This Is Gonna Hurt (14 page)

When we go downtown to a restaurant or someplace public, it can get a little crazy. I'm kind of the alpha male dog in the room with a bunch of mutts. When I walk into a room with Jenna, people look at her, then they look at me and turn away.

But the real people, the people who are not somehow connected to the business, they're the funniest of all. They'll come up to me and ask if it's okay if they take a picture with Jenna. I think a lot of them assume I'm her bodyguard. When it comes to things like autographs, it's the other way around. I get the autograph requests more than Jenna because a lot of them feel that she will be offended if they bother her. But they will go up to Jenna and ask her permission for them to take a picture with me.

Women come up to us all the time now because they want to have threesomes with us. And there are still women who come on to me because they think I have a lot of money and that they can get their hands on it by being close to me.

Well, that shit never worked before and it's certainly not going to work now. It's kind of sad. Why would I want to be with them when I'm with somebody who is beautiful and smart and is not after me for my money? You tell me.

Then there are the haters. There have been a lot of those since Jenna and I got together. We get a lot of the really nasty and hateful stuff on the Internet. When people are real mean and nasty to me, I can deal with it. But when they say things about Jenna, that bothers me a lot. All you can do is ignore that stuff. In fact, during our last contract negotiations, Dana White made some remarks about Jenna not being very bright. All I can say to that is that Dana White is one of the dumbest people I know and that Jenna is one of the smartest.

I still haven't figured this all out yet. Being with Jenna is a whole different world for me. But I do know one thing.

And that's that I love her with all my heart.

R
andy Couture had held the UFC light heavyweight title since he beat me in 2003. It seemed a bit ironic that the person who would take the title from him was my friend Chuck Liddell.

It was inevitable that I would fight him and that I would get my title back. I was thirty-one years old at that time and I had been fighting for ten years. Liddell was one of the best fighters in the business, so I knew I would have my hands full. And I knew I would have to train very seriously.

I was back up in Big Bear training hard. I was working on perfecting every aspect of my game, and I felt that everything was coming together. Then fate stepped in once again.

The UFC wanted me to go to Florida to appear on the Latin ESPY awards show. I caught the flu on the way back and by the time I got back to Big Bear, I was in really bad shape. They ended up having to take me to the emergency room. It turns out I had a real bad case of dehydration that had been compounded by the flu. The doctors ended up pumping five bags' worth of IV fluids into me. I was out of action for six days and by the time I had recovered enough to train, there were only three weeks left before the fight.

I had lost a lot of weight and felt very light. But I still felt like I was going to win.

During the buildup to the Liddell fight, Dana White started bad-mouthing me to the press again. He painted this real shitty picture of me as being a money-grubbing sonofa-bitch. And again I was kind of caught in the middle of his hostility because of Chuck Liddell.

Don't get me wrong. Chuck has been a good friend and training partner for a long time. It's just that we both have different attitudes about what is good for the fighters. I'm a firm believer that all fighters should get as much as we can because it's our asses on the line when we step into the Octagon. My feeling has always been, “Let's
really
get paid to do this.” But Chuck doesn't really care that much.

He's kind of a trailer park kid who likes to dress in thongs and shorts. In a way, he's kind of unsophisticated. He's happy to have a house in San Luis Obispo and a couple of cars, and that's all he wants. That's not me. I want to make sure that I'm getting paid for the rest of my life and that my family will continue to make money off my name long after I stop fighting.

So if wanting that is a negative, then I guess I'm a real shithead.

The fight, billed as UFC 66: Liddell vs Ortiz 2, was held in Las Vegas. I felt good about everything that night. The fans were cheering me on instead of booing me. They saw a different person. Now, all of a sudden, Liddell was being booed and he looked like the bad guy.

