Conor McGregor Got Wasted

The UFC under TKO mismanaged the career of the man who should have been the GOAT

Yeah, yeah, I know the joke is a little too obvious, but I’m not talking about the dude we know as Conor McGregor, the one Andreas Hale so ably chronicled for ESPN, I’m just including a few of the lowlights; there are literally dozens more:

• Sept. 11, 2018: Michael Chiesa sues McGregor for an undisclosed amount following UFC 223 bus attack, citing “serious personal, economic and other injury” and “severe emotional distress, mental trauma and/or bodily harm” in court papers filed to Kings County Supreme Court in Brooklyn, New York.

• March 26, 2019: The New York Times reports that McGregor is under investigation for allegations of sexual assault at a Dublin hotel in December 2018. Shortly after the report, McGregor announced he was retiring from MMA. This is the second time he has “retired” from MMA on social media.

• Aug. 15, 2019: TMZ publishes an April video of McGregor punching 50-year-old Desmond Keogh at The Marble Arch Pub in Dublin.

• Sept. 10, 2020: McGregor is arrested on the French island of Corsica on suspicion of sexual assault and indecent exposure for an alleged incident at a bar. He is released without charge two days later.

• Jan. 24, 2023: An Irish woman alleges in July 2022 that McGregor assaulted her on his yacht in Ibiza, Spain. She alleges McGregor punched her and threatened to drown her at a party in July on his boat during a birthday party for McGregor. The woman also alleges that she jumped off the yacht to get away from McGregor, breaking her arm in the process. McGregor denies the allegations through his attorney. Days before the claim, the woman’s car was set on fire by unknown assailants.

• June 9, 2023: McGregor is involved in a skit at halftime of Game 4 of the NBA Finals where he’s to punch Miami Heat mascot Burnie. McGregor takes things too far after punching the mascot when he delivers a second blow to the fallen Burnie. The man inside the costume is taken to the emergency room for injuries sustained in the incident.

• June 11, 2023: McGregor was accused of sexually assaulting a woman inside the VIP restroom at the Kaseya Center at Game 4 of the NBA Finals in Miami. The woman claims McGregor “aggressively kissed her” before attempting to force her into multiple sexual acts. McGregor denies the allegation through his attorney.

• Nov. 22, 2024: McGregor is found guilty in a civil suit stemming from an accusation that the fighter sexually assaulted a woman in a hotel room back in December 2018. McGregor was ordered by the High Court in Dublin to pay 248,000 euros ($257,000) to his accuser. The Irishman denied the accusations and stated that he had consensual sex with his accuser. He is not currently facing any criminal charges from the incident.

• July 31, 2025: McGregor loses his attempt to appeal the Irish High Court's decision to find him liable of sexual assault in November 2024.

No, not that stupid asshole. I’m done with that guy.

Ireland has had enough

According to Petesy Carroll, so is Ireland:

There are people in Ireland who can’t fathom the idea of McGregor the athlete, or the biggest superstar the UFC has ever created, taking precedence over his lengthy rap sheet. On the other hand, there is a whole new UFC fanbase that is champing at the bit for its first fight week experience starring “The Notorious,” and a mere mention of Nikita Hand or 2024’s civil sexual assault trial can provoke the most vehement defenses.

This, of course, is the reality of covering the most divisive and controversial athlete to ever hail from the Emerald Isle.

…

McGregor was once an overwhelmingly positive story back home. As his peers were in the midst of a nation-wide recession, he forged a path in a sport most Irish people had never heard of and eventually went on to transcend it. Winning the 2016 RTE Sports Personality of the Year, as voted by the public, is evidence of how prominent he was in the broader Irish consciousness, despite thriving in a niche discipline.

It was somewhere around his blockbuster boxing bout with Floyd Mayweather Jr. in 2017 when the tone began to shift in Ireland. While he was still hugely popular, people began to take issue not only with the "circus" fight with Mayweather, but also some of McGregor's declarations, a memorable one being him telling the people of New York that he was "Black from the waist down" at a pre-fight press conference.

