Tito Ortiz is done fighting for a living, or so he would have us believe after his submission victory over Chael Sonnen at Bellator 170. And when a fighter like Ortiz calls it quits, we face a problem.

How are we supposed to explain this guy to the newer fans of MMA, or even the not-so new fans of MMA, when for so much of his recent history he’s been a running punchline in this sport, the guy who made his excuses and mangled his words and was always good for some unintentional comedy whenever he showed up on the scene?

Because you can see how, for someone who started following this sport only in the past few years, it might be hard to understand why Ortiz matters. Even someone who started following MMA a full 10 years ago would have witnessed an Ortiz who went 4-8-1, with half of his victories at light heavyweight coming against middleweights. He finishes his career with a record of 19-12-1. Not exactly killing it, at least on paper.

Why, a person new to all this might ask, do people still care about this guy? Why do they act like he’s a big deal on his way out the door?

But Ortiz really was a big deal. One of the ways you can tell is by how resilient his name has proven to be, even after the beatings it took over the last decade. His best highlights might not come in HD, but they did come at an important time for the sport, back when MMA was in need of a figure to help drag it out of the primordial ooze.

Ortiz belonged to that generation of fighters who, mostly due to a lack of other options, debuted in the UFC. His first two pro fights (both in the same night, naturally) came at UFC 13 in 1997. He didn’t start out on the small shows because there really weren’t any. Back then, the UFC was still so raw that it had yet to stumble upon idea of putting its own initials on the (optional) gloves.

It’s rare enough for any fighter from that era to still be around for this one. To still be a ratings draw after all that time is a borderline miracle.

That’s part of Ortiz’s legacy, that resilient brand of fame that somehow outlasts what it was originally about. But there’s also what he actually did inside the cage, back when a tiny sliver of the populace was watching.

Ortiz wasn’t the first fighter to prove that you could go far in MMA with a little bit of wrestling and a willingness to hang out in someone’s guard and elbow holes in his face. He was, however, one of the first ones to make it seem like an art unto itself. Ground-and-pound wasn’t just something Ortiz did on accident back in those days. It was something he studied, something he helped to develop.

When Ortiz fought Frank Shamrock at UFC 22 in 1999, it was one of those fights that gave us a glimpse of where the sport was headed. It wasn’t just style vs. style. Although Ortiz eventually tapped to strikes in the fourth round, it was one of the first fights in which you could see both participants pursuing strategies and exhibiting techniques that were specific to this new sport and its developing rules.

After that came the longest winning streak of Ortiz’s career, when he reeled off six straight while claiming and then defending the newly vacant and newly renamed UFC light-heavyweight title.

That was the beginning of what would become the UFC’s glamour division, back in the heyday of Ortiz and Chuck Liddell and Randy Couture. Ortiz was the first real star in the 205-pound class.

He’d show up with his bleached blond hair and his trademark shorts, black with orange flames reaching up the thigh, and he’d remind you that you were there to be entertained and you didn’t need to feel ashamed of it. When he won, he had a T-shirt ready, something that looked like he’d gone to the local mall and said, “What can you sell me to make sure my opponents want to fight me all over again immediately after I beat them?”

When Ortiz fought Ken Shamrock at UFC 40, it was the first UFC pay-per-view to feel like a real event, something you had to get together with your friends to watch live, premium prices be damned. You just couldn’t sit around and wait for that one to hit VHS.

The fight was a mismatch, of course. Shamrock was old for a fighter even then. Ortiz wasn’t. After three rounds Shamrock’s face looked like an impressionist painting. He had blood in his eyes and lumps all over his skull. For Ortiz, that was about as good as it was ever going to get.

He lost his belt to Couture in his next fight, and he then got knocked out by former training partner Liddell right after that. Ortiz would never again hold any MMA title of any kind, but he remained a household name for a decade more.

Plenty of that was his own doing. From the days of homemade shirts on, Ortiz was a natural self-promoter. He often spoke in tortured cliches that he couldn’t quite get right, but the force of his personality made him someone people still wanted to listen to.

From his feuds with his boss to his very public relationship woes to the Rolls Royce he crashed while texting and driving, Ortiz hit all the usual notes for a famous MMA fighter, and a lot of them he hit first. He showed us what it looks like to be an MMA star, for better and for worse.

By the end, Ortiz was a favorite punching bag of the MMA community. We loved to make fun of his losses and his missteps, but we also kept tuning in to see him fight without ever expecting much more than a semi-ironic hit of nostalgia.

He always gave us that. Occasionally he even gave us something extra, and through all the insults and the jokes he kept on giving what he had long after his contemporaries had mostly stopped trying. Whatever else we say about Ortiz, we have to give him that. If we’re being fair about who he was and what he meant to this sport, we probably have to give him even more.

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