UFC 189’s promotional “world tour” wrapped up in Dublin on Tuesday, with Jose Aldo, Conor McGregor and the excitement for their featherweight title fight all still alive and well.
But there were some touchy moments there, right?
During the 11-day promotional swing through 10 cities and across three continents, McGregor‘s pursuit of the 145-pound title straddled a fine line. As he’s apt to do, the 26-year-old Irishman needled Aldo at every stop, infuriating and provoking the longtime champion but stopping just short of inciting any kind of actual physical violence.
The climax came in McGregor‘s hometown, where an estimated 3,000 Dubliners came out to cheer the challenger and jeer his Brazilian opponent.
They sang soccer songs over Dana White‘s opening remarks and shouted “Conor’s gonna get you!” when Aldo climbed on stage. Near the beginning of the event—which was more fan smorgasbord than functional news conference—McGregor briefly snatched the UFC belt from Aldo’s side of the table and the adoring crowd went mad.
McGregor and his fans seemed to think it was all fun and games, but during 45 minutes of abuse and one-sided questions, you could see Aldo sinking deeper and deeper into the murderous rage that had been taking hold of him throughout the media tour.
By the end, McGregor had positioned himself as the UFC’s charismatic trickster. Aldo just seemed angry. And dangerous. And as though the tedium and humiliation of following McGregor all over the world for nearly the last two weeks was either going to bring the best or worst out of him come July 11.
“It’s cool to see you all happy right now,” he told the gathered faithful in Ireland, via the UFC.com live stream, “but when I win the fight you’re all going to bow down to me.”
At that point, it seemed as though Aldo was getting as tired of this stuff as the rest of us were.
By the eighth or ninth day of running the same two fighters through the same media routine (one-on-one interviews followed by press conference followed by highly charged staredown) things were bound to get a little stale. Respect is due to both Aldo and McGregor, for making sure this extended media junket didn’t turn into complete drudgery.
That feat was twice as impressive given the fact the whole thing was skillfully (and occasionally painstakingly) chronicled via daily episodes of the UFC’s Embedded video series. Some of it was funny. Some of it was silly. Some of it—like when McGregor said he wanted to build a Reebok sweatshop in Aldo’s childhood neighborhood, or when Aldo threatened to kill McGregor and cut his head off (NSFW language in link)—was just plain ugly.
There was a lot of the typical grandstanding and puffery, rumors of a slap that didn‘t really happen, but it could’ve been a lot worse.
Turns out, these guys are near-perfect foils for each other. If anything saved the UFC 189 “world tour” from turning into a slog it was exactly what we saw on Tuesday—the manic frenzy of McGregor naturally juxtaposed against Aldo’s stoic simmer.
Together they made the kind of poetry that might have gotten you even more excited for their fight, if it wasn’t still three months away.
Let’s be honest, poetry has largely been missing from Aldo’s career for much of his four-year reign as UFC champion. He’s more or less decimated every meager scrap of competition the fight company has thrown his way. He’s torn through everyone—Kenny Florian, Frankie Edgar, Chad Mendes—like a hot knife through butter, but there hasn’t been a ton of magic in it.
Magic, unfortunately, was what we expected from Aldo after watching him terrorize the WEC’s 145-pound ranks from 2008-10, but his UFC run has fallen short of that (perhaps unclearable) bar. If anything, it’s been workmanlike. He’s been hampered by injury, has complained about his pay and has never latched on to that one arch nemesis who could catapult him to the stratospheric heights we first anticipated from him.
That’s where McGregor has come in. By comparison, even Aldo’s feud with Mendes and their ensuing Fight of the Year-candidate brawl at UFC 179 seems staid. You’ll remember during the lead up to that fight, Aldo shoved Mendes at a press event but later admitted he did it just for publicity’s sake and said it wouldn’t happen again.
This feud with McGregor has none of those apologetically fake overtones. This one feels real. The Irishman has played it all pitch perfectly. Throughout his entire run through the Octagon, in fact, he’s shown the kind of gift of gab and natural salesmanship you just can’t teach.
If you could, everyone would do it.
Now, after just five fights, a boatload of analysis and a heap of criticism of his previous opponents, we’re finally going to find out how good he really can be. McGregor, to his credit, appears dead set on playing the biggest chance of his life with the same swing-from-the-heels, shoot-from-the-hip enthusiasm as the rest of his journey.
How will it work out for him on fight night? Therein lies the true fun of this fight.
McGregor is way too articulate and way too smart not to know exactly what he’s doing to Aldo during this promotional swing. He’s very intentionally found the sharpest stick in the yard, walked right up to the bars of the cage and started poking the bear.
Now he’s got the bear’s attention, and ours, too.
What exactly McGregor hopes to accomplish by making Aldo very, very mad is anyone’s best guess. Perhaps he believes that an angry Aldo will be less technically superb once they get around to the actual fight. Perhaps he hopes Aldo’s rage will prompt him to abandon his picture-perfect punches and baseball-bat leg kicks and charge right into one of McGregor’s counter left hands.
Or maybe McGregor is merely 26, and a hothead, and he doesn’t plan much beyond his next insult. We honestly have no idea yet.
But he’s succeeded already in making this the most interesting fight of Aldo’s career. We’ve never seen Aldo in a contentious blood feud—at least not like this—and there is no telling how he’ll react.
Will we get the best possible version of Aldo on July 11? Will we see a return to the breathtaking aggression and mind-blowing highlights of his WEC run?
Will we get the worst version of him? Will he be reckless and prone to a counter? Will he retreat into his brilliant but occasionally uninspired shell?
We have no idea, and perhaps the true genius of the UFC 189 “world tour” was creating an environment where—gulp, three months from now—anything can happen.
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