Why Conor McGregor is still as big as ever
He’s not quite Lazarus, risen from the dead, but it’s a pretty nifty feat that Conor McGregor has pulled.
The UFC’s featherweight champion, coming off a dispiriting non-title loss to Nate Diaz and coming out of a dispute with UFC management, is now a more powerful, significant figure within the sport’s hierarchy than he’s ever been.
And if you’re among those who believe that McGregor’s popularity will plummet with another entirely possible defeat, forget it. The man has staying power, too.
He’s human, so he doesn’t make all of the right moves, but when it comes to handling his career and promoting himself and mixed martial arts, McGregor is about 99.99 percent dead on the money.
His resurrection, if you want to call it that, began in the most desperate of times, in the seconds after his submission to Diaz in their bout at UFC 196 in Las Vegas in March.
He was, by all accounts, disconsolate in the locker room, according to multiple sources who saw him backstage. He wasn’t planning to attend the post-fight news conference.
The Internet is a “gotcha” kind of world, and after all of McGregor’s trash talk and predictions of an easy win in the two weeks leading up to the bout, the Internet was going to get him.
McGregor, though, showed up at the post-fight news conference and, in defeat, did an extraordinary job, as good or better than he’d ever done in victory.
He made no excuses. He blamed himself for his defeat. He said he wasn’t in the proper type of condition. He didn’t attempt to minimize Diaz’s performance and he didn’t blame the 25-pound increase in weight.
The 145-pound champion, McGregor walks around normally in the low-to-mid 170s, so the disparity in weight actually was an excuse, had he wanted to use it. But he wanted no part of it.
He owned up to his defeat and vowed to be better. He handled himself far better in defeat than former women’s bantamweight champion Ronda Rousey, who went incommunicado and has largely avoided the MMA media ever since.
McGregor rematches Diaz on Saturday in the main event of UFC 202 at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas with the same conditions as before. The fight is at 170 pounds, not 155 where Diaz has fought most of his career and which would seemingly give McGregor a far better shot.
Skill matters, and McGregor has plenty of it, but size matters, too. And given their respective skill sets, Diaz is a tough matchup for McGregor, a powerful striker at 145 who doesn’t hit quite as powerfully at 170.
Diaz has a great chin and can take a lot of punishment, which he showed in the first fight against McGregor. His ground game gives him a decided advantage if the fight gets to the floor.
But McGregor wanted it to be the same, and despite UFC president Dana White’s pronouncement that his next fight will be a defense of his featherweight title against interim champ Jose Aldo, McGregor isn’t necessarily down with that, yet.
Giving Aldo the shot is the fair thing to do, given his years of dominance in the division and his one-sided victory over top contender Frankie Edgar at UFC 200 last month. From McGregor’s perspective, though, a win over Diaz on Saturday won’t definitively answer the question, “Who is the better man?”
Even with a series-evening win on Saturday, McGregor will still have something to prove.
A McGregor-Aldo fight makes a lot of sense, though, and if McGregor doesn’t want to fight Aldo next, he could simply give up the belt rather than tying it up chasing this ghost called revenge.
One gets the idea, though, that there are going to be some intense talks between White and McGregor before McGregor’s next fight is set.
“I read that [White said Aldo is next],” McGregor said. “We’ll see. There’s a lot to still happen yet. I’m going to go in there to face this man, do what I know I can do and put him away and then we’ll see.”
There are many fighters who use trash talk as a means to get attention. Some of them can back it up; others, not so much. When McGregor first came into the UFC in 2013, he was talking even though he didn’t have the resumé to back it up.
Many, including a large portion of the media, wondered who this cocky guy thought he was when he hadn’t defeated so much as a Top 10 opponent.
But for a young person, the 28-year-old Irishman has a deep understanding of the business and his place in it.
He’s positioned himself expertly. He’s quite the entertaining fighter, and even with a loss to Diaz on Saturday, he still would be that. Multiple losses did little or no harm to ex-light heavyweight champion Chuck Liddell or legendary boxer Arturo Gatti. Because of the way they fought, and the capital they’d built with the fan base, they remained hot tickets even after a few losses in succession.
People wanted to see them, win or lose. And fans will still want to see McGregor regardless of the outcome of his fight on Saturday. He delivers bang for the entertainment dollar; he’s fun, and that’s why people plunk their money down, to have fun and be entertained.
At a time when prominent, powerful forces such as sports agent Jeff Borris are attempting to former a fighter’s union, McGregor stands out for his willingness to take on management to fight for his rights.
A dispute with White and outgoing UFC CEO Lorenzo Fertitta over appearing at press conferences in Las Vegas and New York to promote UFC 200 led to him very publicly being yanked from the card.
It was hard to fault White, because it would have been anarchy had he allowed a fighter to skip a news conference. But it was also hard to disagree with McGregor’s position, especially when it became clear just how much this meant to him.
For his own piece of mind, he had to do it his way. If that meant getting booted off UFC 200, so be it.
He’s fighting Diaz five weeks later than if he’d done what White wanted, and he now has a little extra firepower in his arsenal.
With McGregor on the card, UFC 200 almost certainly would have done two million pay-per-view sales. Because of Jon Jones’ drug test failure that forced him to be yanked from the main event, the card did significantly less than that.
Those events showed McGregor is a guy the UFC can rely on. He’ll show up to fight, injured or not. He’ll put on a great show. He’ll draw big numbers and generate significant income. No one has to worry about McGregor failing a drug test.
So he’ll be there on Saturday and, win or lose, few doubt the rematch with Diaz will be outstanding.
And whether it’s a fight with Aldo or a rubber match with Diaz or this ridiculous potential fight with retired – retired, folks – boxer Floyd Mayweather Jr., he’s going to do the same thing in the next fight: Put on a show and generate big money.
“Right now I have Floyd running around the Showtime offices gathering my money,” McGregor said. “As soon as he has my money, we can fight.
“If [Mayweather] wants to fight me, we can fight. If you need a safety net of rules, we can do that as long as you have my money. I don’t need no rules to protect me. That’s my thoughts on all that.”
And so, here he is, as big as ever, just five months after a loss many saw as devastating to his career, with nothing but blue skies and big dollar signs in his future.
More UFC coverage:
