Oh, Tito versus Chuck.
Look, I don't know that anything happened that wasn't expected to happen.
Did it?
Now, the match itself I will fully concede you was a bit of a surprise.
In fact, you know what, let's start there.
No, let's not start there.
Let's end there.
Let's just start with the night, okay?
I don't know that anybody was stunned.
I thought that the production was good.
I have seen excellent production, I have seen extraordinary production, I have seen great
production – it was good.
I thought it was good.
The card was not loaded.
We knew that.
We knew these things coming in, so I don't think firing any shots after the bell here
really makes us some kind of geniuses.
It was more that we just got what we expected to get.
I thought there was good talent.
I thought Deron Winn looked really good.
You know, for the few of you that watched the show, I thought one of the bigger storylines
maybe was Deron Winn.
I've known him for a meaningful period of time.
He was an amateur wrestler.
I knew that he could go out and do those things, but to actually walk out in a large venue,
in a co-main-event spot, and do them are totally different, and do them against a very tough
gritty veteran in Lawlor.
So, okay, that was one of the highlights.
I thought that the crowd, whether they papered the house, which means to give tickets away,
whether they begged them to come in, bussed them in, I don’t really know that it makes
a damn bit of difference.
I've been on some smaller shows where they papered the house and you still couldn't get
anybody to come.
I don't know that it makes a difference.
They had people in that building.
I would guess they probably had 6000 people in the building.
If I was to give you a prediction before that show I would have hit it more about 4500,
so I wouldn't have been terribly off but I would've been off.
I thought that was a good sign for them.
Get to the main event.
Tito’s walkout—I actually watched this fight with the Godfather and Joel thought
that it was just terrible from a level of production.
He thought that the walkout was terrible.
And I believe it was Fred Durst who sang the song but the song starts out and says, “Who's
in the house?
Who’s in the house?” says that over and over again and then they give you the answer,
“Tito is in the house,” and it's kind of done by acoustics and it's a little bit
cheesy.
However, I loved it.
I thought it was great because that's the same walkout and the same level of production
going way back to like UFC 14 that Tito had come out to, and at that time that was like
cutting edge that Fred Durst was singing and was by your side.
You know, I think Fred Durst is with Limp Bizkit if I remember correctly, but they were
a big band at the time.
He was a very famous guy and all of a sudden he was involved in MMA on some level, which
was just Tito, but then he even sang Tito a song.
I can just tell you, guys, for that moment in time when that first happened it was a
cool moment, and yes, you might have watched it this weekend or heard about it from this
weekend and it was a cheesy moment.
Well, be a little bit nostalgic here.
I thought it was very cool but I also got it, okay?
And it also did make me very grateful for where the sport is at today because when—on
the weekend people were laughing at this, but to take you back the first time that it
was done and the level of production and the cameras and the expense, or I should say lack
of production cameras and expense, it was really cool at the time.
It just shows you how much the sport has grown.
So, I don’t fully agree with people on that.
All of a sudden, Chuck walks out.
Chuck’s got a pretty cool walkout.
He comes out, one of the first guys I've ever seen limp to the ring.
And Chuck has a bit of a distinguished walk and I don't know what else to refer, but as
he was walking to the ring I was thinking, and I hadn't seen Chuck walk in a while, I
was thinking, “Is that that distinguished walk, if you will, or is he limping?”
I was never clear.
I still don't know that I have the answer, but as Chuck went to the ring I thought, “Well,
something seems amiss here.”
So the fight starts and, not for nothing, both of these guys physically looked very
good.
They both worked for this moment.
I think they should get some credit and that's probably about as nice as I can get in this
whole thing, so there's nice Chael and now let's get down to the realness of what we
saw.
Look, I don't know that we should have been surprised.
Chuck did not leave this sport on his own eight years ago.
Chuck was forced out of the sport.
So he was not on a high note then.
He was not a very dangerous athlete when he left.
