Win or Learn: MMA, Conor McGregor and Me: A Trainer's Journey

by John Kavanagh

  When I woke up on Wednesday morning, Conor told me he was in a lot of pain from a wisdom tooth. It had kept him awake for most of the night. The combination of that and the tough weight-cut down to 145lb meant that he wasn’t exactly feeling on top of the world. All the while, he was putting on a brave face as he dealt with his various media commitments. By late afternoon the pain in his tooth was really bothering him, and I was concerned that it was only going to deteriorate further if we ignored it. An injury is something a fighter can often push on through, but a toothache is the sort of pain that can drive you crazy. We went off in search of a dentist.

  The guy we found assured us that it was nothing to worry about. There was a bit of an infection in the tooth, so he’d remove it. Conor would be back to normal in seven days.

  Seven days? With Conor’s fight now just seventy-two hours away, that wasn’t going to work for us. We explained the situation to the dentist, who suggested cleaning the tooth in order to reduce the infection. It wasn’t going to be a long-term solution, but it managed to provide enough relief for Conor to get through the next few days.

  It’s at the weigh-ins when Conor really begins to go into animal mode. In Conor’s mind, at this stage, he’s about to compete against somebody for his next meal. Add in the fact that he’s already feeling abrasive from the weight-cut and it usually makes for a tense staredown. More often than not, someone needs to step in to prevent things from boiling over. Overseeing his first weigh-ins since joining the organization, UFC executive Garry Cook was thrown in at the deep end with this one. Conor towered above Brimage and they butted heads before being separated. The crowd loved it. Backstage afterwards, Brimage and Chris Connelly smiled in our direction as they remarked that the incident would serve to ‘hype the fight up’. But Conor wasn’t playing games.

  ‘Get the fuck away from me,’ he said. ‘I’m going to destroy you.’

  Reinforcements arrived from SBG for fight night, as Owen Roddy and Artem Lobov flew over from Dublin to join me in Conor’s corner. With the exception of some of Conor’s family and friends, I wasn’t expecting there to be many Irish supporters in the crowd. But when we walked out, Conor was greeted by a massive roar. I looked around the arena and there was green everywhere. To see that so many people had gone to such effort and expense to be there for Conor’s UFC debut was quite overwhelming.

  Although there had been a significant increase in mainstream media coverage of Conor in Ireland, we hadn’t attracted any sponsors for the fight. Most fighters in the UFC walk out for their fights with sponsored hats, T-shirts and shorts, as well as a banner displaying all the brands they’re endorsing. Conor made that first walk with just his own shorts and the Irish tricolour. But struggling to find sponsorship would very soon be a thing of the past.

  Marcus Brimage was game for the battle and came forward without fear. But as the occupants of the UFC’s featherweight division were about to discover, trading punches with Conor McGregor is a strategy that will never end well. Just over a minute after the contest began, Conor was celebrating his first win in the UFC while Brimage was on the canvas, wondering what had just happened.

  In his post-fight interview in the octagon with UFC commentator Kenny Florian, Conor had the audience eating out of his hand. Given the manner in which he put Brimage away, I was confident that Conor would be in with a good shout of being awarded the ‘Knockout of the Night’ bonus worth $60,000 – a significant financial boost considering that his pay for the fight was $16,000. As the interview was drawing to a close, I mouthed to Conor: ‘Ask for the money.’ UFC president Dana White was in attendance, and I thought he might be persuaded by a cheeky young Irish newcomer asking for the bonus. Conor grabbed the microphone and shouted: ‘Dana: 60 Gs, baby!’

  Conor had put on a beautiful display of striking and evasive footwork. People hadn’t seen striking like it before. Most guys in the UFC come from a grappling background and then they add the striking to that, so it’s very basic and rough around the edges. But with his wide variety of crisp shots, his angles and his movement, Conor was already light years ahead. I knew he only needed one chance to show that, and he had grabbed it with both hands.

  When we got back to the changing room after the fight I looked at my phone and was blown away by the reaction to the result. A small number of people were already talking about Conor as a potential opponent for UFC featherweight champion José Aldo. The majority of fans laughed at that thought. It was far too soon to be even mentioning Conor in the same sentence as Aldo, they said. But nobody on the SBG team was laughing. Conor was heading for the summit, and if Aldo was the man occupying top spot, then that’s who we were aiming for.

  Conor was brought straight into a private room at the arena to meet Dana White, who asked him for a photo. Dana couldn’t contain his excitement at having a new star in the UFC. He recognized that Conor was something special. Irish fans had been tormenting Dana for a long time on social media about bringing Conor to the UFC. Now he understood why.

  ‘Welcome to the UFC!’ Dana laughed. ‘There’s been a lot of hype. I guess the hype is real … People are going crazy on Twitter, man. People are going fucking crazy. Ireland’s going nuts! We’re pumped!’

  In the post-event press conference, Dana couldn’t praise Conor highly enough: ‘I’m blown away. First of all, it’s his first fight ever in the UFC. He walked out tonight and got into the octagon like it was his hundredth fight in the UFC. From the minute the bell started, he was nice and relaxed … and even after he gets the knockout, it’s like he’s been here before and done it a hundred times. The kid is totally relaxed. He’s a beast. I’m impressed.’

  Conor’s win really felt like the conclusion of an emotional rollercoaster ride. Five years earlier I’d been sitting beside him on his bed in his parents’ house as he was in tears due to his life’s apparent lack of direction. Yet here he was now, the talk of the UFC, with the president of the organization falling at his feet. It was hard to take it all in, so I had to escape and find a quiet room where I could have a few minutes to myself. I lay down on the floor and let the wave of emotion sweep over me. I just needed a chance to allow it all to sink in. Taking that little bit of time to myself has become a ritual that I follow after every big fight.

