Tito Ortiz: Bellator Knows What They’re Doing, Will Grow With The Sport Of MMA

Former UFC light heavyweight champion Tito Ortiz’s long-standing feud with Dana White has been a well-chronicled one. “The Huntington Beach Bad Boy” has always possessed a severe dislike for how the UFC does business, and the feeling was no doubt mutual.

The bad blood ultimately resulted in his release from the promotion after a decision loss to Forrest Griffin at UFC 148 in July 2012, his seventh loss in his last nine UFC bouts.

The oft-injured Ortiz made his way to Bellator and was immediately scheduled to fight fellow former UFC champ Quinton “Rampage” Jackson at the company’s first pay-per-view (PPV) event of Bellator 106 last November, but the card fell apart when he was forced out of yet another bout.

Ortiz will finally make his promotional debut at Bellator’s second attempt at a first PPV tonight (May 17, 2014) when he squares off with middleweight champion Alexander Shlemenko at Bellator 120 from the Landers Center in Southaven, Mississippi.

Having been employed by both the UFC and Bellator, the controversial MMA pioneer appeared on last night’s Inside MMA on AXS TV to discuss how the UFC evolved over the years, and how Bellator can and will catch up to their lofty standards:

“I was there in the ‘dark ages’ with the UFC, before Zuffa even took over; and just watching it get bigger, and bigger, and bigger, to where it’s a mega-company now. Bellator has, I think, has stepped up hugely over the last five years, and now is having their first pay-per-view. You know, they pretty much; they know what they’re doing. There’s a lot of things, I think, that the harder we work as a team to make this sport bigger, Bellator will get bigger as well.”

That’s obviously the goal that Bellator is working towards, but with a PPV headlined by a couple of aging UFC castoffs and their only truly marketable bout having fallen by the wayside (at least for the time being), the deck is heavily stacked against MMA’s second promotion.

They can go a long ways towards establishing themselves as a legitimate force with a great show later tonight, but given the massive amount of action that the UFC has been putting forth on free cards recently, they have some big shoes to fill.

Are you giving them a shot at growing bigger tonight, or will a failed attempt at a successful PPV only serve to make them look foolish?