#3 Tito Ortiz vs. Lee Murray
These days Lee Murray is better known for being one of the UK’s most notorious criminals – the mastermind behind the Securitas robbery in 2006 that was the largest robbery in British history.
His brief MMA career has mostly been forgotten, reduced to a cliff note due to his lone UFC fight – a win over Jorge Rivera via triangle armbar – and a pretty well-known fight with a pre-UFC Anderson Silva.
Despite this though, his name still turns heads in the MMA world today, perhaps due to one of MMA’s biggest myths that surrounds him – his street brawl with then-UFC Light-Heavyweight champion Tito Ortiz.
It was July 2002 and the UFC had travelled to the UK for the first time for UFC 38, taking place at London’s Royal Albert Hall with a main event of Matt Hughes vs. Carlos Newton for the Welterweight title. Naturally, though, all the UFC’s big stars of the time came over, including then-buddies Tito Ortiz and Chuck Liddell.
Murray, at the time, was making some waves on the UK scene and had been travelling to the US to train with Pat Miletich and his camp, which included fighters such as Hughes, fellow UFC champion Jens Pulver, and contenders like Tony Fryklund and Jeremy Horn.
The story goes something like this. Following an after-party following the UFC event, a number of fighters – the Miletich team including Murray and a couple of his friends, as well as Ortiz and Liddell – were waiting for a bus to take them back to their hotel. From there the story gets a little twisted, depending on who you hear it from, like the very best myths.
According to Matt Hughes, who retold the story in his book Made In America, the issue began when one of Tito’s friends jumped onto the back of Pat Miletich and pretended to slap a chokehold on him. Tony Fryklund, thinking Miletich was really being choked, stepped in and really DID choke Tito’s friend.
Miletich managed to pull Fryklund off, but Tito’s friend took exception and went for Fryklund, and one of Murray’s friends took exception to that and then all hell broke loose. Somehow this ended with Murray and Ortiz squaring up. Ortiz threw a punch that missed and Murray dropped him with a combination and then soccer kicked him in the head, Wanderlei-style.
Or so Matt Hughes says. And even his re-telling is via Pat Miletich, as Hughes – victorious over Newton that night – was in his hotel room at the time! To hear Tito tell the story, as in the video above, he only got dropped by Murray because he slipped due to wearing dress shoes.
The one funny part of the story that seems to be a constant in each re-telling is that a heavily drunk Chuck Liddell somehow got involved – possibly to defend Tito – and ended up KO’ing three or four men while leaning against a wall to keep himself vertical. Even if it’s not true, I wish it was!
Honestly, who knows what really happened? All parties were apparently drunk, the story has been re-told countless times via different people, and obviously it wasn’t in the UFC’s interest to confirm that their Champion was knocked out.
Clearly, something happened, though – Tony Fryklund was supposedly blacklisted from the UFC due to the incident and only fought there one more time as a late replacement, and Murray was signed by the UFC shortly after.
Rumours of Zuffa matching him and Ortiz flew around at the time but the fight never came around, largely due to Murray’s constant legal issues. Still, it’s a classic MMA myth and maybe my favourite of all.
