“We’re not here to take part—we’re here to take over.”
Those words—which Conor McGregor uttered after knocking out Diego Brandao in July 2014—birthed an icon in Ireland, another warrior to carry forth the tricolor and foist the tiny nation upon his back for an ascent up the mountain of combat sports.
At the time, they were more imaginative than anything, a battle cry from a burgeoning star who had just blasted his way to a win on the strength of his eventually famous left hand.
He’d done it live on UFC Fight Pass, an online subscription service that only the most hardcore mixed martial arts fans would care to pay for, and it thus occurred before an audience size one might expect for such a platform.
Three years later, that star has fully arrived, ascending to every lofty statement he’s made.
He’s taken over the game. He’s taken over multiple games. His next fight will garner him more dollars than that fight on the internet had viewers.
He is Conor McGregor, and he told you he’d be here and he’d do this and you’d all just have to sit there and like it. He’s the ultimate rags-to-riches tale of a man gone from a plumber collecting welfare to a bona fide one-man global brand in a time frame equivalent to a presidential term.
It’s never been seen before in MMA.
What he didn’t tell you was he’d need boxing to do it.
It’s been a common narrative since McGregor signed to fight Floyd Mayweather Jr. that he has never boxed before, but that’s inaccurate. McGregor was a boxer long before he was ever the biggest name in MMA history; he’s just never devoted himself to it exclusively.
Early indications of an interest in boxing were instructive of the general path McGregor would take, but perhaps not so clear as to the magnitude. Past instances have seen him acknowledge the interest more generally as a foundation for his MMA success, but never as an obvious career path.
He told Bleacher Report’s Jeremy Botter in 2015 that, as a young footballer in Ireland, he stumbled across a boxing gym and would occasionally spectate before and after his time on the pitch. After a childhood move forced him to engage his own solitude more often, he turned that spectatorship into action and got more serious about martial arts.
He began kickboxing but worked on his boxing more seriously as well.
“I realized I was enjoying combat sports a lot more than I was enjoying football,” he said. “Instead of going to the football club, I would go next door to the boxing club.”
On August 26, McGregor will hit a level in boxing that he surely never contemplated while hitting mitts in a stale-smelling fight factory in the Lucan part of Dublin. He’ll face both his stiffest and most famous competition when he toes the line opposite Mayweather.
It will be a professional boxing match, McGregor’s first ever and Mayweather’s 50th.
It’s a bout that was improbable when the two began sniping in the media but one that was churned out quickly once it became apparent everyone involved wanted it.
Now, McGregor will score more money than he’s ever seen in his life, a total many believe will hit $100 million—probably the salary of every plumber in Ireland combined for the year and then some—simply for lacing up the big gloves and jumping into another sport for a night.
That proposition alone is both courageous and outrageous, a testament to McGregor’s sheer force of will. He’ll fight the best boxer of his generation without ever having competed in professional boxing, and he believes he’s going to win.
A separate 2015 interview with B/R’s Jonathan Snowden showcased that self-belief and the matter-of-fact way McGregor approaches his fights.
“I don’t speak trash. I speak truth. Occasionally, I might throw in a little insult here or there, but this is the Irish way,” he said. “If I feel something is the way it is, I will say it. I will let it be known. Some people can’t handle the truth. That’s not my problem.”
He’ll be part of the promotional team under his newly formed McGregor Sports and Entertainment, and it will charge nearly twice the going rate for a UFC pay-per-view to see him under the Marquess of Queensberry rules.
And all of it—the price tag, the promoting, the payday—would not have been possible in MMA. It would not have been possible in the UFC.
The salaries there are too paltry, the style of a promotion too authoritarian and absent of fighter input. Time and again, those beholden to MMA have lamented how little their pursuits provide for them financially.
It’s a tale nearly as old as the sport itself, and it has made McGregor even more divisive among his fellow athletes than he was before he signed to fight Mayweather. While some love and respect him for his willingness to go big, others sit in frustration at his ability to hold up entire UFC divisions.
Still, given the number of fellow UFC athletes who’ve taken to calling out boxers or trying to get on the Mayweather-McGregor undercard, McGregor has done something right.
Bottom line: He has created a one-time payout unlike anything MMA or the UFC could ever offer him.
Even though McGregor‘s already the biggest star and the biggest earner there, UFC President Dana White himself said of making Mayweather-McGregor that he’d never stand in the way of McGregor’s earning such a payday.
McGregor got his way and his priority all along.
“The whole division can hate me. The whole roster can hate me. The whole of America can hate me. I only need one American to love me,” McGregor said, a grin creeping onto his face. “And that’s Mr. Benjamin Franklin. As long as he loves me, I am good.”
He told you he’d be here and that he’d do this.
“I predict these things,” he said after knocking out Dustin Poirier at UFC 178.
Once again he has. He just never predicted how.
With a track record like McGregor’s, though? That’s a minor criticism.
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