Aside from questionable taste in chest tattoos, perhaps there are no obvious similarities between the UFC’s newest male superstar and its last one.
Yet, the further Conor McGregor stomps into the forefront of the MMA world, the more his meteoric journey is reminiscent of Brock Lesnar’s rise to power in the UFC six years ago—and maybe sniffs of Lesnar’s eventual fall, too.
Sound crazy? On the surface, these two men seem like complete opposites.
Lesnar was an enormous man from the upper Midwest, for starters. He was a brooding, disagreeable fighter who always seemed more at ease lugging a deer carcass through the underbrush than allowing mere mortals to ask him questions or take his picture. An NCAA champion at 23 and superstar pro wrestler by age 25, Lesnar‘s lucrative athletic future was never really in doubt.
By contrast, McGregor is a dapper little Irish fellow on a mission to hog every ounce of the sport’s spotlight. He has taken to instant celebrity like a frog to its lily pad, is never at a loss for words and always appears to be having the best possible time—even while Chad Mendes was trying to break his face last weekend at UFC 189. Perhaps because he once eked out a living as a plumber, McGregor knows a sweet gig when he lands one.
Despite those differences, however, there is clearly a lot that binds the sinewy featherweight and hulking heavyweight.
In their own ways, they are both among the most charismatic individuals ever to strap on fingerless gloves. If you buy into the idea that McGregor cemented his position as the UFC’s biggest male star by defeating Mendes for the interim 145-pound title, then in many ways he’s picking up the torch Lesnar dropped when he left the Octagon for a return to WWE in 2011.
Amid declining pay-per-view buys and a shifting UFC landscape, company brass couldn’t appear any more eager to prop McGregor up as the biggest thing this sport has ever seen. It can’t get enough of him and is hoping the public can’t, either.
By now it’s clear that, even if Lesnar and McGregor aren’t out-and-out analogues, they’re both cut from the same, rare superstar cloth.
Both men came to the UFC relatively early in their careers. Lesnar made the jump to the Octagon after just one professional fight, but he was already 30 years old and enjoyed the preloaded notoriety of a previous WWE stint. McGregor had 14 fights before signing with Zuffa, but almost all of them were in his native Ireland, and he was still a 24-year-old unknown when he made his UFC debut in April 2013.
Both also jetted to the title with lightning speed. Lesnar won the heavyweight championship in his third UFC bout (his promotional record was 1-1 heading into that UFC 91 clash with Randy Couture). McGregor took five bouts to get there, but then UFC executives created an interim featherweight title for the express purpose of having him win it.
Once there, Lesnar and McGregor were each charged with reviving the hobbled old warhorse of The Ultimate Fighter. For Lesnar, it turned out reality television was the wrong platform to promote him. How the fickle hand of the TUF gym treats McGregor is still anyone’s best guess.
And now for the strangest and perhaps most glaring similarity of all.
Lesnar and McGregor both managed to become some version of UFC champion while being almost entirely one-dimensional inside the cage. They put their shortcomings on full display, letting their flaws hang out with such audacity that every fan, analyst and future opponent couldn’t help but see them—and yet they won anyway.
At least for a while.
Lesnar entered the UFC equipped with preternatural size and athleticism, the wrestling skills he honed at the University of Minnesota and a rudimentary striking game he didn’t have the time or inclination to flesh out. It worked for him for a time, but eventually the better-rounded, better-trained athletes of the 265-pound division knocked him off his pedestal.
(Ed. Note: Of course, Lesnar’s dual bouts with diverticulitis hurt his cause, too. Still, there’s always the argument it was Lesnar’s inability to evolve and not his disease that played the primary role in his ouster from MMA.)
McGregor’s skill set comes from the opposite side of the yin-yang swirl, but so far it appears to be similarly limited. He’s a wickedly impressive and powerful striker. His punches are deadly accurate, and his diverse array of kicks fly from all angles. His mobility allows him to cut off the cage like a supremely confident, supremely skilled field general.
But wrestling? Nah, not so much.
Anybody who came away from McGregor’s title win over Mendes on Saturday thinking the Irishman successfully “answered the wrestler question” must’ve thought Lesnar also emerged from his UFC 116 victory over Shane Carwin looking as dominant as ever.
