Conor McGregor came out and I found this to be pretty interesting.
Conor McGregor comes out and he gives a breakdown of his fight, and he did this on some kind
of social media but he went round by round, and I thought it was interesting.
You know, anytime you have a big fight, you never know if you have a big fight until after
the fact.
You guys won't remember but we thought that coming into 2018 the biggest fight that we
were going to see and what will go down as one of the biggest fights in history was Stipe
versus Cormier, and no part of me telling you that that wasn’t a big fight is my attempt
to throw stones.
I was with you guys.
I thought that was going to be the biggest fight.
For my height of anticipation as a fan, no, that wasn’t #1, but boy, it was up there.
It was up there.
We got short-term memories as fans but I'm telling you, I remember looking forward to
that from the day they announced it, and why that fight fizzled out—
And the point I'm trying to make to you is a big fight you only know after the fact,
okay?
It doesn’t mean it's a big competitive fight.
It doesn’t mean it's a highly anticipated fight.
A big fight is reserved for one definition: How many people watched it.
That's it, whether it was a big fight or not.
It could be Spinks versus Tyson in 1989, the end of the 93 seconds.
That was the biggest boxing fight of all time.
So it doesn’t come down to competitiveness in nature at all.
It just purely comes down to how many people watch.
The reason I bring up Stipe and Cormier is, for reasons unknown and unexpectedly, nobody
wanted to watch that fight.
Shockingly.
I could begin to guess what those reasons were, but I personally just wasn’t part
of that.
I was excited for it.
I went there live.
I don’t regret any of it.
I thought it was a meaningful fight.
I think it will be a more meaningful fight as history goes on.
However, the second that fight was done, nobody’s talking about it.
That is just merely a sign and adds to the point that I am trying to illustrate for you
guys that a big fight is only something that could be recognized and categorized after
the fact.
So when you look at Conor and Khabib and you look at the fact that this fight was a meaningful
amount of time ago, three weeks ago, a month ago, we're still talking about it.
Conor McGregor is coming out and putting out his own interpretation of round one, two,
three, and four.
So the point that I'm making for you is the fact that Conor and Khabib was a meaningful
amount of time ago.
I mean, in MMA that was light years ago.
I just got out of the ring.
I got out of the ring forever ago, okay?
I mean, that's just the way that it happens.
But when you look at Conor and Khabib and the fact that Conor can put out his interpretation
of rounds one through four, which was the extent of the contest, and this can still
be headline news, that isn't some compliment to Conor, it's not even a compliment to Khabib,
it's a compliment to them both of Conor and Khabib as they went out and they did fantastic
business together, but it gets a little bit more interesting.
So first off, when Conor gave his insight into this and he break it down round by round—and
I'm going to give you this in conjunction.
I'm going to blur a couple of stories.
But Conor’s coach, Coach John Kavanagh, went on Joe Rogan’s podcast two days after
the fight, so I'm combining a little bit of what Kavanagh had said to Rogan but also what
Conor had put into print.
I'm doing that because that's how my mind is working on this.
I saw the interview, I read the interview, but it's a combination and, of course, when
you've got the student and coach here, I think that it's fair that we express their opinions
together.
But I will fully admit, and I'm blurring these lines just a touch, but between the two of
them, Kavanagh had come out on Joe Rogan’s show and said essentially that they trained
to lose, and he broke that down and I appreciate that he had said that, and those weren't his
words but I appreciate that he eventually came to that conclusion because since I heard
it I couldn't believe what he was saying.
And what he said was, “We believed if Khabib took us down—we believed in the grappling
department—our job was to stay on our feet, but we conceded that we probably weren't going
to get up.
If we failed at keeping the fight standing, we were probably going to be stuck underneath
Khabib based on the evidence that we've seen of both Conor’s skill set and Khabib’s
ability to stay on top.
So, if Conor is to get taken down, go to guard, pull nice and tight, don’t let Khabib get
separation, and eat up the round and concede that entire round.”
You guys see why that is a very dangerous mindset and I can tell you as fighters there
are parts of that that we all do.
There are parts of it where you go, “Okay, if I get taken down I'm simply not going to
get an arm bar on this guy, so throw arm bar out.
Don’t waste any time in practice on the arm bar.
Don’t waste any time in the fight on the arm bar.
Yeah, triangle choke isn't going to be the—you know what?
I'm not going to get leglocked.”
There are things about this where you don’t want to waste time and energy in the preparation
into it but then also within the strategies of the match.
What surprised me is when Coach Kavanagh, who’s fantastic at game plans and I don’t
mean to second-guess him—he has just said this and it surprised me—when he said, “We
just conceded the entire position and were ready to throw rounds away,” because as
I'm looking at that I'm going to, “Wait a minute, Khabib’s five take rounds away
from winning this fight then.
If all he has to do is get you there and you're going to stay there, unless you got put there
in the last 30 seconds of a fight you are going to lose the entire round.”
So I thought that was very interesting.
When Conor weighed in on it, he kind of said the same thing and it was open to interpretation
if Conor was throwing a coach under the bus or not.
I don't know that I thought that he went that far as much as, “Look, these guys handle
strategy and here's what the strategy was, and then I handle the actual competition itself
and here's my end of it.”
So I saw some talk online as well – I guess why I wanted to clarify that.
I don't know that I agree that Conor threw any coaches under the bus.
I think it was more of a team effort of, “Well, here's what part of the team was doing and
here's what the other part of the team, myself, was doing.”
I thought he was okay on that.
I thought he was just being candid.
But one thing when a fighter comes out and speaks very candidly, I don’t see them get
a whole lot of credit for it and I think that is very refreshing, particularly when you
have a performer, particularly when you have a character like Conor.
I don't think you get a whole lot of those real moments.
