With his feud with Dana White in the past, Tito Ortiz looks ahead to Chuck Liddell, and recalls the business advice Donald Trump gave him back on The Celebrity Apprentice.
Tito Ortiz returns from retirement from the second time later this month, to fight Chuck Liddell for the third time. This time around, however, both will be stepping into new territory. Gone is the UFC octagon. Instead, the fight takes place under Oscar De La Hoya’s Golden Boy Promotions banner, as the former boxing champ turned promoter looks to break into the MMA realm.
To do so, he’s tapped into one of the greatest MMA grudge matches of all time. Yet asked what has kept the grudge going so long, Ortiz told Cageside Press on Tuesday that “I think you’re asking the wrong person that one. He’s the one who called me out. I was enjoying retirement. He called me out and said he wanted to kick my *ss. Well, cool. I’m down for the challenge.”
This particular challenge comes against a much older Liddell, but one who Ortiz admits “did beat me twice before. But I’m willing for redemption, I willing to get an opportunity of getting my hand raised.”
It’s an interesting case for redemption. Ortiz, after all, arguably had the better end to his career, going 3-1 in Bellator after exiting the UFC, the only loss coming in a title challenge against Liam McGeary. Yet as Ortiz pointed out, “there’s always a fight in me. I always want to prove people wrong, and this is an opportunity for me to make it happen.”
Ortiz, who has always been vocal about getting fighters paid, wasn’t exactly resting on his laurels in retirement. Asked about the key to securing the future for fighters, Ortiz recalled his time under now-President Donald Trump.
“When I worked for Donald Trump back in 2005 on The Celebrity Apprentice, I was the guy asking questions,” Ortiz recalled. “‘How do you become a billionaire? How do you become a millionaire?'”
“‘Well Tito,'” Trump told him, “‘I don’t stop working. From when I wake up in the morning at five in the morning until I go to bed at midnight, I don’t stop working.” Even sleeping, Trump told the UFC champ that he had others working for him. “‘I have a great team around me, and I try to get as many businesses as I possibly can start up. If they fail they fail, if the other ones take off, they take off. But I make sure I have more than one source of income coming in, and have five sources of income coming in each year to stay a millionaire.'”
Ortiz has tried to take that advice to heart. “I’ve been doing that. I have three so far,” he said. Those would be Tito Auto Group, a wholesale car company, Punishment Athletics, his clothing line, and Primetime 360, Ortiz’s management firm.
“And possibly now, doing promotion with Oscar De La Hoya,” he added, as “an arena promoter, giving back to those MMA fighters, so they’re able to be paid the great money, so they can invest their money as I did with my money.”
Trump wasn’t the only one to give Ortiz some sage advice. “Back when me and Dana White were friends, he says ‘Tito you need to invest in something they don’t make more of.’ I go, ‘what do you mean, they don’t make more of?’ He goes, ‘land!'”
That led to Ortiz purchasing his own home, and one for his mother. And as rich as Ortiz may be, what he truly feels makes him rich is his family. “I’m rich because my kids are happy, and that’s important.”
As far as Ortiz’s future in MMA, that’s unclear outside the pending bout with Liddell. But he doesn’t exactly consider this as coming out of retirement yet again, only because “with UFC, that was just to get away from the company.”
“I had to do it because I had to get my life in order, I had to get my kids in order. I went through a huge breakup with my ex, and I was able to get full custody of my children,” Ortiz explained. Besides that being the reason he left the UFC, “they weren’t treating me right, and I understood that.”
Now, however, “time has changed, me and Dana are cool now, but then I went to Bellator, and I tried to see if another promotion could treat me any better, and I was wrong. Then I was able to retire, and Chuck Liddell called me out.”
Ortiz seems to be looking at this as the start of something new, regardless of how long he sticks around. “Let’s do it one more time, but let’s start something new. Let me be the person at the forefront, the flag bearer, and start a company of Golden Boy MMA, able to give back to the fighters. And that’s what it’s all about.”
Liddell vs. Ortiz 3 takes place November 24 at The Forum in Inglewood, CA. The event airs live on PPV.
