When the fight between Conor McGregor and Floyd Mayweather was initially announced, many scoffed at the idea that it would be competitive. McGregor — again — proved doubters wrong.
LAS VEGAS — When it was all said and done, the Floyd Mayweather- Conor McGregor spectacle delivered an actual fight after all.
That was really the question all along, right? Would all of this hype and social media theater produce anything that resembled a real fight. Or were we just buying in to some well-lit exhibition match, whose only purpose was to make all of its beneficiaries rich?
Even the most stingy of haters out there would have a hard time complaining about Saturday’s junior middleweight fight inside T-Mobile Arena.
Mayweather, who reached his perfect 50-0 mark, expertly weathered McGregor’s early storm before opening up offensively in a way fans hadn’t seen in years.
It was an amazing performance by Mayweather, at age 40, coming off two years of inactivity.
Editor’s Picks Mayweather stops fading McGregor in Round 10
Floyd Mayweather defeated a game but tiring Conor McGregor by TKO in the 10th round Saturday night at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas. The numbers behind Mayweather’s win over McGregor
A dive inside the stats from Floyd Mayweather’s 10-round TKO of Conor McGregor. Mayweather win helps Vegas avoid big losses
Las Vegas sportsbooks are rejoicing as Floyd Mayweather’s 10th-round TKO of Conor McGregor helped them avoid multimillion-dollar losses.
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Floyd Mayweather defeated a game but tiring Conor McGregor by TKO in the 10th round Saturday night at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas.
A dive inside the stats from Floyd Mayweather’s 10-round TKO of Conor McGregor.
Las Vegas sportsbooks are rejoicing as Floyd Mayweather’s 10th-round TKO of Conor McGregor helped them avoid multimillion-dollar losses.
But even though Mayweather took the opportunity afterwards to say he’d made good on his promise to pay back disgruntled fans from his flat fight against Manny Pacquiao two years ago — it was McGregor who made this fight.
It was McGregor, 29, who went from a welfare check-collecting no-name in Dublin to the biggest star in mixed martial arts in four years. It was McGregor’s stardom that brought Mayweather back, and it was competitive refusal to go down (even in a hard-to-watch ninth round) that brought out the long lost killer in Mayweather.
Immediately after the fight, Mayweather sipped whiskey from clear plastic cups and watched highlights of the fight, while celebrities waited outside to pay their dues. McGregor met with each and every one eventually, and looked happy to receive them, but what he really wanted to discuss was the fight.
How could referee Robert Byrd stop the bout in the 10th? Why does he have a tendency to slip into sloppiness during the middle rounds of a fight (he recognizes he did so in both of his Nate Diaz bouts as well) . During interviews, he moved and shadowboxed and replayed certain moments of the fight.
His head coach John Kavanagh penned a book titled, „Win or Learn, “ and McGregor was already on the latter. He’d just collected the biggest paycheck of his life and fought the best boxer of his generation. Thirty million dollars was the purse, and his final haul will be more. But the only thing on his mind was the fight.
Look, no one really knew what to expect going into this one. UFC president Dana White told ESPN early Saturday he felt sick to his stomach with nerves. His exact words were, „I’ve never felt like this before.“
By the end of the night, those nerves were gone. Defeat was probably inevitable, but it was the best of defeats. In his locker room afterwards, McGregor hinted he could probably beat Mayweather if given another shot, armed with this experience.
Plenty would probably still disagree, although they wouldn’t be as confident about it a second time around.
If you bought in for the spectacle, you got more than you bargained for. And if this was your first McGregor experience, think about coming back.
Mixed martial arts is not the small niche sport, fighting for legitimacy, it once was — but it’s still one that gets a little defensive when its on the biggest stage. MMA knows it has something special in McGregor — but it hoped the world got to see that, under the hostile circumstances of a boxing match with Mayweather.
It did.
