This Is Gonna Hurt by Tito Ortiz

trainers told me I had done a good job, but I was bummed. All I could think of was that I had lost my chance to be world champion.
    The sad thing was that I decided to let John go after that fight. His pushing the steroids was part of the problem, but it basically boiled down to not being able to trust the guy anymore.
    Right after the Shamrock fight, Saul Garcia and I also parted company. What it came down to was that Saul was in over his head. Yeah, he got me a couple of fights when I first started, but I was basically doing a lot of the work myself.
    As far as I was concerned, Saul was making bad business decisions and costing me money. When I fought Frank Shamrock, I was supposed to get $25,000. I only got $10,000. After signing the contract, I found out that the UFC said they were cutting my fee and Saul didn’t have the balls to go up against them. When I saw that, I said this isn’t going to happen again.
    The split was amicable at the beginning. But then I found out that Saul had gone out and made a DVD that said that he had made my career. He claimed that he was the one who told me to bleach my hair and to start wearing the T-shirts. The guy was just full of shit. He was telling nothing but lies, and I had to spend a lot of time in interviews disputing all the things he said.
    Some good did actually come out of the fight with Shamrock, though. That fight put me on a course to my first non-fighting business venture.
    After the fight a kid came up to me and asked if I had a T-shirt for sale that had my name on it. I told him I didn’t, but I thought about it afterward and it sounded like a pretty good idea. So I went home and got together with my brother Marty. He was raving about the punishment I had given Shamrock, and the word “punishment” kind of stuck in my head. I looked up the definition of the word and found that “to punish” meant to threaten or cause severe damage. So I got the idea to put the word “Punishment” on a T-shirt with TitoOrtiz.com under it. I kicked in $500 to get it going, and we printed the T-shirts on a silk-screen machine my brother Marty had in his garage. Kristin understood the business and marketing side of things, and she stepped in to help. I started selling T-shirts, and within the first year, we cleared quite a bit.
    Not long after the shirts began selling, I decided to expand the line to include a version of the flame shorts I fought in. The first ones we made didn’t really look very good, but they sold. That was pretty much the moment Punishment Athletic Wear was born. I gave Kristin fifty-percent ownership in the company. I was doing my own thing, and the money I was making off the shirts and shorts was like icing on the cake.
    After taking a couple of days off to wind down from the Shamrock fight, I went back to work at Spanky’s. As soon as I walked into the office, the boss asked me to have a seat. He said flat out, “I don’t think this job is for you.”
    I said, “Fighting? I love fighting!”
    He said “No, I mean working here. I think there’s something better for you out there.”
    I thought I was being fired.
    Then he said, “You do what you need to do to get your work in and I’ll pay for your rent and your cell phone, and give you a per diem for six months.” The only condition was that I had to put “Spanky’s” on my shorts and he even gave me extra money for that.
    I got back into training full on. And there was only one thing I was training for—a rematch with Frank Shamrock. I wanted that rematch badly. So did the UFC. As it turned out, the only person who didn’t was Frank Shamrock.
    Shamrock said the money wasn’t good enough for him to fight me. So he gave up his title and retired. That left the title vacant. I felt I would be in line to fight for it at some point, so I knew I’d better be in good shape when the call came. And I figured the best