Official Conor McGregor thread (part 4) *Updated Warning in 1st Post Re:Boxing match

brendanwalsh wrote: »

Wonder will this baby be called Conor jr too.

You mean Conor Jr Two, surely?

Outlaw Pete wrote: »

Dana comments on it all......

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fO-V2yAwaCM

In fairness to Dana Calling out Conors cling ons aka Dunohy, Waterboy Byrne, etc for what they are.

As for saying Tony Ferguson has no right to say anything, he's the legitimate #1 contender, interim champion. He has every right to say his piece.

Ultimate Seduction wrote: »

Awaiting the 6 paragraph detailed breakdown of the incident from wonderfulli

Long night for me so I'm happy to oblige with some armchair psychology and wild speculation

My main observation is that Conor suffers from something nearly all sportspeople, and particularly fighters, suffer from: an inability to replace the adrenaline rush they feel on the big occasion. Combat sports is littered with fighters turning to drink and drugs to try recreate the buzz of fight night yet you don't tend to see as many examples of it in other individual sports.

If someone like Novak Djokovic loses the Wimbledon title in any given year, I'm sure there's massive disappointment but there's always the French, the Australian and the US peppered around the same season to aim at. If Mark Selby loses a UK title or a Masters title, I'm sure he's down in the dumps but there's the World title to go for at the end of the year.

More relevantly, even if he loses all of his titles or flops at the majors, there's always next year.

Defeated champions in boxing and MMA often get a rematch or further title shots but usually it's only one or two more shots at it and that's it - it's all over. Sometimes those titles shots and the big-time fights are never ever coming back - Anthony Pettis is a good case-in-point.

Hero-to-zero.

It must be an incredible high to, for example, go out there in Madison Square Garden and win a title in front of thousands of cheering Irish fans, with all those months and years of hard training going into that one moment in time where it's all on the line.

The comedown back to reality must be difficult. Mike Tyson was a coke-fiend and his problems worsened when his coach couldn't influence him anymore (Cus D'Amato died). Tyson Fury, Ricky Hatton, there's honestly a list as long as your arm of fighters turning to substances to try get that buzz again.

The Floyd fight was arguably one of the biggest sporting events of the year and the comedown from it, worse in defeat, must be something else. I had shivers when Imelda May was singing the anthem and the tension was ridiculous - all for a glorified exhibition - so God only knows the adrenaline dump the fighters feel.

And God only knows how mundane it must be to go from that huge event feeling to walking your dog around the K Club in the pissing rain. I've never done drugs but I've read enough about them to understand why he might turn to them to try get that buzz back.

I also think the manner of his defeat to Floyd - in particular the realization he doesn't have Roberto Duran power in his hands - probably dented his ego. It's a fairly standard reaction from people with certain types of personality to go off the rails when they have their ego walloped - whether it's being dumped by the missus, losing a job, having a bad date, etc.

I think Conor bought into his own hype regarding his KO-power and, to be fair, he had good reason to do so because he was dropping much bigger guys consistently with 4oz gloves. I think he went into the contest thinking "I'll easily drop a 154lb guy with 8oz gloves, sure I'm dropping 185lb guys like Alvarez". I think his paid cheerleading section (Dunphy's, Byrne etc) and his coaches didn't help in that sense.

I sat down and re-watched JK's appearance on The MMA Hour the Monday of fight week - he was smirking like Floyd had 0% chance of coping with Conor's heavy hands. He said he sees a very easy fight for Conor, that he can see 2 scenarios (a 1-round KO but at worst Floyd will quit on his stool by the end of the 6th) and "one of our teams is delusional and I'll be back here next week to tell you which one".

Needless to say he didn't go back the next week.

The reality of Conor's power is that it's largely the result of impeccable timing on his shots combined with 4oz gloves which causes concussive damage. As he found out, it's borderline impossible to land with perfect timing on a defensive boxing genius and when he strips a key asset from you with elusivity, the punches have far less impact.

Ultimately it's a fine line between insecurity and self-confidence. There's an even finer line between self-confidence and delusion. To enter a fight thinking he has Tyson-esque one-punch-power and for his opponent to literally laugh in his face at the end of the 5th round asking where the power is, it has to have some impact on his ego.

I think we witnessed reality colliding with delusion and it's a recipe that would send many men straight to the pub to forget about it.

My other suspicion is that Conor Jr. wasn't part of the masterplan at this juncture in his life. If you re-watch the press conference after UFC 205, it was clear he didn't know much - and didn't want to know much - about the whole thing. The timing of it also doesn't tally with his comment about having children 'down the line when the fighting is done' which he made in the run-up to the Aldo fight.

When people have a baby in their late 20's you often hear it described as a "settling down" process. None of us really know the state of his relationship with Dee and it's obviously none of our business but from reading JK's book and listening to interviews over the years with Tony McGregor, Tom Egan and others, they all say Conor is hyperactive and can't sit still, everything has to be a million miles a minute.

It's a serious change of pace to go from that to changing nappies while Paw Patrol is on the telly - especially when you have 100 million in the bank and money is no object for benders on expensive drink & drugs and temptation always nearby.

He seems to have an addictive & obsessive personality that seems to come in bursts of enthusiasm for new things and new people. That's an amazing thing for an athlete to have if it's channeled in the right directions but it can be a curse if it's not.

If you look at his social media over the past 6 or 7 years, it's constant phases of obsessions. He had a phase where he wouldn't go a week without posting up a photo of a winning accumulator on the fights or the football. He had a phase where he was obsessed with gorillas, chimps, lions, cheetahs and hardly a day went by when he wasn't waffling on about animals. He had a tattoo phase where he'd be adding more ink every month. The Ido Portal obsession came and for ages it was all about movement training. Then he meets Julian Dalby and he's obsessing over cycling and rowing.

Instead of channeling that addictive personality into positives for his career (movement, cardio), he's apparently back to channeling it into things that can't be positive for his career (booze, drugs, women).

TL;DR: Regardless of all of that speculative armchair psychology, one thing I feel very confident in saying is the biggest factor in all of this is having no fight booked to focus on.

When he tore his ACL against Max, by every account he went off the rails in a very similar fashion. JK alluded to it, Conor alluded to it, Andre Berto said he was mad for the strip clubs and parties. The key difference is back then he had 90,000 followers on twitter/instagram/facebook and he'd be lucky to have a paragraph written about him buried in the sports pages underneath the local athletics results.

Now he has something like 41 million followers and if he sneezes he's front page of The Sun.

We're not seeing any new patterns of behaviour. This is who he is. This is exactly who he was in 2014 too. All we are seeing are the same self-destructive behaviour patterns being amplified by huge wealth and placed under a massive microscope.

If he wants to retire, fair enough go party like it's 1999 every night of the week, nobody will care. But if he actually wants to fight into his 30's, this type of self-destructive behaviour almost always marks the beginning of the end for fighters (Mike Tyson, Tyson Fury, Jon Jones).

Very easy to add the name Conor McGregor to that list.

Effects wrote: »

Yer one also posted a pic of Conor and her sister video chatting. Any idea what it means?

Thankfully my memory is pretty good so I immediately recognized that photo where she is claiming it's Conor chatting to her sister.

It's a screenshot of Conor from his Betsafe video 0:04 below:




So all that particular photo means is "Terri" if that's her real name, knows how to use photoshop.