On Saturday night at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, Conor McGregor broke, perhaps for the final time. He broke physically: at the end of a grueling first round largely controlled by rival Dustin Poirier, McGregor’s left leg suddenly folded up from underneath him during a seemingly innocuous step, forcing referee Herb Dean to stop the fight.
The leg break itself has been the source of constant speculation since the Poirier-McGregor trilogy’s stunning conclusion. Smarter MMA analysts than me have gone through the fight frame by frame like the Zapruder film to try and find the moment McGregor initially injured his leg, which Poirier said occurred when he checked a McGregor kick earlier in the round.
McGregor came out extremely aggressive throwing leg kicks – perhaps trying to mirror the success Poirier had against them in their second fight – and that’s the risk you run, especially when you kick near the knee. And although it’s still undetermined exactly where it happened, many theories seem to be coalescing around a checked kick just 20 seconds in:
Whatever happened, there was left little doubt that Poirier would have won the fight even without the injury. Although McGregor did some interesting stuff on the feet – I still believe that he can be a strong factor at lightweight even in his current state, although not one that can challenge someone like Poirier, one of the all-time greats in his prime – Poirier seemed even less concerned with the threat McGregor posed on the feet.
In their first fight, McGregor overwhelmed Poirier. In their second, Poirier approached him cautiously, but executed a winning gameplan. In the third, Poirier took the fight to McGregor. Poirier came at his famous rival, got the better of the boxing exchanges, sent the Irishman scurrying into the clinch. Poirier then brutally exposed the fact that McGregor’s grappling defense hasn’t improved at all since the Khabib fight: Poirier took him down and bashed him with aggressive ground-and-pound, leaving the brash former champion bloodied and helpless. McGregor’s only ticket out of his predicament was to blatantly hold Poirier’s gloves, which Dean – who also ignored McGregor’s repeated cheating against Khabib – overlooked again.
So Poirier let him up, and moments later, McGregor’s leg snapped. Yes, Conor McGregor broke physically on Saturday night. He may have broken mentally as well. Or maybe he was already broken, and the emotionally-fraught events of his third defeat in his last four fights simply revealed him to be even more delusional, morally bankrupt and divorced from reality than we knew.
Conor McGregor took the UFC to heights that MMA fans could never have dreamed of, an incredibly charismatic, exciting superstar who captured the imagination and attention of the entire sporting world. He got millions of fans interested in mixed martial arts. And five years after he reached the greatest heights of his career, this is how it all ends: with “the Notorious” Conor McGregor ranting and raving like a lunatic against the cage with a broken leg, impotently raging against the sport that has passed him by.
There’s no disguising it: McGregor is a scumbag. The kind of scumbag to throw a metal cart into the side of the bus with people inside. The kind of scumbag to punch out an old man in a bar. The kind of scumbag to get accused multiple times of sexual assault. But he’s always skated by in the eyes of his millions of fans, who relish the entertainment he brings, and the incredible atmosphere and excitement of his fights.
But how do you come back from this? How do you come back from threatening your opponent’s wife and child, not just while lying in a heap after the fight, but days later on social media?
This is beyond just trash-talk between athletes trying to promote a big fight. Either McGregor has become so unhinged that he believes this is just an OK way to shill a fourth fight between him and Poirier – which should not be of any real interest to anyone who cares about the sport, since Poirier has well and truly proven himself to be above McGregor’s level – or he’s a piece of shit. And I think it’s fair to say he’s given us more evidence that the latter is the case.
There’s something deeply, deeply sad about all this, even past all the schadenfreude you feel when you see a piece of shit get his comeuppance. There was always something electrifying, something magnetic about Conor McGregor. He was special, not just as a fighter, but as a personality. He had that rare ability to make people who never cared a lick about MMA into lifelong fans. But he reached such heights that there was only one way to go, and he’s fallen back down harder than could possibly be imagined. Very few of us can go out on top. Very few of us can be Khabib. This is how it ends for most of us – the best we can do is bow out gracefully.
The UFC will make its money. The third fight between Poirier and McGregor did well over a million pay-per-view buys, by all accounts. Time will go on. UFC president Dana White has already expressed interest in a fourth fight, saying that Saturday’s contest wasn’t conclusively finished….. yeah, right. In any future bouts, McGregor will still probably do bigger business than almost anyone the UFC can book.
But any illusion that McGregor is still an elite star shattered on Saturday night, along with his tibia and fibula. The days of McGregor as conqueror are never coming back. All that’s left is what you see before you now: a pathetic, delusional little man screaming desperately, trying to get someone to care.
The Big Fight 