He sat, on Thursday, in David Copperfield’s theatre at the MGM Grand with the signs, the crowd, the television cameras all there for him: Conor McGregor, a one-time plumber’s apprentice from Dublin. And watching as he prowled the stage at a press conference for UFC 196, tweaking Dana White and complaining about the production that has made him an international star, it was as if the illusion had reversed. Instead of being the UFC’s biggest fighter, Conor McGregor has become bigger than the UFC.
He joked this week about making his own title belt and deciding his own opponents rather than having them dictated to him, and it didn’t seem like a preposterous thought. Even White, the omnipotent UFC president accustomed to making fighters with a wave of his hand, blushed slightly on Thursday when he said: “Conor is tough to deny these days.”
It must be amazing to be 27 and rich and all, but in charge of your own pay-per-view kingdom. McGregor leaned back in his chair on the press conference dais on Thursday, a bearded kingmaker, and counted in the head the money he was delivering to everybody on the stage. Thirteen seconds with Jose Aldo in this casino last December sealed his international fame, and bestowed upon him the power to determine the terms of his arrivals and departures to UFC events and whatever he says in between.
“I could easily switch you out,” he taunted his looming but socially challenged 196 opponent Nate Diaz at a press conference where he kept White, Diaz as well as Holly Holm and Miesha Tate waiting 30 minutes. “Not even a thank you. Not even a little dance. Dance for me, Nate. Dance for me, and don’t look me in the eye when you dance.”
There was little Diaz could do but glare into the lights beaming down on Conor McGregor’s empire and think about the nearly $1m that would never be his had McGregor agreed he should be the last-minute replacement for Rafael dos Anjos, who pulled out with a broken foot. McGregor has been heaved into an outlandish mainstream fame like no one in the sport has ever had.
“I bring a hell of a lot to the table,” he said, Thursday.
Then he proclaimed he would rip down the 11-story banner of boxer Floyd Mayweather on the side of the MGM declaring it to be the boxer’s “home,” with the idea of replacing it with one of his own. Las Vegas is growing on him, he suddenly said.
“The dirt is clean. You can scoop it up and stuff bodies in there,” he said. “So I’ll continue to do that.”
And no one at Conor McGregor’s magical dais of money was going to say this was a bad idea.
Nobody in fighting can tear a man apart with words quite like McGregor. Saturday’s non-title fight might be waged 25lbs over McGregor’s title weight of 145lbs, but his taller, longer, wider opponent was verbally shredded on Thursday with such razor precision he shriveled like a deflated balloon on the stage of Copperfield’s theatre.
Diaz may portray himself as wise on the ways of Stockton, California’s streets – but he is awkward with words. McGregor seized upon Diaz’s uncertainty and slashed away at his backstreet bravado. He chopped at Diaz, luring his opponent into an unwinnable fight. The attack was blistering, profane and almost painful to watch. It was as if he had an imaginary string in which he could tug Diaz into a rhetorical abyss.
“As the fight draws closer, he’s like a scared little boy, trying to pass the spotlight off, trying to pass the spotlight to me,” McGregor began at one point, his voice rising, everything coming in a rat-a-tat-tat. “He’s trying to pass the limelight. That’s what a man does when he’s scared. He shies away and passed it on. Before, he said he was going to do this and do that to me, and now that we are sitting there he is saying absolutely nothing.”
Diaz seethed silently.
“He has a bully mentality until a real man shows up,” McGregor shouted, the matador taunting the hapless bull in a lilting Dublin cadence. “Like Mike Tyson said, he’s scared of the real man.”
Diaz grabbed a microphone, jerked it to his face, breathed in deep and screamed: “Fuck you!”
Then he added: “What do you think about that?”
McGregor threw his head back and laughed. And Diaz, still breathless and red, appeared to have no idea just how much he had lost the first battle of their fight.
But McGregor did not stop there. He compared Diaz to a wounded gazelle. He said the fighter is slow and heavy on his front foot and now is also heavy on his other foot too. He said he was a lion and he would hunt the wounded gazelle, killing it like a beast in the jungle.
He howled when Diaz tried to boast about his armada of fighting coaches, portraying them as battle-tested kickboxing warriors as opposed to McGregor’s more eclectic group of movement and striking coaches.
“I’m a lion in there,” he told Diaz. “Your little gazelle friends are going to be staring though the cage looking at you and your carcass getting eaten alive. All they’re going to do is say: ‘We’re never going to cross this river again.’”
McGregor is the lion of the UFC. His growls become the organization’s command. In a sport where the original stars have departed or aged, he is the Michael Jordan in a post Bird-and-Magic NBA, filling a void and pumping the ratings.
Tom Lawlor, who will fight Corey Anderson on the 196 undercard, said he took the fight because he knew it would let him watch McGregor in person. Lawlor, who lives in Las Vegas, had the UFC turn down ticket requests the last two times McGregor fought at the MGM. When he was told the Anderson fight would be on a McGregor night, he eagerly accepted.
The sport has changed since McGregor has come along, Lawlor said late Thursday morning. The UFC is “less family-like” and more corporate, he added. He attributes a lot of that to McGregor, and the outsiders he brings in as both fans and journalists, and he marvels at the way McGregor brags of his new wealth and the way he will beat opponents – and then wins in exactly the fashion he said he would.
And yet all that can change with one bad match-up or a careless night in the octagon. What if Diaz’s size and reach is too much for McGregor? What if a swing of his foot catches McGregor just right in the head? What then?
“If he doesn’t succeed, let’s see how far his mouth will take him,” Lawlor said.
And yet who is going to shut McGregor up? Is it Diaz, who lost the press conference long before he jabbed his hand in McGregor’s face at the ceremonial square-off, held right after Thursday’s press conference, igniting a scuffle that had to be broken up by hotel security and Las Vegas police? Will it be Dos Anjos, who may never get a shot to fight McGregor at 155lbs? Will it be welterweight champion Robbie Lawler, who McGregor seems to want to fight?
Does it matter, as long as McGregor keeps whipping his opponents before they get to the cage? On Thursday he practically begged Diaz to stay in the fight even as he predicted an early knockout just so he hoped he could show off the techniques he learned for the Aldo fight and never got to use.
At the press conference McGregor was asked to name his ideal opponent. For a moment he seemed perplexed. Who would he want to fight?
“I’d like to fight myself.” he finally said. “Imagine the numbers that would do if there were two of me?”
Then the bearded kingmaker leaned back and studied all that he had made in the days before UFC 196. He saw the crowd and the organization that now swirls around him and he seemed to like it.
He laughed, and everybody in the audience in Copperfield’s theatre laughed, too. There might, indeed, be but one person who can destroy this world he has built. And that might be Conor McGregor himself.
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