We do not get better at something by not doing it, so eight years later to make believe that
a guy is going to come in as good as he was when he left or better, which is only in make-believe
land and somewhere in our brains we do tend to do that, with absolutely to training footage—and
I know you guys are going to say, “Well, you know, I saw Chuck hitting some mitts.”
That's not training footage.
There are people that hit mitts that will never get in there to compete.
Training footage is sparring.
Not only did we never see any sparring, we never even heard rumors of it.
We never even heard interviews of guys saying, “Yeah, you know what, I sparred with Chuck
the other day and thought he looked pretty good,” or “Yeah, I sparred with Chuck
and he's got some stuff to work…”
We never heard those words, and we live in a small community here.
There are only so many gyms and so many trainers.
You got a big-name guy like Chuck in the world of social media, somebody’s going to talk
about it.
We never saw a picture anywhere, a video anywhere or even somebody speak on it and say, “I
sparred with Chuck.”
So when he goes out there and competes and he can't hit anything but the air, I don't
know that we should be stunned.
Anybody can look good on pads.
Anybody can look bad on pads.
One’s got nothing to do with the other.
That's nothing more than a cardio bust, get your heart rate up a little bit, work on your
timing.
A mitt workout is largely how you sell people to come into your gym because they see it
on TV and it looks cool and you can leave them with a false sense that they know how
to fight.
It's like the karate business.
You don’t ever put the kid actually in there with an opponent, you have him punch the air
and then you assure him after practice that if his father continues to pay $114 a month
every month, you'll continue to make his kid a dangerous weapon.
That's all mitts are.
I see a lot of you weigh in on the mitts or how somebody looked on a mitt.
You can look good on mitts or you can look bad on mitts.
It's got nothing to do with anything.
You have to be in front of an opponent sparring and we never even heard a rumor, a leaked
footage, a training video, a caption, a snapshot on social media, ever, that Chuck had done
that.
So, when you go out and watch him compete, I thought that it became pretty clear, yeah,
we hadn't heard of any of those things because it simply didn't happen.
He couldn't find his target.
And when you guys watch that on TV, you will think that's very easy.
You'll think that's very easy to do to walk out and punch somebody.
You'll think what you need to work on is your combinations or your power or your endurance
to be able to continue to do it.
I can tell you if you were not a trained fighter and you go to throw a punch at something that
is moving, it doesn’t just happen.
It's really hard to do.
Trained fighters that take a few months off, take a break, have an injury, come back in
the room, that's the first thing they have to work on.
They literally can't make a punch and touch that target in front of them if it's moving.
It's a range issue, it's a timing issue and it's a repetitive muscle issue.
It's the only way you can be able to do it.
It's very complex.
It looks easy on TV, but if you ever actually go out and try to do it, it's very hard to
hit something that doesn’t want to be it.
So if Chuck wasn’t practicing that and he was only hitting the mitts, you could see
why he couldn't find Tito.
I don't think that Chuck is as slow as he appeared on TV.
A lot of people were saying he was slow.
What I was seeing from more of a trained eye was he didn't know where the target was.
A couple of times it looked like he was throwing punches.
He was more putting his hand out there trying to see where's this guy at and Tito doesn’t
even have a whole lot of movement.
Tito’s not Mr. Fast and Chuck just simply couldn't find him, and that's because he didn't
have the repetitiveness in the gym.
Now, many people are instantly calling for Chuck to retire and saying, “We never want
to see that again.”
That is one theory.
That is one theory and that is a reality that every fighter will face at some point, and
frankly, so will the football players and the baseball players and the basketball—everybody
will experience that at some point.
That point could be now, but I will just tell you the other side of the coin.
The other side of the coin is you don’t have to give in to that.
The other side of the coin is you can go out there and learn from that experience and say,
“I'm going to get better.”
The other side of the coin is you can say, “I froze up and here's why.”
