Hella Nation - Evan Wright [93]
A moment later, he drops on the dressing room couch and stares moodily at his hands. They are large and covered in thick skin from months of training. If you shake Tito’s hand it feels like a brick wrapped in fine-grain sandpaper. Tonight, they tremble with inner tension. “It’s not fear,” he says. “I’m anxious to go into the ring and fight.”
About a dozen of his entourage surround him at all moments. The entourage includes his wife, Kristin—petite, blond, pretty and a former high school sweetheart, now pregnant—his two assistants, three martial trainers and a ragtag crew of fellow fighters who train with Tito under the name Team Punishment. Most are in their early twenties, with shaved heads and arms sleeved with tattoos. They are the kind of guys who work out so much, even their faces have big muscles. There seems to be a competition among them to grow the bushiest and most unusually shaped sideburns and chin beards. Most wear a sort of uniform of black shirts and toques with orange flames on them, matching those on Tito’s shorts. One of them carries Tito’s UFC championship belt slung over his shoulder at all times, a hefty black leather truss with a dinner plate-size gold medallion encrusted with bogus gems that fail to catch the light.
This is Tito’s thirteenth UFC fight. He entered the UFC in 1997 just as it was sliding into decline. Tito lost two early fights, but showed a willingness to learn new techniques, becoming what even an opponent’s coach calls “one of the most well-rounded fighters out there.”
By the time Tito won his first UFC belt in 1999, at a match held in virtual exile in Tokyo, he had honed a technique called “ground and pound.” It consists of throwing his opponents to the mat, pinning them and striking their heads in an explosion of fists and elbows. By the time the Fertittas took over the UFC, Tito’s ground-and-pound tactics had given him the mystique of invincibility. At a fight held in the Meadowlands last June, Tito grounded his opponent, an Australian martial arts champion, and pounded his face into a pretty fair approximation of hamburger meat, winning in under four minutes. In his bout prior to that, Tito scored a knockout in twenty-nine seconds by picking up his 210-pound opponent and dropping him on his head. “I don’t make friends with the guys Tito fights anymore,” his wife, Kristin, says. “I don’t like seeing what Tito does to them.”
Tito says that fighting for him is “strictly business.” He explains, “The other guy in the ring is trying to take away meal money from me, my wife and my kid that’s on the way. I’m ready to fight for it.”
Before the Fertittas took over the UFC, fighters weren’t earning much more than meal money, sometimes as little as a few hundred dollars for undercard fights and about $15,000 for championships. Under the new regime, champion prizes have zoomed to more than $150,000. Other benefits of its newfound legitimacy have followed. For the first time ever, Las Vegas Sports books are putting up numbers on UFC fights. Tito will be a featured character in UFC games being released for PlayStation 2 and Xbox. Jax Toys, a Mattel spin-off, is tooling up to make Tito Ortiz action figures for kids.
One of the last people to stop by Tito’s dressing room and wish him well before the Victory in Vegas fight is Mike Tyson. He enters wearing a dark sport coat, grinning broadly; he is backed by his own well-dressed mini-entourage. Through some unspoken rule of entourage etiquette, Tyson’s entourage and Tito’s do not mingle or exchange eye contact, while their respective entourage leaders engage in a friendly summit. Tyson smiles. He tells Tito he’s a big fan of his, then he balls his fist and taps Tito’s fist. “You’re gonna kill that guy,” Tyson