They came from Ireland, and they took over the MGM Grand.
They began arriving in droves on Thursday. That was the moment the MGM slowly, methodically morphed from a ghost town into Dublin, America. This is a normal fight-week process in Las Vegas. Prior to Thursday, you have a few autograph seekers waiting outside the Grand Garden Arena, biding their time in the hopes they’ll convince a fighter (any fighter will do) to sign 18 different objects while taking pictures to verify authenticity.
But on Thursday, the real crowd begin arriving. And last week, the real crowd consisted of thousands of Irishmen who, having flown a very long way to a land filled with sunshine and lots of beer, proceeded to go about drinking as much of that beer as humanly possible. And I don’t know if you know this, but the Irish have a healthy appetite for beer. They walked through the massive MGM casino, carrying ungodly sized plastic things filled with beer, and sang songs about the hero they’d traveled all this way to see.
One Conor McGregor. There’s only one Conor McGregor. Walking along. Singing his song. Walking in McGregor wonderland.
They’d taken the famous song created for Ricky Hatton and applied it to their newest conquering fighting hero. Like Hatton, the Irish travel well for McGregor. No distance is too far, especially when there is beer to drink and Irish flags to wave and obscenities to scream at the top of your lungs. They came to see a show, yes, but they also came to be a part of the show. And, in a weird way, the Irish fans ended up being the show all by themselves. They packed Friday’s weigh-ins and were so boisterous that for the first time I can remember, Las Vegas police lined the front of the stage in an attempt to actively prevent the McGregor-mad Irish from rushing the stage during his faceoff with Dustin Poirier.
Afterward, they created a sort of traffic jam. Due to the pop singer Katy Perry assuming control of the Grand Garden Arena on the day, weigh-ins for the event were held on the third floor of the little-used MGM conference hall. With one escalator to take all the fans from the third floor to the first, and 2,000 absolutely hammered Irishmen singing songs of McGregor, well, you do the math. I ended up going back into the weigh-in hall and just sitting, waiting and watching, while the Irishmen tried to figure out how to fit 2,000 people onto an escalator. They eventually gave up and just drank, right there in the carpeted halls of a conference center that has probably never seen anything quite like this before.
I sat there and watched, and one of them stumbled up to me and said:
“Buuurhhh gaihjhjhhh ughhhrnnn.”
I did not know what this meant. He was absolutely knackered, as the British say, and his already thick accent was rendered completely unintelligible.
They kept singing their songs, drunkenly, right up until Saturday night, when McGregor walked to the Octagon and did pretty much exactly what he said he was going to do. Afterward, he donned yet another expensive suit and the media loved him and everyone loved him. And then, as I left to begin the long 12-minute drive back to my house, I passed another 400 or 500 Irishmen. They were waiting for McGregor.
It goes without saying they were completely inebriated. They were having the time of their lives. It was a perfect night to be Irish, walking in the McGregor wonderland.
And what about Demetrious Johnson?
After McGregor dispatched Poirier and then Donald Cerrone beat Eddie Alvarez, I made my way to the media center to refill on coffee in the hopes I would be able to stay awake for the rest of the evening. It seems I was not alone in this line of thinking. I tried to make my way back into the Grand Garden Arena for the entrance of flyweight champion Demetrious Johnson, a man who—despite being one of the absolute best and most thrilling fighters in the world—was largely overlooked on this night, both during and after the event.
It took approximately 17 minutes to make the two-minute journey from the media center back into the arena. This is because a large number of people were leaving. Before the main event started. I will tell you that most of these people were Irishmen, and they were leaving because there was beer out there, somewhere, and they did not want it to go to waste. So they were leaving to drink (and drink and drink), and you can’t blame them after the night they’d had.
But it wasn’t just Irishmen walking out of the arena before the championship fight. There were others. It’s a shame, too, because why wouldn’t you want to stick around to see one of the top three pound-for-pound fighters in the world?
Yes, he was fighting someone most folks had never heard of. But I felt then, as I feel now, that I would probably pay to watch Anderson Silva fight my chihuahua. Which is a nicer way of saying that I enjoy watching great fighters fight, and I am perplexed when others do not enjoy it the same way I do.
And then Johnson did his thing, and then went to the McGregor post-fight press conference where, and this is not a joke, he received one question from the media. Chris Cariaso, sitting there in his suit that reminded me of Tom Hanks at the end of Big? He received zero questions. The reigning flyweight champion had just put on a fantastic performance, and he was given one question at the end, most likely because Damon Martin from Fox Sports felt the same way about Johnson we all did at that moment: We felt bad for Johnson, but McGregor says crazy things and is a lot more fun to talk to.
I don’t know what the solution is with Johnson. It may be that our collective inferiority complex just won’t let us take a man who weighs 125 pounds seriously. If that’s the case, it’s unfortunate, because Johnson is a wizard in the Octagon. He has cleaned out his division, and he’s getting better, and it is a shame nobody wants to watch it unfold.
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