The Redoubtable Conor McGregor
After winning his rematch against Nate Diaz last August, Conor McGregor limped through a corridor beneath the emptying stands at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, his beard rust-colored with Diaz’s blood. McGregor moved with triumphal buoyancy in spite of the crutches he was forced to use as a precautionary measure for a foot that might have been broken. He seemed like he was on his way to a birthday party and not leaving a 25-minute cagefight. “They all doubted me!” McGregor exploded, his voice surging against taught and tinny vocal chords. “Everyone of you’s doubted me! Doubt me now! Doubt me now!”
That thought has been a refrain throughout McGregor’s still young UFC career, a mixture of self-pity and defiance, directed at everybody and no one in particular. It was the title of a documentary on his life from BT Sport, sloganized on promotional t-shirts, and in the buildup to the announcement of his fight against undefeated boxing champion Floyd Mayweather Jr., McGregor grew obsessed with the idea that anyone might doubt him. “You’re all going to eat your words,” McGregor promised an assembled group of boxing journalists in March. He singled out Dan Raphael, ESPN’s boxing reporter, and staked his claim on a future he couldn’t imagine belonging to anyone else. “Trust me, I’m going to stop Floyd, and you’re all going to eat your words — the whole world is going to eat their words.”
What’s unusual about McGregor’s doubt narrative is that it’s never been particularly true. McGregor has never been an underdog, according to the gambling archive Best Fight Odds. In his first fight for the UFC in 2013, McGregor closed as a -165 favorite (meaning you would have to bet $165 to win $100) against Marcus Brimage, who was five inches shorter than McGregor, had three inches less arm reach, and who would spend the rest of his career fighting a weight class 10 pounds lighter than the one he was facing McGregor in. McGregor’s performance was electric, delivering a knockout in just over a minute, every second of which seemed boobytrapped with danger for Brimage.

In his next fight, McGregor was almost a four-to-one favorite against a 21-year-old Max Holloway, and then a seven-to-one favorite against Diego Brandao. McGregor closed a three-to-one favorite over Dustin Poirier, and he was a fourteen-to-one favorite to beat Dennis Siver, which launched him into his first (interim) featherweight title fight, against late replacement Chad Mendes, over whom McGregor closed as a two-to-one favorite. Against José Aldo, who hadn’t lost in 10 years, McGregor opened as a -180 favorite, before a last minute surge of money on Aldo brought the odds close to even. McGregor was a -585 favorite in his first fight against Nate Diaz. Even after losing, McGregor remained the favorite in their rematch, with odds closing at -155. In his fight against Eddie Alvarez, a chance for McGregor to hold titles in two weight divisions simultaneously, something that had never been done in the UFC, the odds still sided with McGregor two-to-one. Against Mayweather, Mc Gregor is an underdog for the first time in his career, at+325. Even still, 92% of the bets have been made on McGregor.
McGregor has made a spectacle of proving himself unrestrainable, making doubt not just a kind of flawed fight analysis but an unjust attempt to impede the expression of his spirit through the profane accumulation of money. To prove his untouchability, McGregor has embracred racial stereotype and colonial chauvinism, freely violating social taboo and sporting decency to remind everyone there’s nothing anyone can do to stop him. Of Aldo, McGregor said: “I would invade his favela on horseback and would kill anyone who wasn’t fit to work, but we’re in a new time, so I’ll whoop his ass instead.” In a press conference with Rafael dos Anjos (who would later drop out of the fight with a broken foot), McGregor modeled himself after “El Chapo”and attempted to deliver a message to fans in dos Anjos’s home country of Brazil by speaking Spanish instead of Portuguese. He described Diaz as a “cholo gangster from the hood,” and ridiculed him for teaching children’s jiu-jitsu classes. During a four-city press tour the month before the Mayweather fight, which saw both men posture their way through a series of scripted half-thoughts, McGregor repeatedly called Mayweather “boy,” a diminutive he hadn’t used with any other opponent. On the third stop of the tour in Brooklyn, McGregor, shirtless and pimped up in a white mink coat, told the crowd, through a mercifully muffled PA system, that he couldn’t be a racist because he was “black from the waist down.”
McGregor is drawn to these ways of speaking not in spite of their racist character but because of it. These words register as linguistic weaponry in a way that foreshadows the underlying threat of his presence. For McGregor, there is no world outside. All referents to history or a public interest are used to amplify his own exceptionalism, unrestrained by the norms that usually suggest caution when, say, calling a black man “boy.”His ability to separate himself from the limitations of community and decency are the metric by which his celebrity is measured. For McGregor, accustaions of racism are just another unjust restraint on his individual freedom, not a system of unconscious values and behaviors that give that freedom its particular, and predictable, character.
