Conor McGregor, in the end, flew a little too close to the sun. The beautiful, boastful Irish brawler let his grand ambitions get the better of him, attempting to rewrite the time-tested rules of the fight game.
In McGregor’s fantasy, weight didn’t matter. The ground game didn’t matter either. All that mattered was movement, precision and artistry trumping all. In this world, the physical was merely a manifestation of the battle of wits, a war he’d always won.
It was a sweet dream, one that persisted through the first round, survived right up until a Diaz slap in the second round of their UFC 196 showdown woke him, and us, to reality. A second-round rear-naked-choke finish ended the myth of McGregor once and for all.
It turns out weight classes were instituted for a reason. That punches capable of ending the night of a man who weighs just 145 pounds can’t always crack 25 additional pounds of armor. And that sometimes, no matter how clever you are, another man simply has all the answers.
Diaz, who normally competes at 155 pounds, was too long and too sharp for McGregor. He was able to survive even the featherweight champion’s most fearsome blows and continue forward. Eventually, as his more muscular arms began to sag, McGregor could no longer keep up.
It was a victory for technique, for resiliency and, yes, for size.
“It worked to Nate’s advantage,” Fox Sports analyst and UFC bantamweight champion Dominick Cruz said after the fight. “He was a little heavier and could take the punches. And he had power in his punches that was hurting Conor. But the extra weight made Conor tired, he’s a real featherweight. Conor’s power wasn’t enough at the higher weight.”
Despite the result, there was something magnificent about McGregor’s willingness to test the conventions of his sport. In a world where so many combat sports champions spend their days manufacturing reasons not to challenge themselves, here was a man willing to risk all to prove his point.
If a man must plummet to the ground, why not do it from such gaudy heights? So many of us know what we are. McGregor wanted to know what he might be. It’s the true mark of a champion, this desire to meet any opponent head on, to say “let’s see” instead of “no, I can’t.”
That it didn’t work out as he imagined only makes it more admirable. It was hubris. But absurd confidence is part of what makes a fighter a champion. It’s the same mentality that allowed Diaz to step into the cage on 11 days notice to face one of the best fighters in the sport.
McGregor threw everything he had at Diaz. No one, at least in the UFC cage, has ever faced down his best and asked for more, shrugging as if to say “is that all?” What happens next means everything for both McGregor and the rabid fanbase coalescing behind him in his native Ireland. Both need a win to re-establish what makes their world go around.
“I took a chance,” McGregor told UFC announcer Joe Rogan after the fight. “…it didn’t work out. It is what it is. I’ll take it like a man, like a champion, and come back and do it again.”
It’s a sensible response to a setback, at odds with the pre-fight bluster that made it seem McGregor pictured himself as some robust combination of Bruce Lee and Michael Collins. For many fighters, a loss like this is an open door to self-improvement. Back at 145 pounds, McGregor may very well resume the dominance that made him such a fan favorite.
The fairy tale is over—now the work of maintaining the life he’s built begins. McGregor is saying all the right things. And if he means it, we’ll be watching him hone his art for a long time.
Jonathan Snowden is Bleacher Report’s Senior Combat Sports Writer.
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