When Tito Calls, Nate Quarry Helps

About a month ago, Nate Quarry was minding his own business when he got a call on his cell with an unusual area code for him. "Hmm," he must have thought. "I don't know anybody from there."

"Hi, it's Tito Ortiz, and I'd like to ask you about your back," the voice said.

If you're Nate Quarry, it's not a call you'd expect to get. But he didn't miss a beat.

"You know, the way my life is, nothing really surprises me too much anymore," Quarry told MMA Insider Blog.

Ortiz opened up to Quarry about his longstanding back problems.

"He said 'hey, I've got some degenerated discs and I'm looking at their surgery where they want to cut my abdominals open and snake through the organs and get to the lower back,'" Quarry recalls. "And I said, Tito, man, take my word for it, you don't want to do that. So I introduced him to the people at NuVasive."

Ortiz took a tour of the facility, and ended up getting the surgery done, as he writes on MMAWeekly.com.

At least Ortiz could say he injured himself in a cool way, like fighting. Two months prior, Quarry fractured his left orbital floor at a picnic with friends. Someone had arranged a game involving a golf club, a whiffle ball, and... well, the game really didn't have a name. Quarry was stepping up to take his crack at the ball and walked right into the backswing of a woman on the opposing team. The club weighed five pounds.

"It dropped me to my knees," Quarry said. "I was seeing double for three weeks."

Quarry's old teammate, Randy Couture, suffered the same injury, but in a fight against Ricco Rodriguez at UFC 39.

"There's about a million cool ways to get that injury, and I chose the un-cool one," he said.

So, a consultation with Tito Ortiz wasn't a big deal after all.