The first round I lost, pure and simple. I was trying a lot of leg kicks, but Chuck just came out swinging. He hit me with an overhand right that opened up a cut over my left eye. I was down. But somehow I survived that round. I came back a little bit in the second round with a couple of takedowns and a couple of good shots. I thought I was getting back in it. In the third round I got hit with some pretty good shots. The cut over my left eye opened up again. I thought I was defending myself, but all of a sudden the referee stepped in and stopped it.

The victory shirt I had picked out for that night was appropriate whether I won or lost that fight. Even in defeat I wore it proudly. It said: “Thanks…U.S. Troops For Fighting For Our Country.”

I was disappointed with the loss. I really wanted that title back. But in a sense I really couldn't complain too much. I was still one of the biggest, if not
the
biggest, draw in the UFC for a nonchampion. Every time I fought, there were millions of pay-per-view buys. Every time some record is broken, my name is attached to it. Anybody who knows anything about the sport knows my name.

The relations between me and the UFC had become particularly strained, mostly because of the things Dana White was saying about me and because of the constant pressures of signing contracts and such. Finally, things got so bad that we agreed to settle our differences in the ring.

It seemed like the perfect way to take care of the situation, and my hope was that some money could be made off of the event that would benefit some charities and people who really needed help. So the talks began. The idea was to stage the fight March 24, 2007, and, hopefully, to do some kind of pay-per-view and DVD combination to really bring in some money. But the negotiations never really seemed to go anywhere.

And then one day in April, I turned on the television and there was Dana White doing an interview on Spike TV, accusing me of failing to show up for the fight. And, of course, there was no opportunity for me to respond to him.

The reality was that there never was a contract to sign and I sure as hell was not going to risk getting into the Octagon without something in writing. When I had originally talked with Dana, we had discussed a 50/50 split of whatever money was made. He denied that conversation ever took place. I realized that without a written agreement it was his word against mine, but it pissed me off that anybody would think I might have pussed out of the fight with Dana. It hurt my image, and I don't know why the UFC would want to hurt the image of one of their biggest stars.

We went back and forth on this for a while, and at one point, Chuck Liddell got into it and started giving interviews about how Dana was right and that I was afraid to fight him. Chuck was basically being Dana White's puppet at that point, and I said so. I knew Chuck was a company man, but I was still disappointed in him.

I would have loved to fight Dana, but I wasn't about to fight without a contract. And there would have to be some kind of money involved that I would be quite happy to donate to charity. I would have liked nothing better than to beat Dana White's ass, but I had a living to make, and so it was on to the next fight.

Word was getting around Hollywood that I was actually a fighter who could act and so, even without an agent, offers from film and television people began to come in. In between training and doing whatever I had to do to make money, I managed to get small parts in three films.

One was this cop movie called
Venice Underground
about undercover cops fighting drug dealers in Venice Beach. I also had a small role in this romantic comedy called
The Dog Problem
. But the role I am proudest of up to this point was in a film I made in Iraq called
Valley of the Wolves
. I play this military officer who discovers mercenary American soldiers fighting in the Middle East. I won't ruin it for you and tell you what happens. But I will tell you that anybody who doubts that I can act should see that movie. When the movies were done, it was back to the Octagon and fight preparation.

And it seemed like every time I turned around, my contract had some involvement in the outcome of a fight. I had two more fights on my current contract. But you have to understand how the UFC mind-set works. In their eyes, if I lost my next fight, they'd be able to justify offering me less money on my next deal. My next opponent was going to be Rashad Evans. I knew going in that if I lost to Rashad, I was setting myself up for a horrible negotiation.

The Evans fight came about after the Chuck Liddell fight and I was concerned about the possibility of losing two fights in a row—what it would do to my status and reputation, that kind of stuff. I think the UFC was concerned as well because they gave me a choice of three fighters: Keith Jardine, Forrest Griffin, and Rashad Evans. Keith had already lost to Rashad, and I had already beaten Forrest Griffin. I didn't want an easy fight, so I went with Rashad.

But I knew I was going to beat Rashad. He knew I was going to beat him and the UFC knew I was going to beat him. And the UFC knew that once I beat him, they were going to have to pay me what I was worth.

