Yesterday, UFC featherweight champion Conor McGregor may or may not have retired; it isn’t clear. What is clear is that he won’t participate in a highly-anticipated rematch against Nate Diaz on July 9, unless he does. UFC figurehead Dana White went on The Herd with smooth-skinned ghoul Colin Cowherd today to explain.
As White has it, the issue definitely isn’t money, but that McGregor (who watched a fight that ultimately killed a man from ringside last week) didn’t want leave his training camp to do some perfunctory promotional work for the July 9 fight:
Conor basically had said that he didn’t want to come to Las Vegas. We had a tour planned. We were going to start in Vegas, we were gonna then go to Stockton and then New York. And then he could go back to Iceland, where he is right now. And he said, “I don’t wanna do it. I’m not gonna come.” And I was basically saying, “You have to come.”[...] You can’t not show up to promote your fight. You can’t do it.
This is dumb as shit; the UFC’s biggest drawing card not wanting to do the fighting equivalent of TPS reports isn’t a real issue. (McGregor can promote the fight any number of ways, and press conferences can be moved around easily enough.) Clearly the actual issue here is about, if not money, control, which is close enough. Dana White, in his telling, said, “You have to do this,” and Conor McGregor said, “Fuck you, no I don’t, I’m a big star and you’re a middleman.” Now the two sides are at an impasse, though White doesn’t think McGregor is truly retiring.
Did White’s appearance on The Herd get dumber after he claimed that he scuttled one of the biggest fights of all time because a star fighter didn’t want to do the equivalent of paperwork next week? Yes, it did! Check out his reaction to Cowherd more or less asking if McGregor is a selfish me-first type who doesn’t understand how incredibly important it is for the UFC to profit at his expense:
Check out how he cries “Clickbait!” when the idea that a management vs. labor dispute in a professional sport might be about money:
Not a money issue. That’s false. That’s the problem with the internet—you have all these hacks out there that just make stuff up for clicks. Never, ever was this about money. It was never about money. Conor makes a lot of money, and Conor’s very happy with the money he makes.
Check out how he claims that him pulling McGregor off a fight card isn’t something he did:
Conor made a decision and made a choice to not want to fight on this card. [...] That’s on him, man. That’s not on me.
Dana White sucks and Conor McGregor telling him to eat shit is good. The funny thing is that it’s pretty clear White is ready to scoop the shit up into his mouth and ask for seconds; you can tell by his response to Cowherd asking if McGregor could get back on the card by calling White immediately after his appearance on The Herd. He gulps and says:
Yeah, if he called me after this interview we’d probably still do it.
Of course they would.