Conor McGregor’s intrigue not a hard sell

Six o’clock on a grey north Dublin evening. A snake a couple of hundred young men long trails back from the door of nightclub in a retail park. It ain’t Vegas, that’s for sure. Yet they stand in line, rolling the odd smoke, stepping from one foot to another, ducking in under an awning when the sky starts to leak. They’re here because Conor McGregor is going to be here. That’s what we’re told, at any rate.

Conor lives on Conor time, however. He’s an hour behind schedule. At least an hour, we’re told. You can do these things when you are Conor McGregor. You do these things because you are Conor McGregor.

Eagerly pleasant

The eagerly pleasant PR lady is full of apologies but there’s nothing to be done. He will be here when he is here.

Until then, Hector Ó hEochagáin takes the stage to fill time. He gets the DJ to crank up some tunes and organises an impromptu dance-off under the spotlight.

“What’s this?” asks the eagerly pleasant PR lady in horror. She is English and knows nothing of Hector and his charms. “We’re in a nightclub,” shrugs her colleague, assuming this explains everything.

That we are. Specifically, we’re in a VIP suite upstairs in this nightclub overlooking the stage on which Hector is gamely playing for time. Better again, the suite has a dancer’s pole positioned right at the window that looks down at the stage. None of us has a go on it, mostly on the basis that the scene is surreal enough already.

This is how it rolls in a Conor McGregor world. A couple of hundred UFC fans have paid either €25 or €35 to get in the door to watch him do a Q&A on stage with some other fighters from John Kavanagh’s Straight Blast Gym.

His routine for the past week has been train during the day and head off to one of these at night. Cork one day, Waterford the next, a couple of nights in Swords. They come to hear him shake and bake and talk smack and off the back of it, €25,000 goes to the Simon Community and the same to Focus Ireland.

“Jesus,” blurts Kavanagh, McGregor’s coach, when he sees the dancer’s pole. “You start of doing a bit of martial arts, next thing you know you’re sitting down beside a stripper pole on a Monday night. Mad world.”

Kavanagh has come in to talk to the press for a bit while we wait for McGregor. He opened his first gym in 2001, when the sport itself was barely out of nappies. McGregor landed into him as a 16-year-old. A mix of talent, timing and mouth has bought them unthinkable lives.

“Fighting is raw to begin with. It’s a raw sport. Prizefighting is entertainment, has been since Mohammed Ali. The idea of talking up a fight isn’t new. There’s a reason why Conor is the number one highest paid UFC fighter – he’s intriguing.

“In the lead up to the fight, whether you want to watch him get whupped or whether you want to see him do the whupping, you want to watch. Oh, he has a lot of haters. Go online and you’ll see. A lot of people want to see him get beat up. But as long as they pay, that’s okay. That’s their right.

“The number one motivation for prizefighting has always been to make as much money as possible in as short a period as possible. And if one of my fighters didn’t have that as a goal, I would stop training them. Because you’re not very bright if you’re not doing this for the money.

“It’s not because there’s some honour in it. There’s not. It’s prize-fighting, it’s very dangerous at this level. You’re going to have multiple surgeries, you’re going to take full-contact shots to the head.

‘Huge money’

“The only reason to be in it is to make a huge amount of money out of it. Conor has become very astute at telling his employer that when he is added to a card, this is how much extra money is brought in. He knows exactly the value of a tweet.”

Eventually, two hours later than billed, McGregor walks through the door. “A strip club,” he smiles. “Nice. Pole and all.”

You get the sense that he is surprised by very little, given the way life has turned out. Hundreds queueing to hear him gab away of a Monday night? Sure. Why not?

“It is what it is. If you can’t do all this, you’re in the wrong sport. I chose this so it comes with the territory. You balance it.”

And so he talks. He’s not in what you’d call expansive form tonight but he talks away. About the gym, about opponents, about helping homeless people.

A camera crew circles the room as he talks and so he knocks out little nuggets of wisdom to be packaged and sold ahead of his next fight.

The only time he turns on the proto-Conor McGregor shtick is when he expresses doubts as to whether Jose Aldo will turn up for their fight in December.

“There’s a lot more to this sport than training hard and turning up for a fight. The game does that to you, it’s a whole other bubble.”