Like a Tito Ortiz monologue, Bellator 170 fight with Chael Sonnen is a bad idea too good to ignore

There ought to be a word for the feeling you get when Tito Ortiz makes it clear that he is about to attempt to recreate a Christopher Walken monologue. I’m thinking one word, it would probably have to be real long, like the way the Germans do when they want to smush a series of emotions into one mouthful.

I mean, it’s Tito we’re talking about. This is the guy for whom even the simplest of idioms form a linguistic minefield.

He used to sit there at UFC press conferences and talk about how he was fighting to put food on his children’s stomachs and a house over their heads. He once conducted a post-fight interview in which he asked the winning fighter to “let me tell you how you’re feeling right now.”

Now he wants to do a Walken speech? At the Bellator 170 press conference? With Chael Sonnen, the quickest wit in the West, sitting just a few feet away, ready to pounce on the smallest screwup?

The feeling here is dread, but also anticipation. You know it won’t go well. You know it is a feat beyond his abilities as a speaker. You wish he wouldn’t try it, but as long as he’s set on it, you’ll be damned if you’re going to miss the unintentional hilarity.

It’s as if your drunk uncle has just announced his intention to perform a handstand. You’ve already got your cringe face on, but you can’t possibly look away.

This feeling, as much as anything else, is what Bellator is selling us on Saturday night. In Ortiz (29-14-1 MMA, 2-1 BMMA) and Sonnen (18-12-1 MMA, 0-0 BMMA), we have two aging fighters known at this point in their careers mostly for the excitement they generate before and after the bell. Here they’ll square off in a Spike-televised main event at The Forum in Inglewood, Calif., with some bragging rights on the line, but not much else, and we’ll watch because it’s free on basic cable and also because there’s always the chance that things will get weird.

Is this one of those bad blood grudge matches? Well, kind of. Sonnen said the things you’d expect him to in the lead-up to a fight like this, zinging Ortiz on everything from financial struggles to romantic relationships, but he did it with a palpable lack of enthusiasm. He knows it’s part of the job. He knows we’re waiting for it. At the same time, he and Ortiz are both hovering on opposite sides of 40, and who has the energy for this part anymore?

Ortiz, on the other hand, seems to need that fuel. He’d have us believe that this is his retirement fight, and he never misses a chance to tell us how long he’s been in training camp for it. (It’s 14 weeks, by the way, which seems like it could easily become the cornerstone for his customary I-don’t-want-to-make-excuses-but-here-I-go speech if he loses.)

Fighting Sonnen is a chance for Ortiz to rewrite history in a way that makes this matchup seem inevitable, even preordained, when to the rest of us it mostly seems like a pairing of convenience and a lack of better ideas.

Which is not to say that it won’t be worth watching. You know, in a way. They’re two of MMA’s most memorable personalities, for different reasons, and they’re both old enough that, regardless of which retirements stick and which need a few more tries, we know they can’t keep this up too much longer.

Even if this isn’t the last chance to see them do this, it’s probably among the last chances, which is a real good-news/bad-news situation for those of us who remember when Ortiz and Sonnen both blazed new trails to a certain kind of MMA stardom.

And, as with all Bellator’s most successful offerings, there’s that old reliable question on a weekend with no UFC event: What else are you going to do on Saturday night?

We’ve heard better sales pitches, many of them by Ortiz and Sonnen themselves. But then, we’ve heard much worse ones too. Even if we watch this one with a slight cringe, how are we not going to watch?

For more on Bellator 170, check out the UFC Rumors section of MMAjunkie.