Hella Nation - Evan Wright [96]
A couple years after the Gracies’ gym opened, a Los Angeles advertising executive and former Marine named Art Davie and Hollywood screenwriter John Milius, best known for writing Apocalypse Now and Conan the Barbarian, witnessed a Gracie-style tournament at the gym. They were so impressed, they soon formed a partnership with the Gracies to stage televised no-holds-barred contests under the name Ultimate Fighting Championship.
Milius saw the formation of the UFC as a rebellion against prevailing values. “It was the height of political correctness,” says Milius. “Men had lost their manhood in America. We wanted to create real martial arts to celebrate the manly virtues—courage, combat.” Milius pushed the UFC in the direction of staging its fights as spectacles. “We put the fighters in an octagon because Conan fought in an octagon pit,” says Milius. “We wanted it to be savage. We wanted people to see this and say, ‘My God! They’re doing gladiatorial combat on TV!’”
While the original UFC founders succeeded in creating public outrage even beyond their expectations—even though no fighters ever suffered permanent injuries or death—those paying attention to the actual fighting witnessed an interesting trend. As expected, early fights were invariably won by Gracie-trained fighters, but within a couple of years American collegiate and Olympic wrestlers, who revived old catch-as-catch-can submissions and choke holds and cross-trained in jujitsu, boxing and kickboxing, soon dominated the sport.
Even after the UFC was driven from mainstream venues, the thriving underground of UFC-inspired, no-holds-barred fighting had taken root in America. According to Todd Hester, editor of a magazine called Grappling, which is dedicated to the no-holds-barred fighting underground and which claims, believe it or not, a monthly circulation of about seventy-five thousand, “There’s a simple reason UFC-style fighting caught on. There is no professional sport for collegiate wrestlers. Suddenly, the UFC came along, and they had a place to go after college.”
TITO ORTIZ IS CERTAIN THAT if it hadn’t been for high school wrestling he would have gone to prison like many of his friends. He was born Jacob Ortiz in Huntington Beach, south of Los Angeles, to parents of mixed Hispanic and Anglo ancestry. His parents, who according to Tito both became hard-core drug addicts, raised him in affluent Southern California’s poor underbelly. “We lived from motel to motel,” says Tito. “Sometimes we slept in a car, or in a camper in someone’s backyard.”
Pro wrestling was his first interest in life. So deeply did he escape into its fantasy world, by the age of nine he started calling himself “Tito” after Tito Santana, the pro wrestler. “I just wanted to be tough,” says Tito.
By the time he reached his early teens, Tito had been in and out of various schools and street gangs. “Tito didn’t ever want nothing but to be a damn junkyard dog,” says his mother, Jacqueline.
It was during his sophomore year at Huntington Beach High School that Tito was recruited onto the wrestling team by a new assistant wrestling coach named Paul Herrera, then twenty-three years old. Herrera says when he arrived in his new coaching job he asked who the toughest kid was in the school. Everyone told him it was Tito Ortiz. Herrera says, “So I went looking for him.”
Tito was scrawny, underdeveloped for his age. At fifteen, he was five-seven and weighed 130 pounds. But, Herrera says, “that kid was an animal.”
Herrera pressed Tito onto the team, claiming he “chain-locked the doors to the wrestling room to keep the bad influences away.” Before tournaments, Herrera forced Tito to pray. “I don’t care what people say about prayer in school,” he says. “I told Tito, ‘You have to choose between God and the Devil. To be a wrestler, you need to be of sound body and of sound soul.’”
After high school Tito placed in state tournaments and wound up in the legendary wrestling program at CSU Bakersfield. But here, according to assistant coach Tom Caspieri, “Tito was not successful.” He left without receiving