Conor McGregor Believes Mayweather Fight Was Stopped Too Early
Conor McGregor still feels that the odds were stacked against him over a month out from his tenth round TKO boxing defeat to Floyd Mayweather in August.
While the task of beating Mayweather was already a tall order, McGregor says the presence of Robert Byrd, who is the husband of Adalaide Byrd, the now-suspended boxing judge from Golovkin vs GGG, kept him from getting “a fair shake”.
During his first major media appearance since his boxing match with Mayweather, McGregor told Caroline Pearce at “An Evening With Conor McGregor” in Glasgow (via MMA Fighting) that he was only recently made aware of the connection between the two, which just furthers his idea of how boxing politics interloped the fight:
“Adalaide Byrd’s husband Robert Byrd, that’s all I’ll say on that. That’s her husband.
“When we came face to face and we were doing the rules thing, he was only staring at me. I’m looking at him staring at me and I could see in my peripheral vision that he was looking at me and not looking at Floyd,” he said.
“I was going to say, ‘He’s fighting as well, mate. Give him the f**king rules. I don’t know, what was going on there?
“Every time we tied he literally wrestled me off him. It is what it is, I knew I wasn’t going to get a fair shake out there.”
McGregor is expected to return to the UFC following his stint in boxing and defend his lightweight title. Meanwhile, Tony Ferguson and Kevin Lee will throw down for the interim 155 pound belt in his absence, the winner of which is widely expected to fight McGregor sometime next year.
McGregor insists that the fight was stopped to early, as he was still on his feet when Robert Byrd intervened.
“I thought it was an early stoppage. How the f**k can you stop a fight if there were no knockdowns or nothing previous?” he asked.
“The round before that I almost had him dropped. I hurt him to the body in the round before. How the f**k can you stop it like that at the first sign of a wobble? You’ve got to let these fights go on.”
McGregor won the first several rounds against the boxing legend before eventually succumbing to punches and exhaustion in the later rounds before being stopped in round ten.
