5 ultimate betrayals in UFC history

#4 Chuck wants to fight Tito

It was the storyline that almost pushed the UFC into the mainstream around a year before the first season of TUF ever aired – the story of two friends who had supposedly formed a pact that meant they’d never fight, only one of them decided to break that pact, and somehow found that the majority of fans were siding with him, not against him. I’m talking, of course, about Tito Ortiz and Chuck Liddell.

The story began in the early days of the Zuffa-led UFC, when Ortiz was the biggest star in the company and the reigning Light-Heavyweight champion, while Liddell was Ortiz’s training partner and one of the top up-and-comers in the weight class. The two had supposedly agreed not to fight, but Liddell was on such a hot run that a title shot was hard to deny him.

Ortiz for his part felt utterly betrayed by the idea that Liddell was willing to fight him, while Liddell simply played down the friendship and claimed they were merely sparring partners, and he’d always gotten the better of Ortiz in those sparring sessions.

When Tito decided to refuse the fight, the fans immediately sided with Liddell, feeling that Ortiz was ducking his former friend and never really considering that Tito could’ve been sincere in his feelings. Eventually – after the bad blood finally boiled over – the two men fought, with Liddell winning by first-round knockout.

The hatchet wasn’t buried, however, and even after Liddell beat his former friend on a second occasion two years later, a third fight was planned in 2010 before Ortiz withdrew citing a back injury.

Supposedly, Chuck and Tito have now made up and are on good terms again, but it’s hard to tell given both men are firmly in happy retirement these days. It’s a story that’s really tricky to judge who was completely in the right – you get the feeling that the truth was somewhere in the middle, but from Ortiz’s point of view, it was a huge betrayal.