Ortiz’s body has become too soft to absorb the hard shots like it could a few years ago. He is going to have to avoid damage to the body. Thankfully for him, Griffin is not known for attacking the midsection.
What Forrest Griffin Needs to do to Win
Many people don’t realize the brutal talent Griffin has faced over the last four years. In that period of time he has faced Shogun Rua (twice), Rampage Jackson, Anderson Silva, Rich Franklin, and of course Tito Ortiz.
Griffin is 4-3 in those seven fights. Should he face Ortiz this year, it would easily be the most favorable matchup he has had during that span. The Tito Ortiz of 2012 is a long ways off from the Tito Ortiz of 2009.
In order to secure a win against Ortiz, Forrest needs to have the same type of game plan that he had for his fight against Rampage. Crisp kicks to the legs of Ortiz will limit the effectiveness of a potential takedown attempt by Ortiz and make him question his will early on in the fight.
We’ve all seen what happens to Ortiz once he gets a few hard shots as of late. He seems to go in shutdown mode. If Forrest can get off to a good start in the first round and mix in kicks and effective striking while stuffing Ortiz’s takedowns, then he should win by an easy decision.
Who Will Win
Forrest Griffin—easily. Ortiz hasn’t shown us anything in over five years except for a flash punch that dropped Bader and allowed himself to secure the submission. Griffin, while not as sharp or durable as he once was has faced elite competition on a continuous basis, and has had much more success as of late than Ortiz has.
This fight would go to a decision and Griffin would walk out victorious should this event take place.
Filed under: UFCIt probably tells us something that UFC president Dana White knew he hated ESPN’s Outside the Lines segment on fighter pay well before he saw it. One gets the sense that he hated the topic more than the source or the approach, and the U…
It probably tells us something that UFC president Dana White knew he hated ESPN’s Outside the Lines segment on fighter pay well before he saw it. One gets the sense that he hated the topic more than the source or the approach, and the UFC’s heavy-handed response to the story only confirms that this is a conversation the UFC would probably rather stop before it starts.
ESPN tells us that many UFC fighters are practically despondent about their pay, even if it can’t name any of them or produce any meaningful, verifiable financial figures that make the case. The piece questions Lorenzo Fertitta’s claim that the UFC pays somewhere “in the neighborhood” of half its revenue to fighters, as most major sports leagues do, but it can’t disprove it. And when ESPN’s John Barr says he’s spoken with “more than 20 current, former, and potential UFC fighters,” the savvy viewer is right to stop and ask just what he means by “potential” UFC fighters, and how many of the former fighters are guys like Ken Shamrock, who is the only fighter quoted in the piece, and who is, shall we say, not the most reliable or unbiased of sources on the topic.
In response, the UFC crafted a clever little piece of propaganda featuring interviews with fighters Forrest Griffin, Chuck Liddell, and Matt Serra, all of whom have nothing but positive things to say about how the UFC compensates its fighters. Shocking right? And here I thought that when the UFC showed up at Griffin’s house with a camera he’d have used the opportunity to unload on his employers with one bitter complaint after another. And who could have guessed that Liddell, who was given a cushy, do-nothing corporate gig with the UFC once his fighting days were finished, would be so supportive? Never saw that one coming, I tell you.
The UFC loves to tout its post-fight bonuses, all that off-the-books money that it gives away out of sheer generosity and appreciation, and it does so again in its video rebuttal. It’s true that the UFC literally gives away money that it doesn’t have to. I’ve talked to dozens of fighters who have told me stories of White writing them a check that they didn’t earn, contractually speaking. I’ve also talked to fighters who thought they went out of their way to hype a fight or put on a great show, only to have the UFC pat them on the back and send them on their way without the extra monetary appreciation they were expecting.
The current bonus system keeps fighters in a constant state of financial anticipation. They know the big money is out there somewhere, but unlike in most employer/employee relationships, it isn’t laid out in print anywhere exactly what they need to do to get their hands on it. In that sense, fighters are like a primitive tribe of people worshipping inscrutable gods. They keep putting different offerings on the altar, trying different dances to make it rain. Sometimes it rains, and sometimes it doesn’t. Some guys are thirstier than others. Some guys are better dancers.