…

The conveyor belt of negativity culminated with McGregor being found liable in an Irish civil court for the sexual assault of Nikita Hand in November 2024.

It was the biggest story in the country that year, and the public perception of McGregor was damaged to an unprecedented level. People marched through the streets demanding that a criminal case be reopened in the aftermath. Massive retailers boycotted McGregor-related products.

For the majority of people back home, it wasn’t just the straw that broke the camel’s back; it was the final nail in the coffin.

I’m with the Irish on this one. I’ve had plenty of Conor McGregor the human being living in 2026, a lifetime supply in fact.

Conor coulda woulda shoulda GOATed

But Conor McGregor the fighter who first took the UFC by storm and then transcended the sport from 2013 to 2016, him I still care about.

McGregor at his best was on the road to being the GOAT of GOATs, the best there’s ever been.

Unfortunately, Endeavor bought a controlling interest in the UFC in 2016, and they didn’t want to blow up their pay scale — the one they’ve already paid $375 million in court for, the one that limits fighters’ share of revenue to 15% no matter what.

Petesy and the Irish public he’s speaking for are absolutely right to identify the 2017 Mayweather boxing bout as the moment Conor McGregor jumped the shark.

But what Petesy is missing is that it was not only the moment when McGregor went rancid, it’s also the point at which Endeavor threw away all the work that Zuffa had done to establish MMA as THE combat sport.

By letting McGregor face Mayweather in a boxing ring — at a point in time when the average idiot in the US knew that MMA > boxing and that the heavyweight champ of the UFC would absolutely murder the best boxer in the world 9/10 times in a street fight — Endeavor chose to protect their profit margins and severely damange the sport and stunt the man who was on track to be the best to ever do it.

Indulge me some fight fan nostalgia.

Conor McGregor’s great run

When McGregor made his UFC debut in April 2013, he was a 24-year-old with a 12-2 record in Irish MMA — a complete backwater of the sport of the time.

But then you could say that in 1964, John Lennon was a 24-year-old with 4 #1 hits in England — a completely irrelevant musical backwater — when he walked on Ed Sullivan’s stage in February 1964, too.

McGregor wasted no time in making his presence felt by TKO’ing an up-and-coming Marcus Brimage in a little over one minute in his UFC debut.

But it was his second fight with an admittedly green Max Holloway that first showed UFC fans we were seeing someone special.

That fight is at the top of this post. McGregor’s karate-based style completely flummoxed Holloway — a gifted fighter coming from a more conventional Muay Thai background — in the first round and dominated him in the second and third.

It was only when we learned that Conor had blown out his ACL in that first round that we realized, “Holy shit, this kid has got the stuff.”

Fans had to wait over a year for McGregor to return from surgery and rehab, but over the next year he would fight four times and reeled off four highlight reel wins over the cream of the featherweight division at the time and he made it look easy: Diego Brandao TKO 4:05 of the 1st; Dustin Poirier TKO at 1:46 of the 1st; Denis Siver TKO 1:54 of the 2nd; Chad Mendes TKO 4:57 of the 2nd.

The Siver fight was McGregor’s first time headlining a UFC card — a Fight Night that aired on Fox Sports 1, so it wasn’t quite the big time, yet — but it was a star-making performance.

Watch the video above; the aura just drips off the guy. Rizz for miles, and he backed up the style with the skill, precision, and power to completely overawe the veteran Siver.

By the time he beat Chad Mendes (who was stepping in for an injured Jose Aldo) at UFC 189, McGregor was not only proving he could beat one of the best wrestlers in the division, he was drawing a $7 million gate and selling a reported 825,000 pay-per-views.

