Chael Sonnen Talks Move to Bellator MMA, Tito Ortiz and Whether Bad Men Also Cry

Josh Hedges/Zuffa LLC/Getty Images

Near the end of the five-minute video vignette Bellator MMA produced to publicize Saturday’s fight against Tito Ortiz, Chael Sonnen starts to cry.

The footage is remarkable for at least two reasons.

First, because the short “In Focus” feature may be the single best bit of marketing Bellator has ever produced.

Second, because MMA fans have never seen Sonnen quite like this before.

Many hardcore MMA fans know the story of Sonnen promising his dying father in 2002 that he would one day beat Ortiz and become the world champion. He’s been using the anecdote in the media since before his first clash with Anderson Silva in 2010 and included it his 2012 book, pugnaciously titled The Voice of Reason: A VIP Pass to Enlightenment.

Despite all that—and because of the bad-boy image he’s worked hard to cultivate—it’s unexpectedly heartrending to see Sonnen break down in tears while telling the story here.

This is a guy who made his name as a swaggering loudmouth styled after classic professional wrestling heel Superstar Billy Graham. While at the height of his powers from 2010-2013, Sonnen single-handedly rewrote the rule book on how the UFC’s traditionally cookie-cutter athletes can market their bouts.

He lobbed insults that often crossed the boundary of good taste. At his best, he was mesmerizing, doing more to shape the trajectory of modern MMA hype than any other fighter.

At worst, it was ugly, like when Sonnen likened Silva’s native Portuguese to “Pig Latin,” called light heavyweight champion Jon Jones “boy” before their fight at UFC 159 or told Brazilian manager Ed Soares on Twitter to "pray to whatever Demon effigy you prance and dance in front of with your piglet tribe of savages that I decide not to CRUCIFY you."

Sonnen and Silva in their first fight at UFC 117.Josh Hedges/Zuffa LLC/Getty Images

Fast-forward a half-dozen years, and nobody expects to see him struggling with his emotions as he prepares to make his promotional debut at Bellator 170 this weekend.

If the point is to lend some genuine emotion to an otherwise ho-hum matchup while humanizing a character much of the MMA world sees as a cartoon, well, it works.

Speaking with Bleacher Report, however, Sonnen warns not to let the waterworks fool you.

“I’m still the bad guy,” he insists. “The tiger doesn’t change his stripes. I may look nice, but it’s just a disguise. I’m candy-coated poison, and you should not believe anything else.”

As usual, it’s difficult to know exactly what to believe about Sonnen right now.

These must be strange days for him.

The 39-year-old Oregonian shocked observers when he signed with Bellator in September 2016. He enters this fight against Ortiz after more than three years away from the cage and fresh from a lengthy PED suspension.

He’s been through a lot during a 44-fight career—some of it pure self-sabotage and some of it the sort of personal tragedy you wouldn’t wish on a bitter enemy.

He’s failed a total of three drug tests dating back to 2010. The first undermined a near victory over Silva as a long-shot underdog at UFC 117. It also made him a poster boy for the sport’s synthetic testosterone epidemic, which ended when the Nevada Athletic Commission and the UFC outlawed the controversial hormone therapy in February 2014.

The second and third failed drug tests knocked Sonnen out of a fight originally scheduled against longtime nemesis Wanderlei Silva at UFC 173. It earned him a two-year ban from the NAC and ended a successful tour of duty in the UFC.

In January 2011, he pleaded guilty to money laundering in connection with mortgage fraud and lost his license as a realtor. In 2013, he waged a legal battle against a business partner over a West Linn, Oregon, pizza shop and ultimately settled out of court.

In August 2016 Sonnen lost six-day old daughter Blauna Dian after she was born 10 weeks premature and both the baby and mother Brittany were diagnosed with listeria. Sonnen spoke about the death with ESPN.com’s Eric Tamiso this week but has mostly kept the pain to himself.

Sonnen during a press appearance before UFC 173.Josh Hedges/Zuffa LLC/Getty Images

When his most recent drug-test failures prompted him to announce a retirement in June 2014, MMA fans thought they might never see Sonnen again. Now, we find him easing into the twilight of his career alongside Bellator’s growing stable of aging stars.

“It’s very seductive to be in this sport, just from the lifestyle of exercise and fitness and health—even the weigh-in...,” Sonnen says. “There’s really nothing else like it. Sports are something that for the most part are for kids, and if you’re able to extend your career you’re very lucky. I would hate to leave anything on the table. You see guys stay in sports too long, but a lot of it is because you just can’t replace it. You can’t do that stuff anywhere else.”

He remains MMA’s most engaging conversationalist, and still the best pure pitchman the sport has ever produced—and, yes, that includes Conor McGregor. With the homespun charisma of a barnstorming politician and the spirit of a carnival barker, Sonnen drifts seamlessly between acute self-evaluation and self-aggrandizing during our 15-minute conversation.

