Former UFC champion and MMA legend Tito Ortiz says he nearly died in a serious boating accident eleven weeks ago, and is still suffering with serious health issues from the incident.<\/p>\n
Tito Ortiz was one of the biggest names in combat sports world through the early 2000s and held the UFC light heavyweight title from 2000 too 2003. He hasn\u2019t competed regularly since 2012, with his last fight being a 2021 KO loss to Anderson Silva<\/a> in boxing.<\/p>\n Ortiz shared the news of the boating accident on Instagram.<\/p>\n \u201cI got into a boating accident eleven weeks ago,\u201d Ortiz said. \u201cI was on my friend\u2019s boat \u2026 And we\u2019re coming back from a fishing tournament. I was sitting next to him and we\u2019re going about 55 miles an hour.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cHe clicked on the autopilot, and I was looking down. I had my feet on the dash, texting my buddies who were at the tournament. And when he clicked in the autopilot, the boat did a complete veer to the left and turned at a 45 degree angle, threw me off the boat. I hit the water going 55 miles an hour.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve been in a lot of fights and sparring, everything, but I\u2019ve never been hit that hard,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd to be knocked out unconscious, to wake up 10 feet in the water and have to swim to the top? I almost died, and it was scary for me, really really scary for me.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cFor the next eleven weeks, I mean even today, headaches, numbness down my arms. I [went] to the hospital about a week after because I had really bad headaches. I really didn\u2019t remember anything \u2026 It was really bad for the first couple weeks. I had problems speaking, I had problems thinking. I mean to this day, I still have problems thinking of names and everything. It really damaged my head, damaged my body, damaged my neck, lower back.\u201d<\/p>\n Ortiz said that he\u2019s already undergone one spinal surgery and is set to undergo another to hopefully help with the pain he\u2019s been dealing with since the accident. Given the severity of the injuries he\u2019s sustained on top of all the prior damage he\u2019s done<\/a> to his body through his career, he\u2019s understandably worried about the outcome.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s hoping Ortiz only gets better after this serious boating accident.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Former UFC champion and MMA legend Tito Ortiz says he nearly died in a serious boating accident eleven…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":710369,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[570],"tags":[64,63,786,40762,785,85],"class_list":["post-710368","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mma","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-fighting","tag-latest-ufc-mma-news","tag-mma","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/710368","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=710368"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/710368\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/710369"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=710368"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=710368"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=710368"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}