Last week, when the initial press release for UFC 205 was sent out, there was a good bit of harrumphing at its vagueness in regards to the attendees. "The stars of UFC 205" was the language of matchmaker sweat as the clock ticked, a self-imposed deadline to deliver some magical assembly for UFC’s historic first show at Madison Square Garden. As good as Stephen Thompson vs. Tyron Woodley was, it wasn’t Big Apple good. It wasn’t big enough to hold down Mecca. It wasn’t we will bring a UFC 100 type card to New York City good, the original Lorenzo Fertitta promise.
Turns out the UFC had some shit up its sleeve. Not long afterwards it was announced that Joanna Jedrzejczyk would defend her strawweight title against Karolina Kowalkiewicz, and then, late Monday night, a mushroom cloud quietly bloomed on social media as the East Coast slept. Conor McGregor was made official to challenge Eddie Alvarez for the lightweight belt.
That was the fight people were waiting for. More specifically, that was the fighter that people were waiting for. Conor McGregor. It was that big name alone that could match the bigness of the event. It was that name that had a semblance of the historic significance in the now. By Tuesday Long Island’s own Chris Weidman was added to face Yoel Romero, and Khabib Nurmagomedov was made official for a fight with Michael Johnson. All gravy. But the catalyst, the star of Broadway, was Mystic Mac. That was the missing ingredient.
And of course, every time McGregor is booked into an event these days minor volcanic eruptions occur all over the globe. Nate Diaz, who has fought McGregor twice, immediately defaulted to a black and white understanding of the situation — that both the Irishman and Alvarez were scared to fight him. Nurmagomedov, who has been injured into relative dormancy for the last couple of years yet had pinky swears that he was next for Alvarez, recognized his shape in the mirror: He looked like a pawn. A Dagestan Pawn! And Jose Aldo, a northerly pound-for-pound name that for years incited nothing other than our reverence, just up and…I mean, it looks like he quit.
"Conor himself said before that he wouldn’t give his belt away by any chance and nobody would take it away from him," Aldo told the Brazilian website Combate. "After all this, I see I can’t trust any word from president Dana White, and who’s in charge of the promotion now is Conor McGregor. Since I’m not here to be an employee of McGregor, today I ask to cancel my contract with the UFC. When they offered me a fight with Frankie Edgar, Dana said that the winner would challenge McGregor or win the linear title, that he would lose his belt if he didn’t return to the featherweight division after his rematch with Nate Diaz. After being fooled so many times, I don’t feel motivated to fight in the UFC anymore."
See, this is the complicated place the UFC finds itself in with Conor McGregor in 2016. The one thing that couldn’t happen was a repeat of UFC 200, where McGregor was booked for just a moment in a rematch with Diaz, and then removed over a flex-off with the UFC over attending press conferences. The UFC couldn’t have the second of its "historic big events" in 2016 go without its biggest star, especially in New York where Irish pubs are on every city block. The only way McGregor wanted to fight at MSG was for the lightweight belt against Alvarez. He wanted to keep his featherweight belt while he did it. The dude is a titan in leverage, an Armani chauvinist, who has somehow manifest his worth beyond just about everyone’s ability to understand (or appreciate). And the UFC had to cave, because guess what — it’s easier to seethe behind the curtain than it is to put on a lesser show in front of it.
There’s plenty of seething to go around.
Now Aldo is (temporarily) gone, and Nurmagomedov is (pissed but) taking his second option, and Diaz is (still just) pissed. The only man who is pinching himself is Philly’s own Eddie Alvarez, who — like everybody else — wants nothing more than to wreck the privileged Irish tyrant who is stomping across divisions in caiman-skinned loafers. It was McGregor who criticized Alvarez for not sweetening his own deal for the fight, too, like the small picture (the fight) wasn’t going to cloud his managerial lordliness, even for his opponent.
Still, every fighter at Tuesday’s press conference at MSG was concentrating telekinetic power into Alvarez’s fists, and perhaps secretly stewing that it wasn’t them. There was Donald Cerrone, a target of McGregor’s during last year’s Go Big conference, sitting in the darkness of his Stetson. Had he beat Rafael dos Anjos last December, he might have got his chance. There was Frankie Edgar, another portion of raw minced meat. Edgar orbited McGregor (and was promised a fight with him, just like Aldo), yet finds himself facing Jeremy Stephens in his homecoming fight.
And even Stephens! — a non sequitur, non-New Yorker, nonentity in the coach class seat behind him — tried to seize a moment. When somebody asked Conor who of the "champions and grizzled vets" among the assembled would give him the hardest fight, Stephens saw his chance to pipe up.
"Right here, right here," Stephens said, as McGregor thoughtfully stroked his beard. "The real hardest-hitting 145er, right here. This guy TKOs people. When I knock people out, they don’t f*cking move."
"Who the f*ck is that guy?" McGregor said, as if sharing in a laugh with the crowd. "Who the f*ck…is…that!" Stephens snuck in a "leprechaun" comment, and McGregor dismissed him so thoroughly it was like the scene in Spinal Tap, when the band rolls up the window in the limo as the driver tells a story. "After I take [Alvarez’s] belt," he resumed, "I look around and I don’t know what anyone else has for me right now. I might have to jump up and drag Floyd Mayweather out of bed."
The New York crowd ate it up. Stephens was reduced to nothingness. The rest of the panel was just incidental. And Mayweather was dragged back in, because McGregor wasn’t talking about what anybody has for him fight wise. He was talking about what anybody has for him in the Brinks truck sense. That kind of thing is liberating to his fellow fighters, even as it pisses them off.
And in the end, the UFC didn’t necessarily need to state that the press conference would feature "The stars of UFC 205." McGregor has done away with the plural altogether. "The star of UFC 205" would have served just as well, and — whether you’re enraged or enraptured — it’s hard to deny the truth. With McGregor, it’s now an event heading to Madison Square Garden, the costs be what they may.
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