If McGregor has an explicit political belief, it’s that all uncertainties about the world can be answered inwardly, through triumphal separation from the laggardly masses. The week after Donald Trump’s election, McGregor watched the streets fill with protesters while in New York preparing to fight Alvarez. He took it as a sign of weakness, personal responsibility deferred. “ Everybody’s just pointing at [Trump], and I don’t know,” McGregor told GQ Style’s Zach Baron. “Rather than putting your energy into pointing the finger at somebody else, figure out what it is you need to do and do it, and do it right, and get it done, and get your situation right. And if a person does that, then their life will get better. Standing on a fucking picket…I don’t know.”
In another interview, with Allistair Campbell for GQ UK, McGregor admitted he had no idea who Nicola Sturgeon, the First Minister of Scotland, was. He momentarily thought Tony Blair was still prime minister of England and admitted he’d never voted despite having depended on public welfare before signing with the UFC. “Listen, I am in the fighting game,” McGregor told Campbell, “I don’t care about anything else. I don’t watch the news, I don’t care about politics, I don’t care about other sports. I don’t care about anything I don’t need to care about. This is my sport, it is my life. I study it, I think about it, all the time. Nothing else matters.”
Ironically, McGregor has made a career of refuting other people’s dreams, unmaking his opponent’s hard work and self-belief. For McGregor, his opponents aren’t even people, really. “There is no face,” he said in 2015. “It’s just blank and a fresh body type.” The point of being a champion is to prove that no one else can be, to show that some limits cannot be overcome and that those limits are easiest to measure when they come in the form of another person, fearsome, punishing, and without forgiveness. In describing Mayweather’s flaws, he points not to technique or tendency, but anatomy. He’s too small and too frail and too old. Listen to McGregor talk about Mayweather, or any of his opponents, it’s hard not to wonder why he’s even bothering.
Without the spectacle of doubt and disbelief, McGregor is simply a favorite, a man with all the advantages, whose victories prove nothing other than the odds were right all along. Even in hismatching up against the best in another sport isn’t so improbable — it’s the central premise of mixed martial arts. The imaginary membrane that separates boxing from mixed martial arts has always been permeable, with many fighters switching back and forth at the amateur and regional level, usually out of financial necessity more than self-aggrandizement. At the highest levels of both sports it’s been the onerous terms of UFC contracts that’s prevented fights like Mayweather-McGregor from happening, not anything particular to either sport.
If McGregor has built his career by refuting imaginary doubters, Mayweather made himself a legend by refusing the bloodlust of fight fans. He’s won by rule rather than physical domination. Fans have never forgiven him for treating boxing as a sport, and for proving that a great sportsman can beat a great fighter. McGregor is following in the hopeful footsteps of all of Mayweather’s recent opponents, by promising to punish Mayweather for this legacy, dragging him back into the realm of fighting, where victory is measured by broken bodies and not accumulated points. The moral of Mayweather’s career is that there’s no audience for excellence. It’s defilement people want from fighting. That Mayweather let himself be enticed into one last fight two years after retiring may well be a sign of his own secret disbelief, a private superstition that he was allowed to get away with things for too long.
Whatever victories still lie ahead for McGregor, it’s unlikely any will be as significant as those others hold over him. Nothing McGregor has done in combat sports has felt as righteous as when Diaz, a man who’d been with the UFC for nine years, trapped in a contract that guaranteed only $20,000 per fight, choked him to the point of submission. McGregor had promised to feast on Diaz, as a lion might devour a gazelle. And when Diaz rose from McGregor’s drained body, flexing his arms in victory as he walked toward the camera hovering above the octagon cage, it was like seeing a gazelle loping across the savannah with the carcass of a lion in its mouth, the kind of wondrously inverted vision that should precede apocalypse, reality drowning itself in an ecstatic hallucination. When McGregor beat Diaz in their rematch five months later, inching out a one-point decision on two of the three judges scorecards, he reclaimed Diaz’s victory line — “I’m not surprised, motherfucker.” — like a landlord with an eviction notice: “Surprise, surprise, motherfucker, the king is back!” It felt rehearsed, a gloating claim on status that had momentarily been usurped. The fight both proved McGregor’s greatness and made it feel exhausting, inevitable.
In the buildup, fights seem as if they might reshape the world. And afterwards, it’s only ever the rankings that change. Fights are the debauched autofiction of a culture that feeds on cannibal vanities, one which can no longer distinguish the numeral from the numinous, inquiry from insult, doubt from disavowal. Can a sociopathic super-athlete beat an ex-plumber peacocking through the desert in a rental Lamborghini? Or is it the other way around? When the world is only big enough for two people, anything could be true. Who are you to think otherwise?
