Former UFC stars Chuck Liddell, Tito Ortiz agree to third MMA fight

[Skookum Charlie]

Quote:Mixed martial arts legends Chuck Liddell and Tito Ortiz will rekindle their infamous rivalry in a trilogy bout later this year, under the banner of Oscar De La Hoya's Golden Boy Promotions.

ESPN has confirmed that Golden Boy, one of the world's premier boxing promotions, has signed agreements with Liddell and Ortiz. An official date and location are being finalized and should be announced soon.

"Oscar said, 'Let's get this done.' I said, 'Let's get this done,' and it took about 2½ months to make Chuck happy enough to make it happen, and it's signed," Ortiz said Monday on ESPN's Ariel Helwani's MMA Show. "This fight is going to happen this year."

The pay-per-view event will mark Golden Boy's first foray into MMA. It will take place nearly 12 years after Liddell knocked out Ortiz in the third round of their second meeting, at UFC 66 in December 2006.

"I'm proud to announce we've signed a deal for the fight between Chuck Liddell and Tito Ortiz," De La Hoya said in a statement to ESPN. "This will be huge for sports fans around the world. Ortiz and Liddell are two of the most recognized fighters in MMA history. They are legends in the sport.

"Everyone remembers their rivalry helped put the sport on the map, and we're excited to host the next and final chapter of this historic rivalry."

Golden Boy is not offering further details at this time. Liddell told ESPN the bout will take place inside a cage, not a ring, and Ortiz confirmed that.

Ortiz said the fight will be at 205 pounds, which is the same weight class both men fought in during their careers.

"It will be a strictly an MMA card," Ortiz said. "We're putting the fight together and there will be announcements as the weeks go on. We're talking to fighters that have names."

Liddell, 48, retired from MMA in 2010, at the request of UFC president and longtime friend Dana White. Liddell held an executive position at the UFC until 2016, when the company sold to new ownership.

The California native lost his last three bouts by knockout, but hinted at a comeback for years. He said he is not limiting his return to the Ortiz fight.

"It feels great to sign a deal, to be honest with you. It's as exciting as I knew it would be," Liddell told ESPN. "Golden Boy offers something different. We're partners in this. And I never get sick of punching Tito."

Ortiz, 43, announced his retirement in 2012, following his final bout in the UFC. He returned to the sport two years later for a four-fight run in Bellator MMA. He defeated Chael Sonnen via first-round submission in his most recent bout, in January 2017.

"I'm only interested in fighting Chuck at this time," said Ortiz, who has already started training again. "If anything, the rivalry is worse than it ever was. This isn't made for TV. This is as real as it gets."

Ortiz continued: "I think the itch [to return] happened after my birthday, when I turned 43 and just got back into the gym to see how my body would respond to it -- and it responded faster than I thought it would. I still feel young; my response skills are super-fast. It's been a long road, working with UFC, then working with Scott Coker and Bellator and now working with De La Hoya and Golden Boy Promotions.

"I've been busy, but Chuck comes out and says, 'Do you like to fight me?' I thought it made sense, it gives me an opportunity to redeem myself. I think all my fans deserve it, I deserve so let's play on an even playing field. I don't think I got a fair handshake every time I fought Chuck."

Ortiz (19-12-1), of Huntington Beach, California, will be seeking his first victory against Liddell. The two former UFC light heavyweight champions met for the first time in a non-title bout in April 2004. Liddell won via TKO in the second round.

The rematch at UFC 66 was a massive financial success, producing a live gate of nearly $5.4 million. It remains the ninth-highest-grossing MMA event in Las Vegas history.

"Just like boxing fans remember the historic rivalry between Erik Morales and Marco Antonio Barrera, so do MMA fans remember the rivalry between Chuck Liddell and Tito Ortiz," Golden Boy president Eric Gomez said. "But Liddell-Ortiz never got their third fight. This time fans will get to see the third fight. They'll see the culmination of a heated trilogy that was pivotal for the sport."

De La Hoya hinted at an interest in launching Golden Boy MMA earlier this year. Discussions are underway for a potential promotional tour later this year.

"I'm excited for Tito and MMA in general," said Ortiz's longtime manager, George Prajin. "Tito has been blessed to have worked with Dana White and [former UFC owner] Lorenzo Fertitta, [Bellator president] Scott Coker and now Oscar De La Hoya, who is providing Tito the opportunity to maximize his last fight against his biggest rival."

http://www.espn.com/mma/story/_/id/23974...-mma-fight

[kungfool]

I would prefer for the boxing world and mma world to remain separate.

[CTsar]

I don't want to see this or Rampage Wanderlei 4. Please stay retired old school MMAers.

[Redneck]

Tito will probably KO Chuck this time, but if he can't beat a 48 year old, punch drunk fighter with ring rust whose lost his chin then Chuck will always have his number.

[EVILYOSHIDA]

UFC is in trouble that's why they are promoting these fights that have no bearing on the current rankings

this is what happens when you don't let the stars shine above the org

no one talks about UFC anymore. no one really cares

[EVILYOSHIDA]

The UFC has its problems, but one stands out as more serious and scary than the rest: Fewer and fewer people are interested in what it’s selling.

Even as UFC president Dana White touts his company’s record profitability in 2017, there’s no getting around the basic fact that the company isn’t doing well in the medium and long term. By several different metrics, the UFC’s audience is declining. Moreover, if the ubiquitous commercials for male vitality products like Nugenix during broadcasts weren’t a big enough clue, the audience that remains is aging out of the coveted youth demographic that the promotion used to sell itself to advertisers for so long. Anecdotally, fan enthusiasm seems to be at a low ebb. But every actual metric suggests that things are even worse than they feel.

