Tito started out<\/a>. \u201cThis huge lion with a big giant mane. In this hot smothering weather in Africa. And the little, small lions come up to kind of poke at him. Bit on his ear. Bit on his neck. The lioness comes over and bugs him.\u201d<\/p>\nAdvertisement<\/p>\n
(I imagined Amanda Nunes bothering this lion and got chills).<\/p>\n
\u201cThen you got the jackals and the rest of the wilderness looking, and seeing that lion on that mountaintop,\u201d he continued. \u201cAnd they come over and bother him, the jackals laugh at him. The hyenas laugh at him, nip at his toes. They eat all his food, and they sit back \u2026\u201d<\/p>\n
(Here Sonnen began to snore, pretty loudly if we\u2019re being completely honest, and I\u2019ve come to believe he was faking sleep).<\/p>\n
\u201c\u2026and you got jackals like this, and they think it\u2019s a comedy. Until one day he gets sick of it, and he attacks. And he shows people who the king of the jungle is.\u201d<\/p>\n
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(This wasn\u2019t the payoff I\u2019d hoped for, but by the end, I understood that Tito saw himself as the lion).<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd this little hyena, I\u2019m going to eat right through him. And we\u2019ll see on Saturday night.\u201d<\/p>\n
(Eat right through him? Jesus.)<\/p>\n
(I remember looking at promoter Scott Coker, who was in the middle of a text when Tito got to the end of the story)<\/p>\n
The table was set for Sonnen-Ortiz.<\/p>\n\n<\/span><\/button>\nSean Strickland really will just say whatever.<\/p>\n
(Jack Gorman via Getty Images)<\/span><\/div>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nThe thing about Sean Strickland is that his humor is a little different. As in, there\u2019s no real playfulness in what he\u2019s saying. No unintentional comedy, as with Tito. None of the comedic one-liners that Sonnen had, nor the self-owning parody of Colby Covington. And if there\u2019s a line, he throws himself over it as far as he can.<\/p>\n
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I like to think that he is performing an experiment to see if the world is still genuinely capable of an emotional response, or \u2014 short of anything quite so well-meaning \u2014 that he\u2019s trying to prove to his buddies that he can get by with whatever the hell he wants.<\/p>\n
You know, like he nudges his coach Eric Nicksick and says, \u201cWatch this, I\u2019m going to toss out some casual misogyny, xenophobia, gay bashing, racism and then sprinkle in some Islamophobia and \u2014 just watch! \u2014 there will be plenty of people who will defend me<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\nWhatever it is, there was real concern among UFC matchmakers early on that they might have trouble marketing a guy who told the world that he\u2019d been a neo-Nazi in his youth who\u2019d idolized the movie \u201cAmerican History X.\u201d Once Strickland forced his way into a title shot against Israel Adesanya and won the crowd over in Australia by taking his title, the fanbase itself reconsidered its labels. Maybe he wasn\u2019t such a bad guy after all. Maybe we were reading too much into his curb-stomping fetishes.<\/p>\n
Maybe the guy who said it would make him \u201csuper happy\u201d to kill an opponent in the Octagon\u2019s biggest fault is simply that he overshares.<\/p>\n
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What\u2019s the big deal?<\/p>\n
We have been in this Strickland whirlpool of slurs and violent soundbites for long enough to be immune to it by now, but we didn\u2019t even make it to fight week before he turned his UFC 328 main event on May 9 into an indie snuff film. Or at least, until he introduced the idea of shooting Khamzat Chimaev.<\/p>\n
While hosting a little Q&A at the UFC\u2019s Performance Institute in Las Vegas, Strickland envisioned his first encounters with Khamzat next week in New Jersey, and let\u2019s just say he wasn\u2019t anticipating a cordial handshake.<\/p>\n
\u201cAll I\u2019m going to do, I\u2019m going to pull my gun out and I\u2019m going to shoot him,\u201d he said. \u201cIf he were to come up to me like a man, say, \u2018You know what Sean, you said some things about my dad, Kadyrov,\u2019 I\u2019m like, \u2018You know what, dude? You whored yourself out, not me, I want to settle this.\u2019 I would say let\u2019s settle this like a man.<\/p>\n
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\u201cBut if you come up to me with three f***ing goatf***ers \u2014 Chechnyans that don\u2019t speak English \u2014 I\u2019m going to pull my gun and I\u2019m going to shoot each and every one of you. I\u2019ll be strapped in New Jersey, too, don\u2019t even worry about that.\u201d<\/p>\n\n<\/span><\/button>\n\n