And why he would choose to go to that platform I have no idea, but I don't think it matters.
I don't know why we couldn't just sit back and enjoy it, and as I read it he was being
very introspective.
He was being very objective.
I took it as a very candid moment.
I don't think there was any PR stunt to this.
I don't think he had anybody edit it.
I think he was up late one night, having some thoughts—I've been there a million times
myself—and he decided to start typing them out.
I thought it was a really interesting piece.
If you guys haven't seen it, I would encourage you to go see it.
But some other stuff that's come up, and the fact that we can even be talking about this
fight, the fact that we're even talking about this fight three and four weeks after the
fact, just speaks to the magnitude and there's really nothing there to credit or copy or,
if you're a young fighter, to go back and steal so that you can have one of those fights.
It's not really a situation like that.
It's more of something that just happens organically after the fact and there seems to be continual
talking points.
But, one of the tremendous signs, and I never like being worked.
I don’t like being the worker.
Or, I like being the worker, I like everybody else to be the mark.
But one way you know when you are getting worked or one thing that has to send your
feathers up is if the guy has a cashout at the end of it, if a guy begins to lure you
into something where he's then going to go and hit the cash register.
Conor did just the opposite where as he also said in conjunction with this piece where
broke down round by round within the last number of days, he's come out and said, “No,
I don’t have to fight Khabib next.
It could be somebody else.
It could be Tony.
It could be an up-and-comer.
Khabib and I can do it down the road.”
No, I didn't know where he was going with that, which leads me to the conclusion he
wasn’t going anywhere with it.
He was just being an honest guy saying, “Maybe I got knocked off my perch and maybe a title
fight isn't my next fight.
I got a whole bunch of money and a whole bunch of fame and a whole bunch of run, but if I
got to go be a contender like everybody else to get my feet wet and get back in there and
get the opportunity that I want, then I'm willing to take it,” And I thought it was
one of the cooler things that he said and I just want to make sure that he gets credit
for it, but this was my interpretation of it.
There was no way to cash in on breaking down or throwing a coach under the bus, which I
think is a misinterpretation, a misrepresentation, but it still creates a little bit of dialogue
over pizza with the boys.
When he's doing that but then he doesn’t have his finger on the scale and he openly
says, “Yeah, it can be another competitor,” I thought it was a very great moment.
I thought it was a very organic week.
I thought that it was appropriate.
I think it also helps to diffuse the power that Khabib has, and don’t forget in this
situation that's the one thing that Conor lost.
He lost control of the power.
And even though he was the biggest star and even though he was the highest-paid and even
though he would have the most influence because of those two aforementioned things, when you
have an opponent who does not care about the money and he's in prizefighting, and that's
what you have with Khabib, all of a sudden logic goes out the window.
What you could logically do and we would logically expect other fighters to respond to, which
is the money and the payday and the rematch.
When you have a guy like Khabib that says, “I don't care about any of them.
You can keep the money.
In fact, I might just leave the sport right now,” when the guy says it but you happen
to believe him, he now just took the power.
In any situation, whoever can care less—and I'm not saying to be careless, I'm saying
to care less—then the other guy has the power.
Conor’s never been in that spot before.
So what is Conor supposed to do when he says, “I want a rematch,” and for the last five
years anybody’s name that comes out of his mouth ends up on the other side of that contract,
ends up standing across the ring from him, ends up having a great moment and a great
experience and a high-profile fight and a big payday, and we are in a business here?
What do you do when that guys says, “I don't care,” and you believe him?
To say, “I don't care,” is one thing.
When the guy says, “I don't care,” and you believe him, what do you do?
The answer is you do what Conor did and you say, “Then I'll fight someone else.
If you don't care, I really don't care, and while you're sitting in front of a commission
I'm going to be building up a pay-per-view.”
That was exactly the way you handle that.
That was the only way to handle that and that does not take back the driver’s side of
the car from Khabib, but it helped to level it a little bit.
And if Khabib is not going to play ball—and I haven't got the foggiest idea, guys, if
he is or not, I'm just speaking to how you handle this piece of psychology—if Khabib
was not going to play ball and you're Conor McGregor, you take your ball to another field
and you see whose lights are going to shine brighter, the field I'm over at or the field
in the corner that you’ve put yourself in.
You don't know that answer until you get there.
But when you're confronted with a situation where a guy doesn’t want to do business
the way that business has been traditionally done, you have to try something different
and that's what Conor did.
And even if Conor wants to go into the rematch with Khabib, even if he wants to go into a
boxing match with somebody else, even if he wants to sit on his ass and do Ireland in
Ireland, when a guy is coming in and he's starting to take control of that car that
is your car, you've got to get his name out of the headlines.
When two people are in a headline, one person is getting the shine.
That's it.
There's never been a tag team that was equal.
There's never been an NBA team that was equal.
There's never been a football team.
One guy gets the endorsements.
One guy goes on the cover of the Wheaties box.
Not all of the Patriots go on the Wheaties but one guy.
One guy gets the MVP.
So if you were the guy in the spotlight, which Conor McGregor is, and somebody else is starting
to dim that light because he's not logically playing ball, the very least thing that you
would give him is a bump.
You will get him out of the headline by getting his name away from yours.
I don't know that Conor McGregor has the forethought to do that as well-thought-out as I just said
it for you but I will tell you, even if it was unintentionally, that's what happened
here.
And if you want to see a big fight with Khabib, if it's not Conor next to it, there are other
options.
You bet there are.
Tony Ferguson can go into that mix any which way he wants, but it's not the same thing.
You could take Khabib and a dance partner of his choice, put him any night, any numbers,
any box office, any way you want to do it, against Conor McGregor and an opponent of
his choice, and you're going to find out who the A-side is.