One thing the ESPN piece and the UFC response have in common is a lack of detailed financial information. For a conversation entirely about money, there aren’t a lot of numbers being thrown around here. ESPN would probably blame the UFC for that, arguing that because it doesn’t release information about how much it makes and how much it pays out, we can’t really know whether Fertitta’s claims are accurate. That’s true, but as Fertitta points out, the UFC doesn’t have to release any of that information, and it’s definitely not going to invite a closer scrutiny of its books if it doesn’t have to. What company would?
But this argument gets us nowhere. ESPN says fighters want more money, which isn’t at all hard to believe. So do NFL and NBA players. The difference is how they go about getting it.
It’s easy to swat the UFC upside the head about fighter pay and ask why it isn’t sharing a bigger slice of the revenue pie with fighters, but it’s also naive. Why should the UFC be the lone company in this capitalist dogfight of ours to simply decide, out of sheer altruism, to give more and take less? If fighters are really unhappy with the deal they’re getting from the UFC, they need to do what athletes in every other major pro sport have done: form a union.
What would it take to form a fighter union? The same thing it takes in any industry: a willingness to stand together, and the participation of a few key people. If Georges St. Pierre, Jon Jones, and Anderson Silva banded together with a few of the lower-tier fighters, the UFC would have little choice but to recognize their union. If it didn’t — if it decided instead to cut its top three champions for daring to organize — it would bring such an avalanche of bad publicity down upon itself that it would wish it had signed a blank check instead. A mess like that could easily end in congressional hearings and a sponsor exodus, and no one at the UFC wants either.
Then again, what do GSP, Jones, and Silva need a union for? They’re doing fine as it is. They’re rich and well taken care of by the UFC, so why speak up and potentially cost themselves money? Why should they care what Octagon newbies are getting paid?
In other words, the people who are most capable of creating a union and addressing issues like fighter pay and general transparency are the people who need it least. It’s pointless to address these complaints to the UFC, which isn’t going to simply decide to give away more money just to keep reporters away. Instead, bring it up with GSP. Bring it up with Dan Henderson and Frankie Edgar. Ask them if they’re willing to do what’s necessary to secure a better future for the fighters of tomorrow, even if it means angering the UFC brass today.
That might be a harder sell in the fight business than it is among pro baseball or football players. Those guys are used to working together against a common foe, and maybe that makes it easier to unite them against greedy owners. MMA fighters, on the other hand, are more accustomed to a certain brand of self-reliance. They’re used to a world where there’s only one champ in each division, one man sitting at the head of the table and eating his fill for as long as he can hold on to the chair. They’re all certain that they’ll be that man some day, so none are eager to complain that he’s the only one getting a decent meal. You come into that world and tell them to unite in service of the fighters they either don’t know or don’t care about, and you might not get such a warm reception.
But this is how it’s gone in every pro sport. The NFL players of today might enjoy great salaries, solid pension plans, and health care for their later years when the bill for all they’ve done to their bodies comes due — all things that UFC fighters need and deserve — but they didn’t get it by waiting around for the owners to give it up voluntarily. It never works that way. Not in any business.
If fighters want to do something about their pay and their treatment in the UFC, it’s up to them to join together and make it happen. For that, they need powerful leaders who don’t need them. If those leaders decide it’s not worth it, that they’re doing just fine on their own, then at least we’ll have our answer. But asking the UFC when it’s going to fork over more money to fighters is like asking a CEO when he’s going to give himself a pay cut so factory workers can get a raise. Change won’t come on its own, via some self-imposed sense of fairness. It’s going to take a struggle, and that struggle is going to have to begin with the fighters.
Filed under: MMA Media Watch, UFCUFC President Dana White promised before ESPN’s Outside the Lines reported on fighter pay that the UFC would release a video of Lorenzo Fertitta’s full, uncut interview with ESPN. But what the UFC actually posted online…
UFC President Dana White promised before ESPN’s Outside the Lines reported on fighter pay that the UFC would release a video of Lorenzo Fertitta’s full, uncut interview with ESPN. But what the UFC actually posted online on Monday was something more than that — it was a full-on rebuttal of the Outside the Lines report that featured not only Fertitta’s comments but also comments from White and some of the UFC’s fighters.
White introduced the UFC’s video by referring to the Outside the Lines report as a “piece of trash” and “one-sided.” And while Outside the Lines is generally well-respected for producing high-quality sports journalism, White also said he doesn’t respect the kind of journalism that ESPN does.
