I grew up as a pro wrestling fan, and every wrestling fan knows about those moments where something happens that makes you ashamed of your fandom.  While I haven’t watched the WWE in ages one thing that comes immediately to mind is octogenarian Mae Young ‘giving birth’ to a fake hand.  Really, there were countless angles from that era that made me ashamed.  Any time that Vince McMahon pulled down his pants on national TV.  Watching Hulk Hogan and The Ultimate Warrior try to ‘work’ a match.  Dating back to the WCW era, the Black Scorpion angle or the infamous Robocop ‘run in’.   As a wrestling fan, you already know that a lot of people aren’t going to ‘get it’.  The ‘moments of shame’ transcend this and seriously makes you question if your investment in the ’sport’ has been worth it.

I’ve had a lot more of ‘moments of shame’ about MMA lately.  Hulk Hogan cutting a promo on a live UFC broadcast certainly wasn’t a high point for the sport.  This weekend, UFC 109 offered yet another.  The fact that the UFC had booked a match between Randy Couture and Mark Coleman as a ‘main event’ was bad enough.  Both guys are legends in the sport, but both are well past their competitive prime.  On the undercard?  I have no problem with the fight.  As the main event that I’m expected to pay $50 to watch?  That’s a different matter.  But despite my disagreement that this is a worthy PPV main event neither that nor the fight itself brought about a feeling of shame.

That happened *after* the fight when Tito Ortiz and his porn skank adult entertainment entrepreneur girlfriend Jenna Jameson decided that they were going to do their own ‘angle’ during Mark Coleman’s post fight interview with Joe Rogan.  Our friends over at The Savage Science describe Tito’s UFC 109 postfight antics:

Unfortunately, Tito seems to think that he’s still ‘the show’.  The latest bit of jackass behavior may have been his most egregious.  After the UFC 109 main event between Randy Couture and Mark Coleman,  Joe Rogan was interviewing the defeated Coleman in the cage.  Ortiz and his porno star girlfriend Jenna Jameson decided that this was a great time to heckle the UFC Hall of Famer.  Tito shouted expletives at Coleman as both he and Jameson gave him the ‘middle finger salute’.  Coleman went to go after Ortiz, but Rogan intervened.  Instead, Coleman grabbed the microphone and said “F*ck you, Tito, you’re a douchebag”.  The crowd at the Mandalay Bay Events Center started the “F*ck you Tito” chant as the show went off the air.

Apparently the ‘feud’ between Coleman and Ortiz started not long after ‘The Huntington Beach Bad Boy’ returned to the UFC.   The two were supposed to fight in Tito’s ‘comeback’ match but Coleman had the nerve to go and get injured.  Ortiz reacted like any professional athlete would and called Coleman a ’sissy’.  This led to some back and forth between the two men in the media and on the CB radio of the 21st Century, aka Twitter.  It also set up one of the better crackbacks in recent memory from Coleman’s longtime friend and business associate Michael DiSabato:

“The only thing Coleman is afraid of when it comes to Tito is contracting swine flu from that dirty ass d-bag. We all know where he lays his head down at night. Tito wants to get personal with a legend? OK, let’s get personal – we can all go to our porn collections and watch what Tito sleeps with night after night.”

Wow.  Talk about harsh.  Tito waited until after UFC 109 to get his ‘revenge’ with his heckling and bird lobbing, a plot worthy of Boris and Natasha’s ongoing battle of wills against ‘Moose and Squirrel’.  The mainstream sports media has picked up on the story, giving them the opportunity to make fun of not only the Coleman/Couture ‘old timers’ main event but Ortiz’s histrionics.  Coming on the heels of NY Jets’ coach Rex Ryan getting in a few extended middle fingers of his own at a Strikeforce show, Tito makes for a pretty easy target.

I’d like to think this wasn’t a planned ‘angle’ but with the UFC you can never tell.  Certainly, no one wants to see a Ortiz/Coleman fight and thankfully Dana White insisted at the press conference afterwards that Coleman was retired.  Longtime foil Chuck Liddell has called out Tito–the two are opposing coaches on the upcoming season of ‘The Ultimate Fighter’ and all of this could be a pitiful effort to generate ‘heat’ and increase ratings.  It also runs the risk of resulting in another Ortiz/Liddell fight which no one wants to see either.

If it wasn’t a ‘planned angle’, where is Dana White while this is going on?  He’s quick to jump in whenever the image of the UFC is at risk and he’s been oddly silent.  What do you think Roger Goodell would have done if Tom Brady and Gisele Bundchen interrupted the Superbowl post game to heckle and give the ‘middle finger salute’ to Peyton Manning?  Goodell would definitely take offense and everyone would think that Brady looked really stupid.

Same deal with Ortiz–its hard enough dealing with the misconceptions that many people have about MMA.  Trying to explain that idiot behavior like this isn’t ‘part of the sport’ is even worse.

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