He’s likable, undeniably skilled at this aspect of the fight game, and it’s impossible to tell when he’s lying to you and when he’s not.

Yet something about this first press tour for Bellator has seemed a bit off-kilter. Sonnen can still spin bombastic promotional yarns when he wants to do it, but he’s been uncharacteristically subdued leading up to the Ortiz fight.

For one thing, he doesn’t seem interested in talking about the specifics of his UFC departure. Reports in July 2016 said he’d entered USADA’s drug testing protocol, prompting most to expect an imminent return to the Octagon. Two months later, he landed at Bellator instead.

Asked if he could connect the dots on that transition, he grows uncharacteristically economical with his words.

“I expected [to go back to the UFC],” Sonnen says. “I didn’t even know I had a choice, [but] I was not under contract with the UFC, and I signed with Bellator.”

Sonnen during a staredown with Wanderlei Silva.Brandon Magnus/Zuffa LLC/Getty Images

For its part, America’s second-largest MMA promotion is obviously glad to have him and plans to deploy Sonnen in multiple capacities across multiple weight classes. Bellator CEO Scott Coker is already teasing potential bouts with Wanderlei Silva, heavyweight star Fedor Emelianenko and middleweight Rory MacDonald.

"These are all fights that I'd be very inclined to watch,” Coker said in a release at the time of Sonnen’s signing. “So hopefully we can put some, if not all of these matchups together.”

First, though, Sonnen gets Ortiz, the UFC’s longtime 205-pound champion who was MMA’s biggest American star during the rocky early 2000s, when the sport was still under fire from politicians like John McCain.

Sonnen’s typical fire has shown itself only in flashes prior to this comeback bout. His outlandish promotional personality peeks out here and there, but other times it feels like he’s merely going through the motions.

Perhaps he’s still finding his legs in Bellator, where he could just as easily win a title as tread water in the organization’s popular but often lampooned senior circuit.

Or perhaps it’s the just absence of any real rivalry with Ortiz and his admitted disinterest in trying to build one.

“He’s just a nuisance,” Sonnen says of Ortiz. “He just annoys me. I didn’t come to Bellator to fight Tito, I came for Wanderlei Silva. But Wanderlei’s busy until the summertime with whatever red tape he’s stuck in, and they called me to fight Tito. It’s like an everyday distraction. It’s like a button off of my shirt. I’ve got to go out and do it because I said I would, but it’s hard to pretend. I mean, it’s just Tito.”

The pair wrestled a short match in January 1997, when Sonnen was at University of Oregon and Ortiz was competing for Cal-State Bakersfield. Ortiz had already appeared as an amateur in the UFC, and Sonnen and his father were both big fans.

“I remember it well,” Sonnen says. “I remember it like it was yesterday. I remember what my dad said to me before that match. I remember warming up. I remember going out there. The match itself was sort of anticlimactic. It was pretty quick.”

Sonnen pinned Ortiz in just 44 seconds. Later that same year, both guys had their first pro MMA fights. By April 2000, Ortiz was UFC champion, though Sonnen toiled on the independent circuit until getting his first crack in the Octagon in 2005. During that initial stint he went 1-2 and got cut from the promotion the following year.

By the time Sonnen had rehabilitated himself into an ostentatious championship contender four years later, Ortiz was already in deep decline. He went a disastrous 1-7-1 between 2006-2012 and then sat out two years before crossing the aisle to Bellator in May 2014.

At this point, neither man is a champion, and so Sonnen’s years-old promise to his father will only partially apply on Saturday.

Without those extenuating circumstances, though, it would be tempting to dismiss this fight as just another example of Bellator’s nostalgia-infused matchmaking philosophy. Even if it’s a pairing of convenience, however, it’s one that will likely score good ratings, with the UFC idle this weekend and Bellator 170 the only top-level MMA on TV.

But Sonnen’s and Ortiz’s promotional work has been stilted.

Ortiz only has one gear when it comes to selling a fight, and his intensity has largely floundered opposite Sonnen’s indifference. During their first side-by-side interview, Ortiz crushed a juice box on camera as a shot at Sonnen’s history with PEDs. The move aimed for savagery but came off goofy.

“He’s a little jackal, he’s a hyena,” Ortiz spat Wednesday at the open workouts for Bellator 170, via MMA Junkie's Steven Marrocco and Ken Hathaway. “I’m a king. I’m a lion, and this lion is going to roar on Saturday night.”

Sonnen hasn’t bit on any of that over-the-top posturing. He’s content to cast Ortiz as a professional hurdle—just a chore he has to take care of before he gets on with the business of trying to recreate his lighting-in-a-bottle UFC success on a new stage.

“My job is the same,” Sonnen says. “It’s still to come in and fight three five-minute rounds under the unified rules, but I do like when people tune in. I can drag Tito out of his hotel right now and whip his ass, but I’m going to wait until January 21 so that everybody can see it.”