“They’re dirty, they lie, and they never really give you all the facts,” White said.
The UFC’s response makes the case that the pay scale in the UFC is better than the ESPN report would have had viewers believe, noting that many UFC fighters have become rich for what they did inside the Octagon. However, the Outside the Lines report didn’t dispute that — Outside the Lines acknowledged that the UFC’s best draws are doing well financially. Outside the Lines was more concerned with how much the entry-level fighters are making.
Where the UFC’s rebuttal report is lacking is in offering any specifics about how much money the low-tiered fighters are making. Fighters like Chuck Liddell, Forrest Griffin and Matt Serra are featured saying they’re satisfied with their pay, but those three guys are popular former champions. There still isn’t a lot of information available about how much entry-level fighters are making. Fertitta says specific payroll numbers are not something the UFC is interested in revealing.
“We’re not hiding anything from anybody, it’s just that we don’t publish it for everybody to see,” Fertitta says. “We’re not a public company. There’s no reason for us to do that.”
The strongest part of the UFC’s response comes at the very end, where Ken Shamrock is shown after his final UFC fight talking about how much money he made in the UFC. Shamrock was featured on ESPN talking about how fighters don’t get paid enough by the UFC, so that quote from Shamrock is a strong rebuttal.
But featuring Shamrock is something of a distraction from the real issue at hand. The issue isn’t whether well-known fighters like Shamrock are making good money, it’s whether the undercard fighters are making good money.
The UFC has also chosen not to release information about how much fighters are making from sources like sponsorships and pay-per-view bonuses. For some fighters, those sources of income represent more than what they make in their purses. But we don’t know for sure which fighters are getting those kinds of bonuses because the UFC has chosen to keep that information private.
Ultimately, Outside the Lines and the ESPN response offered two sides of a story. And neither side has told the whole story.
UPDATE: Later on Monday the UFC posted the entire 47-minute interview with Fertitta on YouTube. That video is below.
Filed under: UFCUFC welterweight David Mitchell got his first hint that fighting in Brazil would be a little different than your average Las Vegas fight night when he was in the airport on his way down to Rio de Janeiro. While waiting for his flight, h…
UFC welterweight David Mitchell got his first hint that fighting in Brazil would be a little different than your average Las Vegas fight night when he was in the airport on his way down to Rio de Janeiro. While waiting for his flight, he got to talking to a Brazilian traveler about his role in the UFC’s first event in Brazil in over a decade, and he casually mentioned that he was slated to fight Paulo Thiago — an accomplished, but far from famous welterweight, by North American standards.
“He told me that Paulo had just done a big movie or something,” Mitchell recalled. “I thought, okay, whatever.”
The movie, Tropa de Elite, was actually a wildly popular Brazilian film about the BOPE — an elite police unit that Thiago serves in. It was also the source of Thiago’s entrance music when he and Mitchell squared off at the HSBC Arena in Rio that Saturday night, and the response from the crowd was enough to jar Mitchell out of his pre-fight game face, if only for a moment.
“I think he got the biggest response from the crowd of anybody,” Mitchell said of Thiago. “I didn’t expect him to be so popular. It was just an electric environment. When I walked out to go fight, it was just 15,000 Brazilians spitting snake venom at me.”
For foreign fighters — but especially Americans going up against Brazilians — it’s a unique fight night environment, and one that not all fighters are fully prepared for when they arrive.
“Some guy just told me I was going to die,” Forrest Griffin said moments after arriving at the open workouts on Rio’s famed Cobacabana Beach. “But he said it in very poor English, so I was able to ignore him.”
‘Hostile’ is one word to describe the environment for visiting fighters. All week long, at press events and weigh-ins, they were greeted by gleeful chants of ‘Vai morrer!’ You’re going to die. Granted, it seemed good-natured and not at all intended literally by most fans, but as some fighters admitted later, it was a little unsettling the first time they heard the translation.
Unlike in the U.S., where fans might start up the occasional ‘USA’ chant but generally spread their loyalties out according to their own individual whims, the Brazilian fans tend to be both exuberant and unanimous in support of their countrymen.
“They’re so passionate,” said UFC lightweight Spencer Fisher, who faced Brazilian Thiago Tavares at UFC 134. “The Americans, it seems like they’re always for whoever wins. If a guy’s losing they don’t like him, but if he comes back they’ll switch sides. But in Brazil, they’re country strong and they’re loyal.”