Khamzat Chimaev is a force of nature \u2014 but he isn’t bullet-proof.<\/p>\n
(Geoff Stellfox via Getty Images)<\/span><\/div>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nAs far as anyone knows, neither Khamzat, nor his traveling faction, has ever been involved in any romantic relationship with a goat. It\u2019s doubtful that Strickland will roll up to the Garden State with a gun, either. Murder is as frowned upon on the East Coast as it is on the West. As with much of what Strickland says, his overboard sentiments feel more like nervous energy taking the form of wild talk<\/em>, as the mics get hot.<\/p>\nThere\u2019s no telling what he\u2019ll say next, but you can bet it\u2019ll make you feel some kind of way.<\/p>\n
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Perhaps it makes you feel like he can\u2019t control his impulses, for one. What he has is a fight-game version of Tourette\u2019s Syndrome, though I hate to involve the Tourette\u2019s community in what Strickland does. He can control himself; he just doesn\u2019t care to. That can be seen as admirable to some, to be so uninhibited, but what makes him compelling to a voyeuristic public is that he doesn\u2019t consider the consequences of what he\u2019s saying. In fact, he dares repercussions of any kind. When he talks about death, which is frequently enough, it doesn\u2019t concern him.<\/p>\n
Death to him is one of the things that\u2019s such bulls*** about life.<\/p>\n
Such an attitude, when it all leads to a fight, cannot help but play. But nobody is free from catching the strays of Strickland\u2019s hypothetical gun that he\u2019s smuggling into Newark. Poor Alex Pereira, who has nothing to do with anything going on with Strickland right now, was used as Exhibit A of the kind of foreigner whom Americans will accept.<\/p>\n
\u201c[The UFC finds] these sh***y people in Third World countries,\u201d Strickland said. \u201cWe don\u2019t accept you guys. We accepted Alex Pereira because he\u2019s a f***ing American. Loves guns. Likes f***ing p***y, maybe a little too much.\u201d<\/p>\n
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That\u2019s another thing. When Strickland talks about sex, which is more often than he talks about death, it commonly involves animals, homosexual encounters or single-track minds, like \u201cPoatan\u2019s.\u201d<\/p>\n
The real drama is what happens before <\/em>the fight. Khamzat, much like Khabib Nurmagomedov, isn\u2019t one to mess around with. What happens when they come face-to-face for real? It took everything in Khabib\u2019s power to wait until after he\u2019d settled things with Conor McGregor at UFC 229 before he talon-swooped down on Dillon Danis to settle some emotional debts.<\/p>\nKhamzat might not wait until fight night, and then the UFC would be stuck with a bigger problem. Not that Strickland is overly concerned with leaving Dana White in the lurch if there\u2019s any jazz before the rumble.<\/p>\n
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In fact, not even Dana was exempt from catching a Strickland stray.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m sure Dana White is a sociopath,\u201d he said, while standing right there in the UFC PI. \u201cAt that level, let\u2019s be honest, at that level of what he\u2019s accomplished, the s*** he deals with, I\u2019m sure he\u2019s a super-narcissistic sociopath. For him, the lizard brain doesn\u2019t compute, so he\u2019s like, f***ing bring it on dude, bring it on mother***er, which I respect. I respect that.\u201d<\/p>\n
Then he said Dana himself would get off on watching Strickland kill Chimaev in a fight.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think Dana White would love to watch that mother****er get killed. Again, he\u2019s a sick f***, dude. I mean 100 percent; do we not think that about Dana White?\u201d<\/p>\n
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Here he flashed his dimples with a big smile. The one thing Strickland likes is approval, especially when he\u2019s trying to get to the bottom of how he knows what we\u2019re really <\/em>feeling.<\/p>\n\u201cThe guy\u2019s probably a sociopath, or even, he\u2019s probably a psychopath.\u201d<\/p>\n
If there\u2019s a line, Strickland will cross it. If there\u2019s a lion, well \u2026 I like to think that in Tito Ortiz\u2019s imaginary animal kingdom, Strickland is the hyena nipping at the lion\u2019s toes.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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