by Bruce Buffer
Eight years later, after some losses and some time off, he was confiding in me and Big John that he had gotten an offer from another MMA production and was planning to leave the UFC.
“Don’t do it!” Big John and I told him, virtually at the same time.
“Tito,” I said, “whatever you do, or whatever they offer you, don’t leave the UFC. You might get a big up-front bounce, but it will all fizzle later. If you want to build your image and your brand in this industry, you have to be in the UFC.”
Ironically, perhaps, Big John went through something similar a few years later. At one point he decided to retire from being a referee, leaving to work as a commentator and on other endeavors. He was back a year or so later.
I’ve had my own experiences with this issue. In the past, I’ve been offered to do all the K-1s and other promotions for much more money than I was making with the UFC, but I turned them all down. I always felt it was more important to stay loyal to the UFC.
But what we were talking about that day I attribute to two things: a young man’s desire for bigger and better, and youthful impatience. Tito went on to become the coach of TUF and fought three straight wins, two against Ken Shamrock, in 2006. That was a hugely memorable, profitable year for Tito Ortiz on his comeback trail.
The 2006 matchups with Ken and Tito were fights that tipped the scales for the UFC. Think about it: Zuffa was still working its way up a year after their daring move to launch TUF, a year after Lorenzo reportedly said they might have to consider selling. And here came these hot fights that everyone wanted to see. Okay, down in Florida where their third and final fight was held, we only had about 3,500 people in attendance. It was a sellout crowd, but a small venue. But at home we had nearly 6 million people watching on free TV. That was huge. It would take us another whole year before we hit a home number that big. Dana had done it. Ken and Tito had done it. The UFC had done it. They’d translated the success of the Spike TV show into a powerful combo of free and pay-per-view events.
I’m sure that, looking back, Tito was happy he did not take a fight elsewhere. It’s not always about the big guarantee up front; it’s about the long run and building a career. I was happy to see Tito make the right decision. He came into his own, in and out of the Octagon, and he’s matured into a successful businessman.
Those trading cards I saw in the bathroom are a good example of his natural-born marketing savvy. He’s always been comfortable creating sales tools to promote himself and his clothing line, Punishment Athletics, which he started from scratch and which has done millions in sales. His brand is an inevitable blossoming of the same instincts I saw in that young fighter so many years back, who was so full of confidence and braggadocio.
I admire him for that. I love his charisma. At one point, early on in my association with the UFC, I used my media influence to get Tito on national TV shows such as National Enquirer TV and The Best Damn Sports Show Period on Fox. I realized that if I wanted this job, I had to do something to help build the sport.
Tito looked to be a major fan favorite, so I coaxed the producers into giving him a shot. I had connections with The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, and persuaded them to do a reporter-in-the-field segment with Tito training in Huntington Beach. (The reporter, by the way, was a young Ryan Seacrest, in his pre-$60-million-a-year days.) Normally, those bits end at the clip, but I pushed to get him on Jay’s couch. The time was right, for Tito and the UFC. But it’s extremely hard to get on the couch. It’s the most coveted piece of real estate in the world of publicity. But lo and behold, Leno did it. Tito came out, served as the sport’s ambassador for a night, and the crowd loved him.
We’ve got years of friendship behind us. I’ve been to all of his fights except UFC 29 in Tokyo, when the production didn’t have the budget to fly me there. I was upset about it, and called Tito just to say that I wouldn’t make it. He said he understood. Believe it or not, that’s the only fight that broke our streak.
The next night after our steak-fest, I walked into the Octagon to introduce him by his nickname, the Huntington Beach Bad Boy. He wore an intense look on his face that night. Rashad Evans connected about forty times, and Tito lost by technical knockout.
Later I went up to Tito’s hotel room to check on him. His face was bruised and battered, but not cut. I said nothing about the fight. I’ve been around fighters enough to know that they don’t need my words of comfort.
