The Huntington Beach Bad Boy doesn't mind speaking the truth.
Tito Ortiz, having completed training in Big Bear for an Ultimate Fighting Championship light-heavyweight title bout with champion Chuck Liddell, understands what drives his popularity in a sport that has riveted the attention of the 18-to-34 male demographic.
He embodies so many of their visions of single-manhood perfected.
Ortiz, 31, lives at the beach, usually beats and bloodies whoever wants to fight him, and dates former adult-film actress Jenna Jameson, whose 2004 book, "How to Make Love Like a Porn Star," became a national best-seller.
Like so many of his similarly aged peers, Ortiz is readying for a New Year's Eve party in Las Vegas.
First, however, he needs to fight Liddell at the MGM Grand on Saturday, a match that is expected to generate a $4-million live gate and produce more than 1 million pay-per-view buys -- more than any boxing match since Lennox Lewis fought Mike Tyson in 2002.
Earlier this month, inside a red barn tucked into the picturesque, snow-dusted mountains where he trains off Highway 38, Ortiz completed a training session of what he calls, "Monday bangin' " by bloodying the eyebrow of sparring partner Aaron Herosa with a powerful front kick, and then knocking down UFC fighter Kendall Grove with a sudden right-handed punch.
"Keep using that right," Grove suggested, and Ortiz smiled.
"I'm happy now," Ortiz said. "I know my life looks good. But it hasn't always been this way."
Before moving to Huntington Beach as a young teenager, Ortiz said he was raised with four older brothers in Santa Ana -- "Corner of Bristol and McFadden; you know where that is? You know how bad that is?" he asked.
He said his estranged father, Sam, and mother, Joyce, were then "hooked on heroin," and he spent a childhood "in and out of juvenile hall," while clinging to a Santa Ana street gang.
"Stealing out of cars, fights, hoodlum stuff," Ortiz said. "I was dying for attention as a kid. I fell into wrestling. I was good at it. Wrestling gave me that attention. It saved me."
Four years after moving to Huntington Beach, Ortiz became a CIF Southern Section semifinalist for Huntington Beach High in 1992. The next year, he won the Southern Section Division I championship at 189 pounds, winning MVP among the meet's higher weights, and capped his season with a sixth-place finish at the state meet.
