The Unstoppable Rise That Was Conor McGregor’s Triumphant 2016

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2016 was undoubtedly the year of Conor McGregor. In fact, one could argue that no fighter in the history of the UFC has had a bigger year than the Irish superstar … and it all started with a loss.

McGregor came into the year on top of the world. In December he finally got to face Jose Aldo to unify the featherweight title, having won the interim belt off Chad Mendes when Aldo pulled out of their first fight in July. It took McGregor all of 13 seconds to knock out Aldo, earning him the 145 pound strap and a world record for fastest title fight in UFC history.

2016 was supposed to start with even more UFC history, in this case Conor’s quest to become the first fighter to hold belts in two weight classes simultaneously. With the featherweight strap slung over one shoulder, he immediately moved up to lightweight to challenge then-champion Rafael Dos Anjos for the 155 pound lightweight championship. Unfortunately, his bad luck with injured competitors struck again, and Dos Anjos pulled out of their match over a broken foot. It was the sixth time McGregor’s original opponent would change leading up to a fight.

With just over a week to go before the event, McGregor called out Nate Diaz as a replacement opponent. When negotiations between Diaz and the UFC stalled over weight concerns, McGregor agreed to have the fight take place at the welterweight limit of 170 pounds, two weight classes above his typical fighting weight of 145 pounds.

“Make it 170,” McGregor said. “Tell him to get comfortable.”

But for once all of McGregor’s braggadocio came back to haunt him. Conor spent fight week filling up on steaks instead of cutting weight, and the extra pounds left him slower and sluggish on game night. Later on, we learned that he suffered from a staph infection in the weeks leading up to the fight that undoubtedly drained his cardio.

Diaz, who regularly competes in triathlons in between fights, had no issues with his gas tank even though he later admitted to stepping off a boat in Cabo from a vacation of hard partying. While McGregor got the best of Diaz over the course of the first round, fortunes changed fast in the second after Nate weathered the storm and returned fire, catching McGregor on the chin and wobbling him. Unable to respond to the barrage of Diaz strikes, McGregor went for a desperate takedown attempt that Diaz blocked. Seconds later, the Stockton black belt had McGregor’s back and forced him to tap to a rear naked choke. Conor McGregor had suffered his first loss in the Octagon.

For many fighters, losing such a high profile match is the beginning of the end. But not so for McGregor. Rather than go into seclusion like the UFC’s other superstar, Ronda Rousey, McGregor acknowledged the loss, congratulated Nate Diaz, and then went straight to the UFC to demand an immediate rematch. Then he disappeared into the gym and redoubled his efforts, ditching an increasingly lax training schedule for a hard regiment that involved many early mornings and a personal nutritionist that monitored every bite of food that went into his body.

But outside concerns almost derailed his rematch with Nate Diaz before it could happen. Originally scheduled to take place at UFC 200 in July, the UFC pulled McGregor off the card after the Irish fighter refused to take time out of his training schedule to travel to Las Vegas for a press conference. The first hint fans had that trouble was brewing arrived in the form of a simple post from McGregor on his official Twitter account.

“So Conor had basically said he didn’t want to come to Las Vegas,” Dana told Colin Cowherd in an interview the next day. “And we had a tour planned. We were going to start out 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 want to do it. I’m not going to come. And I was basically saying, ‘You have to come.’”

“Sitting in a car on the way to some dump in Conneticut or somewhere, to speak to Tim and Suzie on the nobody gives a f*ck morning show did not get me this life,” McGregor replied in a Facebook post to his fans. I will always play the game and play it better than anybody, but just for this one, where I am coming off a loss, I asked for some leeway where I can just train and focus. I did not shut down all media requests. I simply wanted a slight adjustment. But it was denied.”

“There had been 10 million dollars allocated for the promotion of this event is what they told me. So as a gesture of good will, I went and not only saved that 10 million dollars in promotion money, I then went and tripled it for them. And all with one tweet. Keep that 10 mill to promote the other bums that need it. My shows are good. I must isolate myself now.”

McGregor wasn’t joking about the impact of his retirement tweet. It only took a day for the surprise announcement to reach over 150,000 retweets and nearly 200,000 likes, beating out Kobe Bryant’s retirement tweet to become the biggest social media post from an athlete ever. But that wasn’t enough to keep the UFC from taking a hard line on McGregor’s demands. Even after Conor offered to attend a single press conference in New York to cut down on travel time away from his training, the UFC refused to budge and kept McGregor off of UFC 200.

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Feeling like their point had been made, the UFC rebooked McGregor vs Diaz 2 shortly afterwards for UFC 202 in August. McGregor would end up having the last laugh, though. His absence from UFC 200 became the biggest story of the event … until headliner Jon Jones failed a drug test in the days leading up to the show over his use of shady sexual enhancement pills.

“I could sit up here and say well, well, well,” McGregor said following Jones’ removal from the card. “I am a successful human being and successful human beings do not celebrate in the adversity or misfortune of others. I wish Jon well. I wish everyone backstage well. I know they’re running around like headless chickens trying to get everything together. … It is what is it. Aug. 20 is my date, UFC 202, the real UFC 200. And I will have my redemption.”

