Free This Is Gonna Hurt by Tito Ortiz

would even consider fighting. I was on a scholarship for wrestling. I would’ve lost that if I had fought for money. So as long as I could fight as an amateur, I thought I’d give it a shot.
    I started training with Tank Abbott late in 1997. Training for my first fight took six months. We would practice wrestling and jujitsu, we’d do a little bit of sparring like boxers do, and we’d run and lift weights. It was hard work, but I picked up on it really quickly.
    In a sense I had become Tank Jr. But as we continued to train, I found that there were some definite differences between us. I brought the hard training and the work ethic to the relationship. I worked my butt off, but Tank was always looking for the easy way out. He partied all the time. Tank’s attitude was always: “I’m going to fight and kick people’s asses, then go out and get drunk, and then go fight some more.” He was a fighter; he was no martial artist. His style was that of a bar brawler.
    A lot of people who have followed my career think that it began with the UFC. But they’re wrong. I just haven’t talked about the very first fight I had until now. It wasn’t really a legal, sanctioned fight, and it does not count on my professional record, but here it is…
    A few weeks before my UFC debut, I accepted an offer by a promoter named Larry Landis to fight this jujitsu guy in a high school gym in Rosemead, California. I took the fight as kind of checkpoint: I figured if I was going to fight in the UFC, I’d better see what I had at that point. The fight went to a draw—the main reason being that I was not real good at submissions back then and these jujitsu guys could take a pounding really well. But I can tell you that I gave this guy one of the worst beatings that he’d ever had in his life. And after that fight, I knew I was ready.
    The first time I fought in an Ultimate Fighting Championship event was on May 30, 1997. The event was called UFC 13: The Ultimate Force and I was fighting for Team Tank. When I entered the arena that night, I didn’t really know what to expect. There were about ten thousand screaming people in the stands, and the atmosphere of the place was just crazy. At that point, people saw UFC fights as human cockfights with no rules and no time limits. But there were rules, and each fight consisted of one fifteen-minute round.
    I remember climbing into the ring and pacing back and forth in the corner of the Octagon. I was thinking, Holy shit! I’m here! Don’t make a mistake.
    The guy I was fighting that night was Wes Albritton. Wes had a fifth-degree black belt in karate but no wrestling experience. The way the fight was promoted, Wes was on the striking side of the sport and I was on the grappling side of it.
    The fight lasted twenty-two seconds. I remember the bell ringing and I immediately got into a clinch. I grabbed a double underhook on him, body locked him, and threw him to the ground. Then I sat on his chest and started laying in punches. I won with a technical knockout for strikes.
    I was pumped. For me, it was a competition; I was competing to see who was the better man. That’s how I felt about it. The experience was really cool. Since it was on television, all my friends got to see me beating somebody up and I wasn’t getting in trouble for doing it. I was real pumped when we went back to the dressing room. And then I found out that I was going to have to fight again!
    It turns out that one of the four guys who was supposed to move on to the next round had gotten injured. I had been named his alternate, so before I could catch my breath, they put me back in and I was fighting in the finals.
    When I got back into the ring later that night, I was facing this guy named Guy Mezger. I remember walking back out and thinking, Oh shit! Who is this guy? Mezger was a pro. He had been fighting out of Japan for a time and he had championship credentials.