His eyes brightened when he saw me.
“That’s the last time you’re gonna call me the Huntington Beach Bad Boy,” he said.
A flicker of concern flashed through my mind. “Uh, why?”
“I’m not the bad boy anymore. From now on, I’m The People’s Champion. Because that’s who I am, and that’s who I’m going to be in all my marketing. Will you do that for me?”
“You know I will.”
11
NO PAIN
I was wary of talking about my knee injury with the fighters, athletes, and trainers I knew. Seriously, how much sympathy was I really going to get from these guys? “Oh, your knee hurts? Fuck you, Buffer. You’re the announcer, we’re the fighters.”
It turned out that everyone was giving me really good advice on a wide range of things. But only two pieces of information resonated with me and spurred me to action. Marlon Shirley, the great paralympic athlete, with whom I’ve played the World Series of Poker main event, pulled me aside and said, “All I can say is, when the nerve-block medication wears off, be sure you’re ready for the pain. It’ll be the most excruciating pain you’ve ever experienced in your life.” Lots of people concurred with his assessment. Okay, I thought, so how do I prepare for the pain?
A friend and gym buddy, Flavio de Oliveira, a former Brazilian fighter, has had two ACL replacements in his life. Flavio is a five-foot-eight, 195-pound steel monster who is probably the nicest killer I’ve ever met. He works as a trainer today, whipping people like actor Jason Statham and volleyball star Gabrielle Reece into shape. He has also trained the great jiu-jitsu fighter Jean Jacques Machado. “Bruce,” he said, “I’ve been watching you train, and you’re doing fine. But for this operation you have to train at a much higher level. You have to train like a fighter. You need me. Hire me to be your trainer and I’ll make sure that when that doctor goes in to operate, he has a nice, comfortable room to move around.”
I know the imagery probably leaves something to be desired, but Flavio was nothing if not persuasive.
“You need to be strong going into this operation,” he told me. “The more flexible you are, the more your doctor is gonna say thank you because you made it easy for him to go in and do his work. When this thing is over, do you want to be 100 percent, or do you want to live with pain and scar tissue?”
“Who the hell wants that?” I said.
“Then you have to trust me.”
Well, I’m not Jason Statham, but for the next six weeks Flavio put me through some of the most grueling leg workouts I’ve ever been through, all designed to increase the strength, flexibility, and blood flow to both my legs. I’m talking intense ninety-minute to two-hour workouts. We started with thirty minutes of stretching, followed by an hour or more of nonstop circuit training of multiple weight exercises. I did three sets per exercise, and cardio movements in between, to keep my heart rate up. When that was done, I did thirty minutes of cardio on the bike.
I tell you: I have had many fine trainers, but Flavio truly tested my mental and physical limits by pushing me to weight levels I had never before attained. Even with one good leg, I was able to work out incredibly hard, as long as I was careful not to attempt side-to-side motion exercises, running, or jumping rope. I discovered that you can actually do a heck of a lot of leg work with a detached or torn ACL.
Leading up to the operation, I cleared my calendar of everything but the essentials. If it wasn’t a UFC event, I thought very, very carefully about whether I should cancel. If you saw me announce a fight between April and July that year, you didn�
��t see me move very much. Under my pant leg, I was wearing a leg brace to protect my knee from being damaged further.
I was going under the knife on July 6, and I wasn’t due to show up in the Octagon for UFC 133 until August 6, 2011. My window of recovery was four weeks—not a huge amount of time, but enough if I played my cards right and listened to my doctor and rehab trainers. I was determined to do this right and heal right. No way was I going to be Bruce the Gimp.
