Conor McGregor arrived in The City with a pointed swagger that was both arrogantly self-congratulatory and ruthlessly dismissive of the rest of his colleagues filling out what is objectively an excellent card. Which is to say, he was on his A-game.
“I run this whole s–t. I run New York,” he said during the UFC 205 media conference call last week. “I’m the reason we’re even here in the first place. I’m the reason this whole thing is happening. If I wasn’t here, this whole s–t goes down. And that’s the truth. That’s facts. There’s no one else out there. There’s no one else but me.”
Since he’s not running for office, there’s no need to fact-check him, but just know it’s not all factual, even if it’s truth-y.
The fact is, McGregor is the show, both before, during and after UFC 205.
And in some ways, the question of what he will be doing on the morning after UFC 205 is just as interesting as the results of his fight Saturday night against Eddie Alvarez. That’s the kind of intrigue he has built up for himself over the years and the amount of power he has in the fight game. Depending on what he’s going to do, McGregor’s next move may leave two divisions tied up in knots, fans in a rut and the new ownership in a panic.
McGregor is already the best featherweight in the world, and after Saturday night, he could lay claim to the lightweight crown as well. Never in the 20-year-plus history of the UFC has a two-division champion reigned, and such an accomplishment will most certainly make McGregor the most powerful fighter in MMA history and maybe even the most powerful individual in the sport.
That might sound like hyperbole, but at this point, McGregor may already have the former tag. His success has allowed him to call his own shots, picking his opponents, divisions and timelines. When the UFC actually tried to rein him in by dumping him from the UFC 200 card, McGregor returned a month later and, along with Nate Diaz, pumped up a pay-per-view that easily outsold the card he was originally supposed to be on. In fact, it set a single event pay-per-view record, according to MMA Fighting.
In some ways, that result was the best and worst thing that could have happened to the UFC. If McGregor had any remaining questions about his worth, they were answered that night when he headlined an event that sold absolute gangbusters for no good reason. It wasn’t a title fight, and the undercard wasn’t particularly strong.
Through sheer force of business alone, McGregor is officially a one-man movement, but on top of it, he won, giving him the ultimate in leverage. For a new ownership team desperate to maximize every cent of profit to recoup its massive $4 billion investment, that meant McGregor is slicing into its cut. Beyond that, he’s going to have a say in putting together the biggest events, because it’s pretty difficult—nearly impossible, really—to create them without him.
To be blunt, everyone knows this truth: Right now, no one has the pull McGregor has.
“Everyone in this game does what they’re f–king told. Everyone but me because I run the game, so I don’t give a f–k about all that,” McGregor said. “If I tell you you’re on the prelims, you’re on the f–king prelims. If I tell you you’re on Fight Night, you’re on f–king Fight Night. No one has no say in this but me. I’m the only one that can say anything about anything. Everyone else does what they’re told, and rightfully f–king so.”
He’s not really wrong. In an organization that has been controlled by oligarchy—first the Fertitta brothers and Dana White, now WME-IMG and White—McGregor has inserted himself into the equation and flipped the power structure on its head.
In doing so, he’s the first fighter to penetrate the dividing line between fighter and management. Right now, he’s the only fighter actually in control of his own fate.
Of course, that is one of the stakes of UFC 205 as well.
Regardless of his increased power, a loss may be enough to send him back to the featherweight division, where he’s been champion in absentia for close to a year.
That’s the thing about his place on high. One slip and there will be plenty of people waiting to push him down further. Because of that, the importance of winning at UFC 205 cannot be overstated, even if he downplays the possibility of failing at anything.
“I’ll just continue changing the game,” he said. “Continue breaking records, continue striving to put this game onto that next level like I have been doing since day one. So that’s my plan.”
The business of McGregor, Inc., does stand to gain exponentially from UFC 205.
The UFC-in-New York subplot has woven its way through the sport for so long that many have drowned it out, but with its location in the media capital of the U.S., there will be more eyeballs on McGregor than ever, not just from fans but also from media, celebrities, tastemakers. The opportunities that may come out of this for him will be dizzying.
From the beginning, he has been the type to seize the moment.
It took just a few seconds for him to establish himself as a potential superstar. Just 67 of them, in fact, or exactly the time it took him to knock out Marcus Brimage in his UFC debut. The next time out, McGregor’s walk to the Octagon in Boston felt like the arrival of a rock god. Despite his fighting in the prelims, the UFC blacked out the arena, and when his music hit, the 14,000 fans reacted like Larry Bird discovered the fountain of youth and suited up in his old Celtics “33.”
That’s the kind of star McGregor is. He seems to suck everything into his vortex and change the course of events at his whim.
The continuation of this kind of existence is predicated on winning. The UFC has never been an organization that has taken well to athletes flexing their power, but in McGregor’s case, it has little option but to give him room to pose.
When and if he loses, that relationship is certainly liable to change. Maybe. With McGregor, anything seems possible. He is, after all, a man who told the UFC after he first lost to Diaz that, no, he wouldn’t be defending his featherweight belt and would in fact be fighting Diaz in a rematch. The UFC balked at first, but we all know how that game of chicken ended.
As McGregor continues to consolidate his power, other threats will arise, but so far he has shown himself to be an excellent fighter and shrewd businessman.
On Saturday night, one of two things will happen: Either he will win and go home with two belts, another pay-per-view record and more power than any UFC fighter has ever seen; or he will lose and be forced to regroup while the new UFC ownership team tries to pull back some of the slack it’s been forced to hand him.
For McGregor, these are heady days, but he can come crashing down from his prolonged high in a blink. As Ronda Rousey discovered when she was knocked out by Holly Holm, invincibility is an illusion that often shatters instead of merely being chipped away. The higher you rise, the more crushing the fall. You know all the platitudes.
For McGregor, it’s real life. Swagger, after all, only works when the audience is willingly along for the ride. So far, no one’s found a reason to get off. At UFC 205, at The World’s Most Famous Arena, in one of the world’s greatest cities, the eyeballs watching will represent both pressure and opportunity, but McGregor can’t talk his way through Alvarez or the moment. For us, that makes it fun.
For McGregor, that makes it the edge of everything he’s earned and chased, with a mighty fall below.
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