As rough as the sport of MMA is, it’s always good to have an exit strategy. Even the best need one, and it sounds like Conor McGregor has a very simple metric now that he’s made more money than any other UFC fighter ever: he’ll stop once he takes too many bad blows to the head. He laid out his philosophy to Ryan Tubridy on The Late Late Show.
“I will most certainly compete again for the next couple of years and then I’ll see where it is,” McGregor said. “I could cut it off yesterday, you know what I mean? I don’t really have a date and a time and an age because I use it from a damage-taking standpoint. How many blows have I taken? That’s the true danger in combat sport.”
“I’m 29 years of age and I have climbed to the very very top and not with relative ease. I’ve put in a lot of hard work,” he said. “I’ve gone through strenuous camp, after camp after camp, but still compared to other people in the fight game I’m still relatively undamaged. I’ve never been dropped. I was wobbled once.”
https://twitter.com/Ryan_Harkness/status/928016413176094720
“In the Mayweather fight, it was fatigue,” Conor continued. “I wasn’t wobbled, I didn’t see stars once. The only time I was ever wobbled once in a contest was in the Diaz 1 fight. And that’s it, it’s the only heavy shot I’ve ever taken.”
That one heavy shot came in the second round of the fight, and moments later McGregor was shooting in for a takedown attempt in the hopes that it would give him time to clear out the cobwebs. Unfortunately for him, Nate Diaz is a jiujitsu expert even if he prefers to stand and bang. McGregor found himself flattened out face down on the canvas getting choked out.
On the plus side, Conor didn’t take more shots to the head, and he proved the spell he has over the fight industry wouldn’t break just because of one loss. That sets us up now for at least a few more years of McGregor hijinx in the Octagon and possibly the boxing ring, unless someone really gets their hands on him and beats him down.
