For Liam McGeary, it all started on a lumpy sofa in Andover. Weirdly enough, with Tito Ortiz.

McGeary was already 26 by then, a suddenly too-old concrete worker who'd settled into a nine-to-five of construction and weeknight partying. Then one afternoon his mate threw on an old DVD, and up flashed the images of Ortiz, the original bad boy, getting melted where he stood by a mohawked embodiment of McGeary's tough guy lifestyle.

It was somewhere between the fortieth and fiftieth punch Ortiz ate that day from Chuck Liddell that the realization slowly dawned on McGeary.

"I was like, you know what, I think I can do that," the now Bellator light heavyweight champion remembers. "My mate was like, ‘what happens if you had to fight him?' I went, ‘I'd knock him out.'

"And now, I don't know how many years later it is, but now my mate is flying over here and he's actually watching the fight. Me against Tito Ortiz."

It's funny, the way life tends to lead us in little circles. Now Ortiz, the once California hothead with flames rippling up his fight shorts, is a middle-aged man caught between retirement and unexpected relevance, while McGeary, eight years his junior but twice that in fight years, is on the precipice of not only staking his claim as one of the world's most intriguing light heavyweight unknowns, but also doubling down on the boast which got him into this mess of a sport in the first place.

On Saturday, Sept. 19, McGeary meets Ortiz in the headlining bout of the Bellator Dynamite 1, the biggest and most ambitious Bellator show of the Scott Coker era. A cavalcade of goodness for fight fans, the night is expected to blend world class kickboxing with deft MMA matchmaking, at times simultaneously. And McGeary is the engine at the very top, the receiver of all the Ortiz momentum Bellator has carefully cultivated over the last year.

It's a long way from the couches of Hampshire, England, where McGeary first made his leap.

While he was never one for school, McGeary and his six-foot-six frame were quick studies to the intricacies of the fight game. He learned first at Gracie Barra in the Channel Islands, then dropped it all and moved to the U.S. on the urging of his coaches. As a late starter, time was precious and he didn't have much to waste.

McGeary eventually landed in New York at Renzo Gracie's gym, and from there, as he says, the rest is history. He smashed through three regional fights in nearby New Jersey, then cut a wide, destructive swathe through the Bellator light heavyweight division, finishing six straight fights inside the first round before tying Emanuel Newton into knots and snatching away the Bellator title.

All of it took just three years. And now comes Ortiz, whose revival tour against the diminutive Alexander Shlemenko and abruptly unretired Stephan Bonnar has been dubious, to say the least, but whose far-reaching star has the ability to do more for McGeary's career than 100 victories over Newton ever would.

"I'm not taking anything away from him. He's Tito. But nah, man," McGeary says of Ortiz's resurgence. "He fought somebody who was too small for him, then he fought somebody who hasn't fought in years. And he was coming off of, I don't know, a three or four-year losing streak?

"He moves like an older guy, you know? I mean, he's 40 years old. No matter how good you feel, your mind may feel good, but at the end of the day you're still 40 years old. And you've had 20 years of bigger fish. Twenty years of fight camps. Twenty years of people putting him through torture and fighting him and beating him down and breaking him down. No matter how well you feel, at the end of the day he's that age. It comes out with it: the harder you get hit, the more often you get hit, the more it shows."

All of that being said, McGeary is no fool. You don't stay undefeated by underestimating the Anton Talamantes and Beau Tribolets of the world, and you certainly don't make that mistake against a living legend.

"That's still Tito Ortiz, you know?" McGeary says. "Nothing about this is an easy fight. He is who he is and I have to prepare for who he is, whether he's 40 years old or whether he's 20 years old. It makes no difference to me. It's still the man who it is, and I'm not taking him lightly at all. So I'm preparing for the 20-year-old Tito."

Still, if McGeary can avoid his own Ryan Bader moment, he figures to emerge from Saturday night with a treasure trove of momentum and newfound notoriety coming his way.

He'll even have his next opponent, too, as below him on the card is a throwback four-man tournament pitting four of Bellator's top light heavyweights against each other in one bracket.

McGeary says he's looking forward to watching the spectacle himself, and though he doesn't have a horse in the race, he'll be rooting for one competitor far less than the other three.

"I don't want Phil Davis to win," says McGeary. "I mean, I'm just saying that because he's ex-UFC. He comes into Bellator being like, ‘oh yeah, I'm ex-UFC, I'm the best here.' Come on. I want the Bellator fighters to knock all of these ex-UFC fighters back to where they belong. ... We're just as good as they are, if not better. Now it's our chance to prove that.

"I don't know how everyone else feels, but that's just the way I feel," adds McGeary. "You've got Tito Ortiz coming in here demanding, ‘oh yeah, I want a title fight, I want a title fight.' Why, because you just came from the UFC? Nope. Then you got Phil Davis coming at me, ‘I want a title shot, I want a title shot.' Why, because you came from the UFC? Nope. All the other guys who've been in Bellator, they deserve to fight for the title shot. Just because you're ex-UFC doesn't put you necessarily up there at the top, you know? Bellator fighters have just as much right of being up there as everybody else."