And when he finally got the legendary Jose Aldo in the Octagon at UFC 194 in December 2015, he put on the performance that sealed his legend: destroying the champ, who’d been baited into foolishly charging at the impudent Irishman, with one beautiful, perfectly targeted left hand that ended the fight by KO at 0:13.

The Nate Diaz diversion only burnished Conor’s rep

UFC 196 was originally planned to be the capstone of the promotion’s still unmatched mid-2010’s run in Brazil.

In partnership with the country’s top TV network, Globo, the UFC was setting viewership records that remain the all-time popular pinnacle of MMA on Planet Earth thanks to Brazilian champs Anderson Silva, Fabricio Werdum, Jose Aldo, Raphael dos Anjos and Junior dos Santos.

The original plan was for UFC 196 to feature a heavyweight title fight between Werdum vs Cain Velasquez AND a middleweight title fight pitting Anderson Silva vs Michael Bisping in one of Brazil’s largest venues, the 42,000-capacity Arena da Baixada.

But alas, that all fell apart, and even moving the event to a 15,000-seater in Rio still left the promotion in dire need of a headliner, preferably Brazilian.

The initial plan was for dos Anjos to defend his lightweight title against featherweight champ McGregor — who was already a massive heel in Brazil after flatlining Aldo — and I’ll let Wikipedia tell the sad story of how featherweight Conor found himself in the cage fighting at welterweight against then-journeyman Nate Diaz:

On February 23, the planned bout suffered a setback as it was announced that dos Anjos pulled out due to a broken foot. Former UFC Featherweight Champion José Aldo declined the initial opportunity to replace him due to "lack of time" to prepare for the bout. Former lightweight champion and top featherweight contender Frankie Edgar also declined the opportunity due to a groin injury.

Eventually, The Ultimate Fighter 5 winner and former lightweight title challenger Nate Diaz was announced as the replacement and the bout took place in the welterweight division.

Sure, I was among the many haters cheering wildly when Diaz survived McGregor’s initial attacks to win by submission after hurting Conor on the feet late in the second round.

But in retrospect, there was no shame in McGregor taking one for the promotion or in the featherweight champ moving up and losing to a welterweight.

And all was redeemed when Conor dominated Diaz en route to a decision win at UFC 202 — a card that sold 1.6 million PPVs

And that set up McGregor’s last moment of MMA greatness, utterly destroying the lightweight champ Eddie Alvarez in a terrifyingly one-sided bout.

Give it another watch:

McGregor, despite moving up in class, seemed the bigger man in every sense of the word. His left hand dropped Alvarez on first contact and kept dropping him again and again until the finish was secured late in the second round.

The aura around Conor McGregor — the first simultaneous two-division champ in UFC history — at that point was at Michael Jackson Thriller levels.

Sadly, Endeavor did what they did in 2017, and McGregor did what he did from 2017 on, and here we are.

Endeavor’s greed and the kind of rot that happens inside a man when he’s paid $100 million for a bout he never earned in a sport in which he’d never competed combined to ruin the legacy McGregor spent his first 29 years building.

It’s not just that he was overpaid; more importantly, he — and the fans — were robbed of the chance to see peak McGregor against the greatest lightweights division in UFC history — not just Khabib Nurmagomedov (who fought a post-Mayweather, much diminished McGregor instead of the magic man who destroyed Eddie Alvarez), but also Justin Gaethje, Charles Oliveira, Tony Ferguson, Kevin Lee, Edson Barboza and maybe even Michael Chandler had McGregor continued his run until 2020.

Just imagine what might have been!

His fight career since 2017, like his personal conduct, has just been an endless series of shameful episodes and richly deserved defeats, so I’ll leave that to someone else to chronicle.

But let’s pour one out for the near greatness that Conor McGregor achieved and the greatness that might have been had the Fertitta Brothers not sold out the sport to Hollywood hustlers for $4 billion.

Nate Wilcox is the Editor-in-Chief of The MMA Draw. He founded Bloody Elbow in 2007 and sold it in 2024.