Dr. Neal S. ElAttrache, who replaced New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady’s ACL and who is head physician to the Los Angeles Dodgers, performed the surgery. This superdoc in the world of sports medicine advised me to do nothing for a week, and as much as I like to be up and about, I’m a guy who listens to my doctors. I checked into a hotel for a few days because I wouldn’t be able to deal with the stairs in my home. Alex, the son of my mom’s caregiver Daysi, stayed with me in the hotel and later, at my home, for two weeks, acting as my twenty-four-hour nurse. And believe me, I needed his help during that first week. I did nothing for a few days but read books, catch up on old movies, play online chess, play video games like UFC, Call of Duty: Black Ops, and Fight Night, and thumb through a long-neglected pile of magazines. I handled all necessary business via phone and mail. Beyond that, I basically became a kid again and played hooky.
Strangely, in spite of everyone’s predictions, I had minimal to no pain. I hate taking prescription drugs and especially painkillers; they’re the most highly addictive drugs and the hardest to shake, so I prefer not to go there, if at all possible. The morning after the operation, I went off the heavy-duty drugs and switched to three Advil three times a day. I was walking with one crutch on day five. When the bandages came off on day eight, I got the stitches out and showed up for my first day of rehab at the Kerlan-Jobe Center in Los Angeles. The plan was to work out there three times a week, while also training three times a week with Flavio and my physical therapist, who did body work on me to keep me loose twice a week. So some days I’d literally be training three to four hours a day.
As I stood in the rehab gym reviewing the game plan, I looked around me. I was surrounded by some of the world’s greatest amateur and professional athletes. Here they were, all on their off seasons, trying to heal their amazing bodies, which they’d pushed to impossible limits. But to my amazement, some of the men, who were all younger than I was, had had the same operation six months ago and were still having problems.
I had none.
That was either great or terrifying, depending on your perspective. Had Flavio’s prescription for pre- and post-op success worked like a charm, or had something gone wrong?
I didn’t know, and I was craving professional opinions about where I was in the healing process. It’s one thing to sit at home and think your knee is doing well. It’s another to hear it from the doctors.
The docs took some images, and left me in a room with my thoughts. I got to wondering: What if the operation didn’t take? What if the graft snapped or slipped off? Shortly after the operation, I had tried to get on a stationary bike and do just one turn of the pedal, and it was impossible. I just couldn’t do it. I realized then just how much work I had ahead of me. The pain may not be here now, I thought, but it is going to come.
I looked at the door now, waiting.
Maybe I was just kidding myself.
I remembered the conversation I’d had with Dr. ElAttrache just a few weeks before. Everything had been so upbeat, so confident.
“Just promise me one thing,” I’d said. “When I get this operation, will I be able to walk in the Octagon in four weeks?”
“Bruce,” the superdoc said, “I will have you in the Octagon in four weeks and have you at full force in Rio on August 28 for UFC 134.”
But sitting there now, I wondered if it was going to happen.
In walked the doctor.
My parents, Joseph and Connie, in their youth. My dad was brilliant and one of the last true “old breed” warriors, a man who thought nothing of facing down a group of thugs armed only with his fists. By the time I was ten, he had me breaking down and reassembling Luger pistols—blindfolded.
When I was in high school, my parents moved to Malibu, back when it was a small community made up of mostly middle-class families like ours but also with some movie stars living on the beach—and I promptly became a typical SoCal kid, spending every day I could riding the waves.
When I was in my late twenties, I started noticing a boxing announcer on TV who shared my last name and who, people said, resembled me. When I worked up the courage to ask my dad about it, I discovered I had a brother whose existence my parents had never once hinted at! The friendship Michael and I went on to build would change both our lives.
UFC 8 in Puerto Rico was my first UFC gig. Even after the fight, then UFC owner Bob Meyrowitz wouldn’t make me the league’s official announcer. It took one of the most high stakes gambles of my life to get him to agree.
The day after UFC 8, I was with fighter Scott Ferrozzo, who I managed at the time. As you can see, I came out of the evening in better shape than Scott!
