“Huntington Beach Bad Boy” Tito Ortiz was looking for respect with this past weekend's light heavyweight bout against his former charge Matt “The Hammer” Hamill.
But after suffering a tough loss at
UFC 121 in Anaheim, MMA pioneer Ortiz is now hearing talk that he's done–and he's talking himself about doing something completely different . . .
]
Wrestling.
“I need to get back to wrestling. I need to get back to my roots. . . . I'm
not a quitter. I'm going to continue on. It sucks to lose because I let
down a lot of my fans. I let down the UFC,” Ortiz said after the match (via Fightline.com).
He said taking a year off hurt him, as did having neck surgery, but he was proud of his effort against Hamill, who the Bad Boy coached in season three of The Ultimate Fighter.
“I've been in this game for 13 years,” he said. “I still feel like I have a
lot more in me.”
Others aren't so sure.
Ortiz, who is 0-4-1 in his last five fights, personally singled out White as among those he let down Saturday night.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.