The Irish lad, Conor McGregor from the Southwest Dublin
Irish professional mixed martial artist and boxer, Conor Anthony McGregor is the former Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) featherweight and lightweight champion. He also competed as a welterweight in mixed martial arts (MMA), and light middleweight in boxing.
Conor McGregor’s journey from the streets of Dublin to the top of the fighting world was not a day’s work, Coming from a working-class family from the suburbs of Dublin, Uninterested in school, McGregor found his way through childhood gyms, and had a stint as a plumber’s apprentice, he took plumbing as a trade and did what he could to make a living for some time. There were times when he would work 12-hour for days before heading to the gym to train as a fighter. When he gave up plumbing to train full time, his parents disapproved of the decision, so much so he and his father came to blows. In a heated conversation, he swore at his dad that he would regret his actions as he was going to be a millionaire at 25.
On his first day of school, young Conor became friends with a meticulous kid, Tom Egan.
On weekends, McGregor would stop by Egan’s parents’ house and they’d watch delayed recordings of UFC fights, then mimic the moves. During the week, McGregor trained at his childhood boxing club in Dublin, or occasionally an MMA gym near his home with Egan. It was there that Kavanagh, the “Godfather of Irish MMA,” noticed both McGregor’s and Egan’s raw talent. They became his prized pupils at the new gym in downtown Dublin.
McGregor arrived determined to fight anyone. He wanted to prove himself, sure, but he was seemingly battling against his own distress. For McGregor, he boasts of winning more titles, but talk to his friends and fellow fighters about a decade of sleepless nights and proclamations on private jets, and it seems like Mystic Mac wanted something unattainable—something only he can see.
McGregor’s first professional mixed martial arts fight took place in a tiny basketball gym in Dublin.
It was McGregor’s third professional fight. At the weigh-in the day before, McGregor stared down his opponent, Artemij Sitenkov, and proceeded to announce he’d knock him out in the first round. Then McGregor turned and yelled at Sitenkov’s coach, “You can get it too, old man!” The next day at the fight, McGregor had his own cheering section, and his family came to see him fight for the first time. But Sitenkov took him right to the ground, submitted McGregor in just 69 seconds for his first loss. McGregor leaped out of the Octagon and disappeared down the hallway ashamed.
The following Monday, he didn’t show up for training for days, McGregor buried himself on his parents’ couch.
Eventually, Kavanagh convinced McGregor to come back to the gym, and he won his next fight by TKO. But there was no epiphany, and soon he was back on his parents’ couch. The 69-second fight he’d promised to win had slapped him with such force that inertia set in. McGregor didn’t fight for another 22 months.
In 2012 he won both the Cage Warriors Featherweight and Lightweight Championships, holding both titles simultaneously before vacating them to sign with the UFC. After losing two of his first three professional fights, McGregor went on a nine-fight winning streak. But his big breakthrough came in April 2013, when he won with a total knockout — bagging a $60,000 bonus for “Knockout of the Night” — in just over a minute.
In 2015, at UFC 194, he defeated José Aldo for the UFC Featherweight Championship via knockout thirteen seconds into the first round, which is the fastest victory in UFC title fight history. Upon defeating Eddie Alvarez for the UFC Lightweight Championship at UFC 205, McGregor became the first fighter in UFC history to hold titles in two weight divisions simultaneously.
McGregor began his professional boxing career in 2017, In his debut boxing match, he was defeated by Floyd Mayweather Jr. His boxing match with Mayweather drew 4.3 million pay-per-view buys in North America, the second most in history as of 2017.McGregor is also the biggest pay-per-view (PPV) draw in MMA history, having headlined four out of the six highest-selling UFC pay-per-view events. His headline bout with Khabib Nurmagomedov at UFC 229 drew 2.4 million PPV buys, the most ever for an MMA event.
McGregor was fourth on the Forbes list of highest paid athletes for 2017/18 – earning himself a reported $99m – from his sole fight against Mayweather, which is over the amount he promised his father he would make at 25.
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