I was an avid martial artist and kickboxer while growing up. That’s why I knew from the first time I entered the Octagon that if I couldn’t announce for the UFC, I didn’t want to be announcing at all. Here I’m messing around with MMA commentator Stephen Quadros, a longtime martial artist himself.
The three Buffer brothers—that’s my big brother Brian in the guest chair—staking out one of the world’s most valuable pieces of media real estate, the Tonight Show desk.
At a club with Rampage Jackson: Rampage sometimes jokes that we’re blood brothers because for a while he was dating one of my ex-girlfriends. If we are, at least we didn’t have to cut our hands to prove it!
Hanging out with Tito Ortiz the night before UFC 133. As we sat there gorging ourselves on meat, Tito described the insane routine he sometimes uses to drop upward of eighteen pounds in a single day. That kind of dedication is part of why I love this sport—and why I’m so proud to call these warriors my friends.
Jon “Bones” Jones showing off some Buffer gear at the Buffer Poker Room store in the Luxor Hotel in Las Vegas. I firmly believe that Jon has the potential to be the Muhammad Ali of the UFC—the only adversary who can hurt him is himself.
When Dana White and the Fertitta brothers took over the struggling UFC, it was a much needed change. Thankfully, Dana believed in me as an announcer and even helped shape my style in the Octagon.
There’s been a lot of talk floating around about Steven Seagal giving tips to UFC fighters. When I watched him working out with Anderson Silva and Lyoto Machida back in 2011, I got to see the truth for myself.
If you ask me, Chuck Liddell is one of the greatest strikers the world has ever seen, boxers included. As a fan, I’m crushed that I won’t be able to watch him in the Octagon again, but as a friend, I’m glad he chose to retire. I’m even happier that Zuffa has since made him a V.P. and an official ambassador for the sport. COURTESY GETTY IMAGES/ZUFFA
Dan “the Outlaw” Hardy is one of my all-time favorite fighters to introduce. He always beckons for me to come closer and to roar my intro face-to-face as he mouths the words with me and shakes his head only inches from the camera. The fans love it—and so do I. COURTESY GETTY IMAGES/ZUFFA
My dad taught me to play poker when I was eight years old. Over time, playing the game has become another career for me. I guess you could say my obsession with it really started when, in only my second tournament ever, I made it all the way through to the televised final table!
This is one of my marked-up fight cards from UFC 100, when I pulled off the 360. I always make a little tear at the bottom to help anchor the card in my hand. The way I move around in the Octagon, I gotta make sure the things don’t go flying off on their own.
I enjoy spending time with my godson Henry and his brother, Rupert. Thanks to these boys—and the friendship of their mom, Kristen, who is also V.P. of my company—t
his old bachelor has learned a thing or two about fatherhood. I might even be ready to settle down sometime.
A couple years after my 360 triumph, everything had changed. I blew out my knee at UFC 129, and during the weeks of rehab and surgery that followed, I wondered if I’d ever be able to announce my way again. I’m putting on a brave face in this photo, but in truth, I was scared.
Being at a photo shoot with the original ladies of the Lingerie Football League is a tough job, but hey, somebody’s gotta do it.
If you’d told me thirty years ago that fans would be wearing T-shirts with my name on them, I wouldn’t have believed it! And if you ever see me, you better believe I’ll be willing to stop and say hi. Trust me, moments like those mean as much to me as they do to you.
Sometimes it’s not what you say, it’s how you say it. Announcing catchphrases are great, but most of all I want my natural passion for the sport to shine through in my voice—and in my physicality! COURTESY GETTY IMAGES/ZUFFA
12
BRAWL IN THE FAMILY
Pat Miletich, the Croatian Sensation, is a great guy and a tough man, with whom I’ve always gotten along. But there was one moment between us that I’ll never forget. It’s hilarious in retrospect, but at the time I wasn’t laughing.
Those of us in the UFC share a common bond. We’re always traveling on the road together and we share a camaraderie that few co-workers, if we can even be called that, will ever have.