The other side of the coin would be, “I could not find my target but here's why,”
and maybe I just accurately identified it, which is he was hitting too many mitts, jumping
too much rope and not having an opponent in front of him enough in something called sparring.
Perhaps that terrible performance that he had will be the worst performance that we've
ever seen him have and perhaps he never returns to that again; he only gets better.
I will share with you openly that I do not know the answer to this because I do not know
Chuck’s lifestyle and I do not know how hard he trained for this.
I know he did not have his long-time coach, Coach Hackleman, in his corner I believe for
the first time in his career.
I do not believe that Coach Hackleman was even part of the training.
I say that because Chuck was training in LA and Coach Hackleman lives in San Luis Obispo.
So I don't think that they were even together, and when you change things up like that—I
would love to know the back story.
I would love to know why he did not train with Coach Hackleman, who led him to multiple
world championships.
I would love to know what happened there.
But it still does come back to the preparation and the training, and to say that Chuck is
done because he had a bad day, I will simply remind you guys, so do you.
So do you, you just don’t have a camera on you.
Whatever profession you're in, all of you have gone to work, gone home that night and
went, “Ooh, that wasn’t a good day.
Ooh, hope nobody knows that I did that today.
Glad nobody saw that,” and then you're going to fix it the next day.
You're going to come back and do better; learn from your mistakes; make sure it doesn’t
happen again; wake up maybe on the better side of the bed, on a better note; go out,
have a better day.
When you're in this sport and you only get to go to work on camera one day in the last
eight years and it happens to be a bad day, you're busted.
You're caught.
There is no getting away with it.
There's no coming in tomorrow and doing better.
So I would just make sure to remind you of that.
If it is an age issue and that's a very real thing and we do not get better with time as
human beings, sadly, if that is what’s happened, then we can address that, too.
But I would like to encourage anybody on the mindset that if you go out and have a day
at work and it doesn’t go well, you do not have to concede and lay down and roll over
and get up.
You can get up the next day and work harder and try to fix it and move forward.
I think that that's going to be a hard thing for Chuck as much as I want to make that—I
think it's going to be a hard thing only because there is no lesser opponent he could ever
get than Tito Ortiz.
Tito’s terrible, and Chuck said as much.
That isn't just sour grapes by Chael.
Chuck said it.
Chuck goes, “Look, I'm fighting Tito because he's terrible.
He's the easiest opponent that I could possibly find and I want this as a warm-up fight,”
and Chuck wasn’t doing promotion.
Chuck doesn’t even understand that, trash talk and build something.
Chuck doesn’t get any of those things.
Chuck’s a very candid open guy, for better or worse.
He'll tell you good things, he'll tell you bad things, he'll tell you in between, but
if you ever want to know something on Chuck just ask him the question.
So when he came out and he said, “Look, Tito’s the easiest…” he wasn’t burying
Tito.
He was just being honest.
“You know, at my age and coming back, I'm a little apprehensive about this so I grabbed
the guy who isn't far from my age, who’s also been sitting on his ass, who also doesn’t
lead the cleanest lifestyle, and who I've whipped a couple of times easily.
That's why I want to fight…”
So if you were to take Chuck at his word and you should—he was very open and honest about
that and he was correct—where do you go?
Where do you go from there?
You can't just throw him in an under—“Oh, let's just give him an up-and-comer.”
Oh, that's the last thing you want.
The last thing you want is some up-and-comer.
So who would you give him?
And I heard some talk.
I must say this to weigh in on this personally, I heard some talk as I was roughing up the
debacle that was this event that Chael was pining for a fight with Chuck.
That's accurate by you guys.
That was very accurate by you if you would have said that on Friday.
After that fight, I will tell you in no uncertain terms I am not looking for a fight with Chuck.
I would not accept a fight with Chuck, including if that were offered to me.
I would not accept that fight.
So if any of you were thinking, “Oh, old Chael’s looking ahead here,” yeah, sure.
Sure.
Would love to have whipped both of those guys on Friday.
After I saw what I saw, we're good.