Rashad was a tough fighter, an undefeated fighter. He came from a wrestling background, and his boxing skills had gotten a lot better.

Once the fight was announced, it didn't take long for the trash talking to start and, as expected, it got pretty intense and nasty.

Rashad immediately started talking some shit about me. Normally I have a thick skin about that stuff. I know it's all part of hyping a fight and putting asses in the seats. But he was being a bit over-the-top and was pushing some buttons.

So I decided that maybe we should meet.

I knew he was going to be at the UFC 69 matches so I thought I'd go down there, shake his hand, and give him some respect. I saw him, went over, put out my hand, and said, “You're a tough fighter. I wish you good luck in your training. But watch what you say.”

He stood up. We were face-to-face. He said, “What do you mean, watch what I say? You're not my dad. I can say anything I want! You're a fucking washout, and I'm going to beat your fucking ass!”

I just looked at him and said, “I'm going to cave your fucking face in!”

It was game on. I took it personally and I was pissed off.

From that moment on I was willing to give as good as I got in the trash-talk department. At one point there was a picture of him on a website with a caption that read: “The first UFC woman fighter.” When you clicked on the picture it said: “7/7/07, The first woman fighter: Rashad Evans.” And then it said I was going to make Rashad Evans “my nappy-headed ho.” THAT was my doing. Yeah, it was more than a little racist and it was the very thing that got Don Imus into a lot of trouble. But for me it was a joke, even though it was a calculating joke. Hell, I'm Mexican. I hear that kind of stuff all the time. My best friend in the business, Rampage, is black, and he thought it was a joke. It was about a person and not a race, so I didn't think there was anything wrong with it.

We're involved in one of the most barbaric sports you can possibly be involved in. We make a living by hitting each other in the face and bloodying each other up. We're always looking for an edge. And as far as I'm concerned, if it takes something like that to get inside his mind, I'm going to say it.

While I was training for the Rashad Evans fight, I made what was probably the biggest purchase I will ever make. I bought Oscar De La Hoya's house up in Big Bear, California, for $2.1 million. Jenna was with me the day the deal closed, and we were walking around the property. She asked me if I was happy. Yes, I was happy. But I was also in a whole other place.

All I could think of was that I used to be this punk kid in Huntington Beach who was sniffing glue and going nowhere. And now I had just laid out $2.1 million for this huge house. I just couldn't believe that it was happening to me. It was just crazy, plain crazy.

My fight with Rashad was not the main event of UFC 73: Stacked, and it was not even a title fight. But it was probably the biggest gate ever for a nonchampionship card. There were more than a 400,000 pay-per-view buys for that one. And I think everyone knew who people were laying their money down to see. We weren't the main event, but we were treated like the main event. And it turned out to be a real tough fight.

I went through my pre-fight ritual of crying. Then the Huntington Beach Bad Boy took over and I was not afraid.

People were going crazy when I entered the ring. My entrance music, “Mosh,” which I was using for the sixth consecutive fight, was bumping. The fight was on.

From the opening bell, it went back and forth. I pretty much dominated with kicks and takedowns. Near the end of the round Rashad hit me a few times and I got cut under my eye. But it was no problem. In the second round I was dominating again until Rashad went for a takedown and I grabbed hold of the fence to keep from going down and I received a warning from the referee. Later in the round I ended up grabbing the fence again and a point was deducted. The round ended even. If I hadn't grabbed the fence, I would have won it. Rashad came on strong in the final round, but I pretty much held my own.

The judges gave me the first round and Rashad the third. The second round was called even and the fight was called a draw. It was a good fight. The only injury I got was a fracture of one of my orbital sockets. It looked a lot worse than it was, and the important thing was that, just like my other injuries, it would heal.

There was an immediate call for a rematch.

I knew there would be.

But win, lose, or draw, the T-shirt I wore that night pretty much said it all.

“Bad Boy For Life.”