The Conor McGregor hyperbole may finally have gotten out of hand this week.
Frightening, considering it feels like we’re just getting started.
With a few days left before McGregor meets Dennis Siver in the main event of Sunday’s Fight Night 59, UFC CEO Lorenzo Fertitta has already—somewhat apologetically—compared him to The Greatest.
“I hate even saying this, but with his gift of gab and his athletic ability and fighting ability, it’s almost like the Irish Muhammad Ali in a way,” Fertitta told MMA Junkie’s John Morgan.
Never to be outdone, hyper-hyperbolic UFC President Dana White also called the 26-year-old Irishman “the most marketable fighter of all time,” via MMA Junkie’s Mike Bohn.
With a victory over Siver as close to guaranteed as possible in this most unpredictable sport, White expects McGregor’s ensuing featherweight title scrap against Jose Aldo to be the company’s bestseller of 2015.
“Aldo and Conor, I think that would be the biggest fight of the year,” White told Bohn. “I think it will beat every other fight his year, and (Jon) Jones vs. (Daniel) Cormier was this year.”
So, yeah, all that is an awful lot of praise to heap on a guy who has so far fought on a grand total of one televised UFC main card. Even if McGregor has effortlessly passed each test the fight company has given him to date, rushing him into a bout against the best 145-pounder MMA has ever seen seems like kind of a strange reward.
Aldo? Really? Has McGregor done anything to make us think he can hang at that level? Does Siver even present him with an opportunity to prove it?
Or does it just not matter?
McGregor has breezed through four Octagon appearances since his debut in April 2013, but if the UFC makes good on plans to boost him to the top of the featherweight heap, we’ll all be in on the secret. It’ll mostly be his innate charisma, easy eloquence and fanatical Irish following that got him there.
We should note before going any further that McGregor seems like a wonderful man. Among the many things to his credit, he told SportsCenter (h/t MMA Fighting‘s Marc Raimondi) on Tuesday that he’d rather not be compared to Ali at this stage in his career.
If the UFC is right about anything, it’s that McGregor absolutely lights up the screen.
He’s a gifted self-promoter and this week he even became the fifth UFC fighter to score a personal sponsorship deal with Reebok, the company’s new official apparel partner.
Reebok’s others chosen ones are Jon Jones, Ronda Rousey, Anthony Pettis and Johny Hendricks, if that tells you anything about the company McGregor keeps.
Perhaps most impressively, he’s managed to keep his shtick from fully crossing over into the cartoonish pretense of a Chael Sonnen or the confusing word hurricane found on Planet Diaz. He seems to be straddling a tricky promotional line with all his talk of visions and dreams of multidivisional titles, but so far he’s making it work.
Despite the fighter bravado, McGregor appears genuine enough that even the UFC’s staunchest critics are quite taken with him. When first Dennis Bermudez and then Cub Swanson saw their superior divisional win streaks snapped last November, the biggest hurdles were cleared for McGregor to sprint in and nab a fight against Aldo.
At this point, we’ve all mostly made peace with that. We know very well what’s going on with McGregor’s meteoric rise and we’ve decided to be cool about it. Or at least to play along until we find out how it ends.
Exactly what will happen if and when McGregor meets Aldo—in Las Vegas or a stadium in Ireland or wherever—is anyone’s best guess.
This week, the fight company released a video documenting McGregor’s “elite” movement, and MMA’s resident fight analysts, such as Vice‘s Jack Slack, have given him mostly rave reviews.
Still, Aldo would be a horse of an altogether different disposition than Siver or any of McGregor‘s other middling UFC opponents. The 28-year-old Brazilian is regarded as one of the world’s top pound-for-pound fighters and has stretched his unbeaten streak to 18 straight fights (including seven in the UFC).
Aldo has run circles around all-time greats like Urijah Faber and Frankie Edgar, and has easily turned back the never-ending parade of challengers the featherweight ranks of both UFC and WEC has had to offer.
According to MMA Junkie’s Josh Morgan, there was even talk of moving him to lightweight for a superfight against champion Anthony Pettis.
McGregor’s trademark wide karate stance seems tailored perfectly to absorb Aldo’s meat-grinder low kicks, and it feels unlikely that he would be able to guide the champion into one of his counter left hands. At least not with the same ease he’s shown against previous foes.
Then again, Aldo has displayed fleeting glimpses of his own mortality as well. He faded badly down the stretch during a 2011 fight against Mark Hominick. More and more, he appears content to grind out dominating decisions, as he did against the outmatched Ricardo Lamas last February.
He’s also been in a couple of close ones—against Edgar and more recently in his rematch with Chad Mendes in October.
For the last five-and-a-half years, however, Aldo has consistently fought and beaten the best. McGregor has been unstoppable during a short stint in the spotlight, but he’s also very much still in the process of building his resume.
If it happens, conventional wisdom says Aldo takes it in a walk.
Then again, convention seems to be something McGregor takes great pleasure in defying.
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