With TV contract negotiations looming, 2018 will be a key year for the promotion. All indicators are trending downward, with nothing pointing to Fox or ESPN shelling out big money for the UFC’s content. The next two months of the UFC’s schedule—five events spread over three continents, none of them terribly compelling—encapsulate the how and the why of this shockingly quick fall from grace. At the core of it is a fundamental question that the promotion has to figure out how to answer: Why should a potential viewer care about the UFC?

It wasn’t always such a difficult question. Both 2015 and 2016 were record-breaking years for the promotion, and the rise of Ronda Rousey and Conor McGregor and staggering pay-per-view buy-rates took UFC to hundreds of millions of dollars in profits and unprecedented mainstream relevance. It also led directly to the promotion’s $4 billion sale to burgeoning entertainment conglomerate WME-IMG in 2016; at the time, the UFC was the crown jewel of their many new acquisitions. There was no reason even to ask why people might care about the UFC. The answer was obvious: because McGregor and Rousey were both genuine celebrities outside the cage and a joy to watch inside it.

It was easy to be bullish about the UFC’s future during the heady days of July 2016. Sure, Rousey had lost to Holly Holm, but there was no reason to think she wouldn’t be back. McGregor was coming off two extraordinarily successful pay-per-view fights against Jose Aldo and Nate Diaz, and the rematch with Diaz was set for the next month. Brock Lesnar had returned to headline the UFC 200 show that cracked a million buys. Jon Jones had tested positive for a PED, which was not great, but if and when he returned, he too would be a marketable property. In a star-driven pay-per-view market, having WME-IMG on board to help push the promotion’s fighters into the spotlight looked like a no-brainer. The TV ratings were good enough, if not mind-boggling. There was good reason to think the next UFC contract might go for as much as $450 million per year.

In retrospect, the situation wasn’t nearly as good as it looked. The success of Rousey and McGregor disguised deeper structural issues with the UFC’s product. Those two linchpin stars drew record-breaking buy-rates at marquee events and the promotion could scrape together enough star power for standout shows like UFC 200, but the audience for everything else was shrinking.

During its pay-per-view glory years between 2008 and 2010, the UFC had a wide array of marketable draws outside the best-known stars and a strong-enough brand that fans felt compelled to buy events even when they didn’t feature elite fighters. Reliable draws like BJ Penn routinely pulled 500,000 or more buys and even dismally booked shows performed well: 2010’s UFC 119 card, headlined by an injury-replacement fight nobody was asking for between Mirko Cro Cop and Frank Mir, still drew nearly 300,000 buys.

In 2017, by contrast, it took two compelling title fights and a stacked lineup to drag last May’s UFC 211 card to the 300,000-buy mark. A poor offering—UFC 215, with a women’s bantamweight title fight featuring Amanda Nunes and Valentina Shevchenko on the marquee—drew just 100,000 buys, which is the low-water mark in the promotion’s modern era. The proportion of the UFC’s audience that’s willing to pay $59.99 for low-end content has fallen drastically. Middle-class draws like Penn or Rashad Evans aged out of relevance or retired altogether, and haven’t been replaced by fighters who inspire comparable interest from the fans; the UFC 211 numbers bear this out. The UFC fooled itself into thinking that it would always be able to convince a huge number of consumers to buy what it was selling simply because it was branded “UFC.” It has never quite rid itself of that assumption, even as the evidence against it has continued to mount.

The biggest problem has been the UFC’s enormous expansion into TV. After a successful run on Spike TV, the promotion debuted on Fox with much fanfare back in November of 2011. This was supposed to mark the UFC’s transformation into a mainstream sports property. It would appear on network TV alongside the NFL, MLB, and NASCAR. Millions of potential new fans would be exposed to the glories of MMA. When Fox Sports 1 launched in 2013, the UFC would be one of the linchpins of the new network.

In hindsight, it’s obvious that the UFC rushed headlong into an expansion that it didn’t have the roster depth to support. In 2011, the last year before the Fox deal fully took hold, the UFC put on 27 events and 300 fights. They sold about 6.5 million pay-per-views. In 2014, a disastrous year, the UFC put on 46 events and 503 fights and sold about 3.2 million pay-per-views. After the Rousey- and McGregor-driven triumphs of 2015-16, 2017 saw 39 events and 457 fights, with roughly 4.1 million pay-per-view sales, not counting whatever they made from the Conor McGregor vs. Floyd Mayweather boxing grift.

https://deadspin.com/who-cares-about-the...1822743470

[EVILYOSHIDA]

conor/mayweather BS also destroyed the prestige of MMA

Conor got whooped and made MMA look weak, even if it was under a diff. skillset

also nothing in MMA could top that in terms of hype.. so everything after seemed small in comparison

[Billygoat]

Nobody cares about watching skinny twinks poke at each other for 25 minutes running around the ring. They also don't want to see ugly dykes at all.

Top 3 weight classes will carry the sport plus some hotties squishing titties.

[max power]

i hate tito
if he wins i might have a mental breakdown. i reckon hes 70% likely to beat chuck now.

[kungfool]

Shogun just got KTFO by a young fighter today. It was really horrible to watch him try to crawl back to his feet.

[CTsar]

^depressing. I think part of the reason a lot of people have been turned off to the UFC is the way they have used legends that are past their primes as stepping stones for young fighters. Fights like the above or BJ / Yair disrespect the history of sport.

[rezin]

^ Yup. It also generally sucks in every other way.

[EVILYOSHIDA]

the UFC is all about athleticism and scientific training now

the rules and vibe of the event are set up for this type of fighter to win