Fisher, too, was met with a partisan crowd when he walked to the cage — and like Mitchell, he also ended up on the losing end that night. But also like Mitchell, Fisher insisted that the hostile environment didn’t affect his performance in the cage.
“I remember Jose Aldo saying once about the Americans, ‘They can scream all they want to, because I don’t understand what they’re saying.’ I kind of felt the same way.”
If anything, the enthusiastic reception — whether negative or positive — actually helped fighters like Mitchell, who came into the bout struggling with a neck injury that required a cortisone shot just to get him into the cage, he said.
“Honestly, after everything I’d been through, dealing with injuries and a real difficult training camp, it was like I had to go fight this guy in his hometown or I was going to get cut. After all that, the crowd, if anything, was a positive,” said Mitchell. “It was a charged atmosphere, like a World Cup game or something.”
That’s something that Anthony Johnson‘s coach, Mike Van Arsdale, is planning on when it’s his fighter’s turn to take on Vitor Belfort at UFC 142.
“Anything like that, whether they want him to win or don’t want him to win, he feeds off that. It’s like Rashad Evans, everywhere he goes they boo him. It makes him fight better. I hope they don’t cheer for Rashad ever. I really do.”
For American heavyweight Brendan Schaub, who took on Brazilian MMA legend Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira on the card, it helped that he’d had a chance to come down a couple months before the bout for an early press conference. He even paid for an extended stay out of his own pocket to do some training and visit the favelas as part of a community outreach program, which made him a little more comfortable when he returned for the fight, he said.
“It was definitely hostile once the fight got going, but one thing I did right was getting down there and embracing the culture and giving back to the community. I think that went a long ways.”
Of course, Schaub, Fisher, and Mitchell all lost that night, as did most foreigners on the card. Of the eight fights that pitted a Brazilian against an outsider, only one — Stanislav Nedkov’s TKO of Luiz Cane — didn’t go the way the crowd wanted it to. It’s one thing for fighters to say the environment didn’t play a factor, but it clearly didn’t help much either.
And yet, the fighters said, once their bouts were over it was as if all the vitriol vanished immediately. They were no longer the enemy. Suddenly they were beloved former foes, and were embraced with the same energy that had gone into despising them moments before.
“When I came out they were booing me, hating me, but I think I earned their respect,” said Mitchell. “When I walked back people were cheering for me and hugging me. This little kid wanted my hat, so I gave it to him. I ended up just kind of cruising around and meeting people. I met the mayor of Rio. It was really cool.”
Even Schaub, who suffered a heartbreaking knockout loss, managed to make the most of the sun, sand, and surf once the fight was over.
“Obviously, I planned on it going a different way, so it wasn’t the best time,” he said. “Still, it’s never a bad time when you’re on the beach in Brazil.”
For Fisher, the post-fight experience ended up being even worse than fight itself. While playing pool volleyball with “Shogun” Rua the next day, he said, he felt as if he’d gotten water in his eye. The sensation didn’t go away all day, and continued even when he returned to the U.S.
“It just kept getting worse and worse,” he said. “I was like, man, how can I still have water in my eye? Then we started boxing and right away I could tell it was something else. That’s when I realized my retina was detached.”
Five months later, Fisher still doesn’t have full vision back in his eye. His doctors tell him it was likely a mix of accumulated damage and blows he took in the fight that night in Rio, and his peripheral vision still hasn’t returned.
“They said I’ll never have the 20/20 vision I had before. Now I’m near-sighted,” Fisher said. “So it was good trip, but a bad one at the same time.”
Tito Ortiz lost badly against Antonio Rogerio Nogueira in their bout at UFC 140. Afterward he claimed he had one match left on his contract and he hoped Dana White would let him compete one last time.
It probably tells us something that UFC president Dana White knew he hated 
UFC President Dana White promised before ESPN’s Outside the Lines reported on fighter pay that the UFC would release a video of Lorenzo Fertitta’s full, uncut interview with ESPN. But what the UFC actually posted online on Monday was something more than that — it was a full-on rebuttal of the Outside the Lines report that featured not only Fertitta’s comments but also comments from White and some of the UFC’s fighters.
UFC welterweight