Daniel Cormier reacted to Conor McGregor’s scuffle with Machine Gun Kelly at the VMAs.
Conor McGregor’s appearance at the MTV Video Music Awards scooped headlines because of an incident that went down on the red carpet. There, after seemingly asking for a picture with Megan Fox, McGregor got into a scuffle with Fox’s boyfriend, rapper Machine Gun Kelly. The situation escalated and resulted in ‘Notorious’ tossing his drink at the celebs and needing to be held back.
Daniel Cormier, who has had some terse words with McGregor already this year, gave his take on what happened during his show on ESPN.
“The crazy thing about McGregor is when I say the gimmick, I mean the billionaire with the strut and the fancy cars and the money, because the reality is it’s the WWE,” said Cormier (ht MMA Fighting). “You get a character, your character can be The Billionaire, your character can be Vince MacMahon. Vince MacMahon is the evil boss but Vince MacMahon, when he hits that curtain in the back he becomes Vince MacMahon the CEO and Chairman of the WWE. It’s the same with Ric Flair. When Ric Flair was Ric Flair, styling and profiling, kiss the girls and make them cry, woo!, all that stuff. But when Ric Flair hit the curtain in the back, he never stopped. He continued to live as Ric Flair and ultimately that was his undoing. That’s why at 60 you saw him still wrestling, because he had spent so much money, he had lived such a reckless life, it wasn’t sustainable.
“Conor McGregor is the fighter but Conor McGregor also lives this big life and that’s where I ask, ‘Has this gimmick overtaken who Conor McGregor is as a person?’”
Cormier went on to say he doubted McGregor could “turn off” his gimmick at this point.
“You can’t turn that off,” he claimed. “It doesn’t matter how much money you have, you can’t turn it off. You can’t turn that burning desire to hit that curtain off. When you hit that curtain, it is the most intense thing I’ve ever seen in my life, and I’ve ever felt and experienced….
“You come through the crowd. You walk through the crowd and the hands are reaching towards you, everybody’s screaming, that’s what you get from the UFC. But you don’t have a helmet on, your face is not hidden, you’re just you, as naked as you can be, walking through that see of fans where somebody wants a piece of you. It’s addicting. And when that octagon door closes, that fight, knowing that that man wants to take you out, that feeling is second to none, and for Conor McGregor, who is a fighter, you can’t replace that. A dollar amount will not equate to what you feel when you feel the mat on your bare feet, when you’re in there with the referee and the guy and you know what’s coming next. You can’t replace that with a dollar value and I think that’s why Conor will never lean into celebrity more than the actual fighter.”
Soon after the red carpet scuffle McGregor announced that there was nothing but love between he and Machine Gun Kelly (who claimed he didn’t know who McGregor was). The Irishman went on to say that Kelly was welcome to attend his future fights.
McGregor is currently recovering from a broken leg suffered in July against Dustin Poirier. That fight, which ended in a TKO loss, was the second stoppage loss McGregor suffered to Poirier this year.
Prior to those bouts, McGregor took a quick TKO win over Donald Cerrone in January 2020. The win was the first fight for McGregor since a submission loss to Khabib Nurmagomedov in 2018.
Since losing to Poirier, McGregor has been a staple on Twitter throwing out tasteless threats and taunts to his old rivals, many of whom seem to have moved on from him and his antics.