Conor McGregor: F*cking Journalists Were Knocking Down My Mother’s Door

UFC featherweight champion Conor McGregor seems to have mended some recently burned bridges with his bosses. After taking a stance against the UFC regarding his media obligations for the rematch with Nate Diaz, the Irish star was dropped from UFC 200 on July 9 and engaged in a ‘publicized civil war’ with his employers It was a war he’d eventually end up coming out of relatively unscathed, although his removal from the milestone pay-per-view card remained official.

The once consummate company man McGregor had attempted to throw a spanner in the works of the organization that helped him become a multi millionaire. Thus is the struggle between a man’s worth and the amount of money his bosses are willing to pay. Whether or not the rumours of a boxing match with Floyd Mayweather were just a media stunt is unclear, but it remains a highly unlikely fight in reality.

His most recent media appearance, a sit down with ESPN, saw McGregor discuss openly about his problems with the UFC, and it sounds as though they are now squared away. From their website is an interesting conversation that was not included in the initial release of the interview, where McGregor talks far more about the effects of Joao Carvalho’s death and the harassment from the media in he time since.

Carvalho was a Portugese fighter who, while taking on one of McGregor’s team mate’s in Dublin, suffered fatal injury in the cage. He died after two days in a local hospital. He was just 28 years of age. The tragic circumstances reverberated around the MMA community worldwide, but the host of Joao’s final fight perhaps bore the biggest brunt. The Irish MMA scene went from a buzz to a solemn and overcast sport overnight, and once again McGregor was at the forefront.

‘The Notorious’ was filmed cheering his team mate to victory on that fateful night, and it led to the obvious media coverage we’ve come to expect these days. Headlines from the maistream papers pretty much read ‘McGregor cheers as team mate kills a man.’ It turns out that terrible moment in MMA history impacted on the upcoming events, that would once again turn the mixed martial arts world on it’s head…

Check out the interview on page 2

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“I’ll tell you what, (the retirement tweet) blew up,” McGregor told ESPN in an exclusive interview. “I was kind of having fun to start, half-hearted. Then all of a sudden it’s, ‘you’re off 200!’ I was like, ‘alright, well f— you too, then.’

“All said and done, there were times (I thought), ‘I should have just jumped on the damn flight.’ But sometimes you’ve got to do what’s right for you and not what’s right for everybody else — especially if you’ve done what’s right for everyone else a million times over.”

“It ain’t just three stops, it’s 30 stops within each stop,” McGregor said. “Reasonable media, to me, was New York — where the sport just got legal. Go around, do all the talk shows, all the morning shows, and blow it out of the water where it just became legal.

“I wanted to isolate, focus, get that win back. That’s all I gave a f— about, because essentially all the other s— means nothing. If I lose again, then this whole ship comes down. I’m the one carrying the ship. This whole thing goes down if I’m gone.”

“I had f—— journalists knocking down my mother’s door, you know what I mean?” McGregor said. “That’s not what I signed up to do — have people knocking on my mother’s door, talking about a kid dying. It’s not nice to see a kid die like that. It does something to you. And there’s been show after show canceled in Ireland since that. It’s f—– up to be a part of it, and I didn’t want to bring it back up and put it more on a public scale.

“After all that, I did not want to be put in front of a camera and made to dance. I just wasn’t feeling it.”

“Did I make that flight (to Las Vegas)? Did I do all the media? Did I dance like a monkey? No. Am I still here? Am I still fighting? Am I still collecting? Yeah.”

Source: ESPN