Bjorn Rebney says Bellator sticking by Tito Ortiz despite injury

LONG BEACH, Calif. – Although Tito Ortiz forced Bellator MMA to abandon plans for its first pay-per-view event, the promotion’s chairman and CEO said he’ll give the fighter another chance.

That doesn’t mean there won’t be any worries about the future, though.

“Sure, I’m worried about it,” Bjorn Rebney said following Saturday’s Bellator 106 event, which took place at Long Beach Arena in California. “But it’s Tito, and I’ve known him for a long time, and I made a commitment to him that we would try to give it another run.

“This went s–tty, and the assumption is he’ll heal and we’ll give it a run. He’s had injuries, but he hasn’t made a career of pulling out of fights. He’s as disappointed as anybody, but if he heals as anticipated, we’ll schedule another fight.”

Ortiz (16-11-1 MMA, 0-0 BMMA) was scheduled to fight former training partner Quinton Jackson (32-11 MMA, 0-0 BMMA) in Bellator 106's headliner, but a fractured neck suffered in training forced him to withdraw eight days prior to the event. The promotion then switched gears from pay-per-view and secured a spot at 9 p.m. PT/ET on Spike TV, whose parent company, Viacom, owns a majority stake in Bellator.

Immediately following the withdrawal, plenty of conspiracy theories floated around about the supposed real reasons behind it, including collusion between Ortiz and his former boss, UFC President Dana White, and Bellator pulling the PPV plug when ticket sales lagged.

But Rebney said the evidence can’t get any clearer when it comes to proving Ortiz was unfit to fight.

“I could give you ridiculous smart-ass answer after smart-ass answer about the other guy on the grassy knoll, and Oliver Stone having a hand in it,” he said. “It’s ridiculous. I actually have real X-rays from Tito’s real neck that showed it wasn’t fractured before and it is now.”

Rebney said it’s a 12-minute trip from the Bellator offices in Irvine, Calif., to Ortiz’s gym in Huntington Beach, and prior to the injury, he felt confident about putting the injury-prone fighter in another headliner after watching him train.

Following his latest ding, however, some have called for the 38-year-old Ortiz to hang up his gloves for good, like he was expected to do this past year following a losing effort against Forrest Griffin at UFC 148.

Rebney, though, said he’s not ready to declare Ortiz’s career over.

“Who are we to tell Tito Ortiz when he can and cannot stop fighting?” he asked. “He had a fracture in his neck. I spoke to a top-level specialist who did the neck surgery on Tito. The reason he couldn’t fight is because it was fractured, and if he got dropped on his head the right way, it could splinter and go into his spinal cord and paralyze him.

“But it’s a fracture like a broken arm. Once it heals, there’s no more likelihood that it might fracture into your spinal cord than you or I. So when he gets well, if he wants to fight, we’ll figure it out and make it work.”

Among the conspiracy theories, there is the idea that regardless of the reason (or reasons) for Ortiz’s withdrawal, it ended up being a positive for Bellator in drawing much-needed attention to the promotion, which has struggled to escape the shadow of industry-leader UFC.

“Well, it sure does look like that now, doesn’t it?” Rebney quipped to MMAjunkie.com.

With an epic rematch between Michael Chandler and Eddie Alvarez taking center stage and delivering big, Ortiz’s withdrawal certainly looks like the best possible course, even if four out of the five main-card fights went to the scorecards.

“I think the thing I’m most thankful for is that so many people got to watch this fight for free on TV, and it speaks to how awesome the first one was,” Rebney said. “I think the shining light off this is however many people would have watched it if it had been the co-main on a pay-per-view, this was open to everybody. Hopefully, the numbers were big and people on the East Coast stayed up to watch it because they didn’t go into the cage until, like, 12:01 a.m. (ET), or something like that.

“The plan was we were going to get clean at 25 before the end of the hour, and Mike and Ed would go in and finish out the hour strong, and by midnight, we’d be clean because [viewers] drop off like crazy after midnight. So we’ll see what the numbers are, but people are going to watch it. We’re going to run it again and again.”

For more on Bellator 106, stay tuned to the MMA Events section of the site.