And redemption is what he got. Leading up to the event, few were giving the Irish fighter much of a change against Nate Diaz. Why would they, considering Diaz was getting a full training camp to prepare for McGregor this time? But people didn’t take into account that McGregor didn’t get a chance to prepare for Diaz the first time around either. Leading up to their rematch, Conor’s ‘military style’ camp featured a range of lanky, long European boxing champs imitating Nate’s style. Jiujitsu world champion Dillon Danis became a fixture in pictures from the gym as McGregor worked to close the perceived hole in his ground game.

“We made sure that we did a lot of very accurate fight simulations,” McGregor’s coach John Kavanagh said. “On our MMA sparring day, we really treated it the exact same as fight day. What [Conor] was going to eat on fight day, how he was going to rest… we mimicked it perfectly. We left the house at the same time he was going to leave the house for fight day. On this one, I remember when he walked into the cage on the actual fight night, and he just walked over to me and he said ‘Yeah, this is just exactly what we have done for the last five months basically. It just feels like gym, it just feels like another training day.’”

All the hard training and preparation paid off. The rematch with Nate Diaz was a back and forth war, but McGregor stayed measured and composed throughout the fight and did enough to win three out of five rounds on two of the judge’s scorecards. The third judge had it a 47-47 draw, earning McGregor a razor thin majority decision. But in combat sports, winning is winning. Conor showed up for the post fight press conference acting like he was the undisputed ruler of the world, and based on the world’s reaction to his victory, many agreed with that assessment. McGregor was back on top of the world.

The typical wait between fights for a top name in the UFC is often between four and six months, but not for Conor McGregor. As soon as he re-established himself with his win over Nate Diaz on August 20th, people were looking forward to November 12th and the UFC’s historic first event in New York City. The UFC had long been promising a massive event worthy of their debut in Madison Square Garden, but with Jon Jones suspended and Ronda Rousey still in seclusion, the card wasn’t coming together as planned. Recent news that the UFC had sold for over four billion dollars had many top fighters on the roster grumbling. Many were holding out for more money before agreeing to compete on the card.

Enter Conor McGregor, who agreed to headline the card even though it would only be twelve weeks since his punishing battle with Nate Diaz. His opponent would be Eddie Alvarez, who had taken the 155 pound lightweight belt off Rafael Dos Anjos in July. So for McGregor, the year was coming full circle. He had begun 2016 with a quest to take the lightweight belt and become the first fighter in UFC history to hold two belts simultaneously. An injury to Dos Anjos sidetracked him as he dealt with Nate Diaz in two fights that broke the record for biggest pay-per-view events in MMA history one after another. And now he got to close the year off with another chance at a second title.

As usual, many doubted McGregor’s ability to defeat Eddie Alvarez and win the 155 pound strap. They pointed to Conor’s trouble handling Nate Diaz, a mid-ranked fighter in the lightweight division, as proof the featherweight champ couldn’t hang at a higher weightclass. McGregor’s legendary left hand, which left almost all of the featherweights he fought dazed on the canvas, wouldn’t be as effective at the higher weight against bigger men like Alvarez. Or so the reasoning went.

But McGregor proved the naysayers wrong once again by not just defeating Alvarez but absolutely obliterating him from opening bell to the end of the fight three minutes into the second round. Alvarez couldn’t even touch McGregor, who used his head movement and footwork to avoid everything being thrown at him while tagging Eddie over and over again with laser accurate shots. By the end of the first round, Conor had dropped his opponent three times. In the second, it was a flawless four shot combo that put Alvarez to the mat for the final time.

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Conor McGregor had accomplished what he declared he’d accomplish from the moment he entered the UFC back in 2013: he now held two championship belts in the world’s biggest fight promotion. But he wasn’t done dreaming big. Following his victory over Alvarez in New York, McGregor declared he wanted an ownership stake in the UFC if he was going to continue to fight for the promotion. When the UFC’s owners responded not with a trip to Ireland to speak to him but with the stripping of his featherweight title two weeks after his win at UFC 205, McGregor applied for boxing licenses in several states across the US.

The message was clear: if the UFC wasn’t willing to play ball with McGregor, McGregor would take his ball somewhere else.

“I can go out now and maybe conquer the boxing scene as well,” he told Irish sports channel RTE at Christmas. “That’s a very serious thought. That’s a very serious conversation that’s happening. I’ve got those wrestling guys trying to contact me as well. I’ve got Hollywood trying to contact me as well. I’ve got so many options.”

The biggest money option is a boxing match with Floyd Mayweather, a fight many think will never come together. But with McGregor, it’s best to never say never. Sources inside his camp swear the Irish fighter is dead set on the match, and why not considering it’s a potential $100 million purse? Floyd Mayweather is also said to be taking the potential bout seriously. The UFC may not have the power to stop it from going ahead either due to clauses in the Muhammad Ali Act protecting boxers from many of the restrictions included in UFC contracts.

After McGregor defeated Eddie Alvarez in November, he said he was planning to take several months off until the birth of his first child in May. But recently he’s been implying a return may occur much sooner than that.

“I did say I was going to take a break,” he said. “But … a Christmas break, the holidays! At least give me the holidays off. So we’ll see what happens in the future.”

So Conor McGregor may just be getting started. With everything that’s occurred in 2016, it seems like the Irish fighter couldn’t have a bigger 2017. But taking people’s expectations and blowing them out of the water is Conor’s specialty, after all.

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