Tito Ortiz, a titan of the UFC, has a history-making theatrical entrances and putting on wild performances. But this was something else entirely. On June 1, 2021, attending an in-person meeting as a Huntington Beach, Calif., city councilman, Ortiz stood before his colleagues and announced that, with three and a half years left on his four-year term, he was stepping down.
In nearly a quarter century as a mixed martial arts light heavyweight, Ortiz officially tapped out only twice. And each of those times came when an opponent was about to divorce him from consciousness or snap his tendons. On this night, the night of his third tap, the capitulation was occasioned by more mundane reasons.
Ortiz would claim that since his swearing in as an unlikely Huntington Beach political dynamo, he had been treated “with hostility and judgment” by other council members; that he had been a victim of character assassination at the hands of the media; that his family was being persecuted. Ortiz reckoned that whatever good he had hoped to contribute to his city would not be possible as an elected official. “To put it simply,” Ortiz said, “this job isn’t working for me.”
