Yesterday MMA personality Front Row Brian tweeted about a rumored bar fight on New Year’s eve involving UFC Hall of Famer and Bellator star Tito Ortiz and a person identified as a boxer from Floyd Mayweather’s gym. Others who witnessed the altercation also tweeted their accounts of the fight:
@sdot_bow LMAO! Naw, hell naw. He was fightin with some boxer in front of the club and I took him down to the ground to stop the fight.
— WatDatMoufDo (@linopipes) January 2, 2015
The person involved in the altercation with Ortiz is apparently not a boxer but a fellow MMA fighter named David “Bionic” Terrel. We spoke to Terrel earlier today, and what follows is his account of what happened:
“I was all over the place for New Year’s but towards around 3 or 4 in the morning I was at a nightclub called Drai’s with a group of friends. To get in the club there’s this huge line around these ropes, so it’s really hard to get in. We had got in because we were getting a table, so we were inside the ropes.
“Tito shows up and he goes to the rope, opens the rope up – which you’re not supposed to do – and lets him and his group in. The host comes over and says “hey, you’re not supposed to do that.” So he starts name-dropping himself, “I’m Tito Ortiz.” And the two guys working there are “well you still can’t do that.”
“But Tito purposely did that to get next to me to try and punk me because we obviously don’t like each other. I helped train him for his fight with Shmelenko in May and then he ended up doing one of my partners dirty so we had a falling out.
“I talked Bonnar into going to Bellator to fight him after that and was now on Bonnar’s team. Tito didn’t like that. And there was a bunch of stuff said back and forth on social media. So when he saw me he tried to get as close to me as possible, which is why he went through the rope.
“So then [the nightclub’s staff] told him he had to go behind us because we were there first, so as he walks by me and I nod my head like ‘what’s up’ but I didn’t saying anything. He stopped and he said ‘motherfucker, don’t say what’s up to me.'”
“So I said “What’s up? You want to fight?” And then he swung on me.
“I slipped the punch and then fired on him with a right–left hook combo and I backed him up and then he swung. And it happened so fast. People started to grab him to break it up and then he tried to shake everyone off him and then he got cracked by someone else. And then I remember security was trying to take him down and I got behind him and grabbed him a round the neck. Kind of like I was going to get him in a rear naked but I didn’t put a choke on him. I pulled him to the ground and I said “Yo! Chill. Relax. Kick back.” And then it stopped.
“A mutual friend of me and Tito told me to leave before the cops came. I remember looking back and seeing him with a big, bloody lump on his head.
“I don’t think he was drunk, but you’d think he was on something to act that way. That was totally unprofessional. We are two pro fighters. I wouldn’t think in a million years he’d do some shit like that in front of the public. He’s like signed with Viacom, you can’t do that shit.
“It was just crazy that he went out of his way to get near me and swung first. Hell, I just wanted to go to Drai’s but Tito fucked that up.”
Several other individuals have told Bloody Elbow they were also witnesses and could confirm most of Terrel’s account.
Bloody Elbow has reached out to Tito Ortiz for his side of the story but he declined to provide a comment for this post. He did offer some unsolicited editorial advice we chose to disregard.
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