In that 2010 fight, Lesnar spent the entirety of the first round getting abused by Carwin both on the feet and on the mat. Had referee Josh Rosenthal stepped in to halt the action at any point while Carwin laid a beating on Lesnar, nobody outside of the champ’s camp would’ve objected.
Unfortunately for Carwin, a stoppage in his favor appeared so imminent that he blew through his energy reserves in a madcap attempt to put Lesnar away. By the start of the second round, he was spent and succumbed to an arm triangle choke in short order.
Lesnar walked away with the undisputed title, but to those looking close enough to see it, the blueprint for beating him had been etched into the permanent record.
From the moment in the first round when Carwin blistered him with an uppercut and Lesnar jumped back like a cat doused with cold water, it was evident: This guy didn’t like to get hit, and against anyone with the defensive wrestling to keep himself upright, he didn’t have the wherewithal to avoid it.
Simply put, Lesnar was the UFC’s biggest star and a pay-per-view juggernaut, but he wasn’t built for a lengthy, Anderson Silva- or Georges St-Pierre-style run at the top.
To date, neither is McGregor.
In fact, it’s worth wondering if at some point McGregor’s victory over Mendes will be regarded as his Shane Carwin moment. Just as Lesnar was a beastly wrestler exposed by Carwin’s striking, did Mendes’ wrestling provide the potential antidote for McGregor’s stand-up game?
All along, it seemed the Irishman’s takedown defense would probably be lacking. Somehow at UFC 189, it ended up looking even worse than expected. Mendes collected four takedowns in just shy of two rounds, and once McGregor was on the floor, he didn’t do much besides hang on, whisper sweet nothings in Mendes’ ear and throw a few elbows from his back.
Like Carwin, Mendes gassed out quickly. He’d come into the fight on two weeks notice, and McGregor’s pressure on the feet, coupled with the enormity of the moment, proved too much for him. Twice he passed guard with ease, but in the end, he gave up his dominant position to try a desperation guillotine choke. It allowed McGregor to regain his feet and force a referee stoppage three seconds before the end of the second stanza.
But along the way did Mendes scout a path to victory over McGregor for other featherweights to follow? If he’d been better conditioned, would things have gone differently?
Maybe, and you better believe top contender Frankie Edgar and champion Jose Aldo were watching. If McGregor can’t shore up that hole in his game—and also the one where he willingly gets punched in the face way too much—somebody is eventually going to make him pay for it.
Just as Carwin teed up the ball for Cain Velasquez to eventually knock Lesnar out of the park, could Aldo or eventually Edgar follow Mendes’ lead, tap into his more complete MMA skill set and take McGregor off his perch?
The good news for the new interim champion is that he just turned 27 on Tuesday. He may not quite be the natural athlete Lesnar was, but he has the benefit of time on his side. In the aftermath of the Mendes fight, his coaches said a knee injury hampered the late stages of his training camp, preventing him from doing any live wrestling drills.
So maybe his grappling isn’t really as bad as it seemed, and maybe he’ll have plenty of opportunities to close the wrestling gap if he makes it a priority to do so.
That was something Lesnar never did. The notoriously misanthropic fighter bucked MMA’s dominant trend of finding a star-studded, high-profile team to train alongside. He didn’t seek out the best striking coaches or travel the country trying to round out his skills. Instead, he started his own, private gym at home in Alexandria, Minnesota, and handpicked the training partners who came to him.
We’ll never know if that approach stunted Lesnar’s growth as a mixed martial artist. We just know he didn’t grow enough to stay on top.
Oddly, McGregor has so far opted for a similarly insular approach to his training. Even when he moved his camp from Ireland to Las Vegas to prepare for UFC 189, he reportedly kept his cohorts from Dublin’s Straight Blast Gym close and almost everyone else at arm’s length.
This was by design, McGregor told MMA Fighting’s Ariel Helwani leading up to the fight. As usual, he remained completely convinced his way was the right one.
“I always believed in my team,” McGregor said. “I always believed that we were the best, and I was right. You know, people leave their coaches and go to new gyms. It’s a sign of a weak fighter to me. It’s a sign of a weak mind.”
So far, you can’t fault the results. Like Lesnar, McGregor has captured UFC gold, filling the void the big man left behind atop that pedestal—the one that seems a little brighter and a little higher than the rest of the UFC’s champions.
Considering what we’ve seen from him so far, however, it’s also possible his time up there will be just as short.
That’s one Lesnar comparison McGregor will no doubt want to avoid.
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