Former UFC superstar Tito Ortiz to sign with affliction

Tito Ortiz will sign with Affliction in a deal that’ll be formally announced in a matter of days, if not sooner. At this point all that remains to be finalized are minor details of a deal that will likely make Ortiz the highest paid fighter in MMA history. Sources close to the organization indicate that much of the deal will consist of “backend” type compensation including a higher than average cut of t-shirt, ticket and PPV sales. The UFC has the right to match any offer but are extremely unlikely to do so. As UFC President Dana White quipped at the time of Ortiz’s release, he wouldn’t match such an offer if he was “getting $30 a fight”.

It’s easy to dismiss Ortiz’s signing as a case of a company paying higher than market value for an over the hill fighter, but that assessment is incorrect. It’s important to remember that Tito was essentially buried by UFC President Dana White during the last few years of his tenure with the promotion.  With the exception of an early setback to Guy Metzger, his career losses have come to a who’s who of the sport—Chuck Liddell (twice), Randy Couture, Frank Shamrock, and Lyoto Machida.

And the names that Ortiz has beaten are equally impressive: longtime PRIDE light heavyweight champion Wanderlei Silva, current UFC light heavyweight champion Forrest Griffin, Patrick Cote (who’s the next challenger to UFC middleweight king Anderson Silva), Vitor Belfort (who’s fighting Matt Lindland for the WAMMA lightweight title on the 2nd Affliction card), former King of Pancrase Yuki Kondo, and Ken Shamrock (three times). While the ultimate determination will be made in the ring, it could very well be a case that Ortiz isn’t on the downside of his career but simply wasn’t put in a position to succeed by his former employer.

More importantly for Affliction, however, is the fact that Ortiz is one of the most polarizing figures in the history of the sport. There’s no middle ground with Tito—fans either love him and his “Huntington Beach Bad Boy” persona or they hate him and want to see him get his face smashed in. In other words, he’s a promotional gold mine evidenced by the fact that he was involved in both the highest rated MMA program on broadcast TV (Ortiz vs. Shamrock 3 in 2006) as well as the highest buy rate for a MMA PPV event in history (UFC 66 vs. Chuck Liddell). In a sport full of likeable ‘regular guys’ who just so happen to be excellent fighters, Ortiz is a legitimate rock star.

Ortiz is scheduled to make his debut at the 2nd Affliction card, “Day of Reckoning” which will be held in Las Vegas on October 11th. His opponent will be another former UFC “bad boy”, Renato “Babalu” Sobral, in what should be an interesting contrast of styles with Tito’s power game up against the world class Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu skills of Sobral. “Babalu” is already very popular among the Affliction fan base so this should be a very highly anticipated matchup and one that’ll move a lot of t-shirts for the company promoting the event.