  ‘To be honest, I don’t know what’s going on here,’ Conor said later. ‘I’m just after hearing sixty thousand dollars and I’m thinking of what I’m going to spend it on. I’m going to buy myself a car, anyway, and maybe some nice custom-made suits.’

  On the way to the fight in Sweden, Conor had collected the dole. On the flight home, there was a cheque for $76,000 in his pocket. I sat back, closed my eyes and smiled. Now that the public had been introduced to Conor McGregor, things were never going to be the same again.

  10

  I suppose it’s quite ironic that while it was the quietness of karate classes that first drew me into martial arts, much of my involvement nowadays is focused on the showbiz environment of the Ultimate Fighting Championship. Large arenas, raucous crowds, loud music, flashing lights – a UFC event is the exact opposite of that calm, soothing dojo setting that I first experienced as a four-year-old. In spite of that, I’ve never found it difficult to focus on the task at hand. Sure, when I’m walking out for a fight behind Conor McGregor and the fans go crazy, we’re enveloped by a massive cacophony of noise. It’s like being punched in the gut at first. But when I’m cageside and it’s time for work, I can honestly say I’ve never been aware of the presence of a crowd – whether it’s thousands of people at a big arena in the US or a couple of hundred at a Dublin GAA hall. All I see and hear is what’s happening in the cage. Despite the noise from the fans, I’ve somehow always been able to project my voice without having to shout. My fighters have often told me that no matter how big the crowd is, they can hear me above everything else. It almost seems intimate. It’s me, my fighter and the problem in front of us. It’s as if we’re simply having a discussion about how to solve it.

>   Coaching fighters on small local shows for so many years certainly allowed me to get the hang of that routine by the time we were ready for the UFC. When the cage door closes, it’s the same proposition every time: my fighter against an opposing fighter. Everything else – venue, attendance, atmosphere, consequences of the result – is irrelevant. That’s something we often speak about at SBG Ireland. Whether that cage is in the gym on a quiet weekday or a massive arena in Boston or Las Vegas on a Saturday night, what difference does it make? It can have an emotional or mental impact, but only as much as you allow it to. As long as you want it to be, the fight takes place in the same environment you’ve been training in for the previous six to eight weeks. I understand entirely why many people might read that and think it’s not that straightforward, and for 99 per cent of people it’s probably not. But the fighters who learn how to approach a fight in the same manner as a Tuesday-afternoon sparring session are the ones who are the most successful.

  My first real experience of such a frenzied crowd was for Conor McGregor’s second UFC fight. Between his final Cage Warriors bout and his UFC debut, Conor’s following in Ireland had increased drastically. But that was nothing compared to how quickly things took off after the win against Marcus Brimage. He was described as an overnight sensation, which wasn’t quite correct because the recognition was a result of years and years of hard work. But from then on it was difficult for him to walk down the street in Dublin without being mobbed for photos and autographs. Every TV show, radio station, newspaper and website wanted an interview. Conor was regularly appearing on the back pages of the papers, and even on the Late Late Show. These were all unprecedented landmarks for an MMA fighter in Ireland. Conor was breaking new ground for the sport in his own country. Having always been on the periphery, MMA was beginning to join soccer, rugby and Gaelic games at the forefront of the Irish sporting landscape.

  It was high time to delegate Conor’s commercial and media commitments to somebody else, because that aspect of his career now required far more time, experience and business nous than Halli Nelson and I had between us. It was starting to take me a couple of hours each morning to sift through the interview requests in my inbox to find important e-mails relating to the day-to-day running of the gym. Conor subsequently handed his management responsibilities over to Audie Attar and the team at Paradigm. They took care of everything away from the gym, allowing Conor to maximize his profitability while he and I concentrated on the day job – winning fights.

  After the defeat of Brimage, the UFC were keen to bring Conor across the Atlantic, and where better to kick things off than in the Irish capital of the USA? His next assignment would be against Andy Ogle in Boston on 17 August 2013. Given how impressively Conor performed in his debut, there were a lot of calls for him to be given a highly ranked opponent next. But Ogle was also quite new to the UFC, having amassed a 1–1 record in the octagon. He was, realistically, a bottom-tier featherweight. Perhaps that suited the UFC at the time. It was still early days for Conor, so they were probably keen to ensure that they didn’t unnecessarily accelerate his progress. On top of that, a demolition of an Englishman would surely go down well with the large Irish crowd that was inevitably going to be at the event in Boston.

  Six weeks before the fight, Ogle pulled out and in came Max Holloway. The change didn’t mean anything for us. Holloway wasn’t a big name either; as far as we were concerned, he was just another guy to take out en route to the title. But in hindsight the switch was a good thing. Holloway would go on to win eight fights in a row after facing Conor, and in my opinion he became the second-best featherweight in the UFC, so it was a bigger fight for Conor than it appeared to be at the time.

  For his part, Conor was already of the opinion that it was a bit of a waste of time facing anyone other than the champion. He already believed he was at that level, so these fights in the meantime were merely a formality.

  Regardless of the opponent, the fight was going to be a big occasion because it was to be Conor’s first time competing in the USA. As is generally the case in the entertainment industry – which the UFC is very much a part of – cracking the American market is an essential part of the journey to success.

  Conor required a work visa to compete in the USA, but it was late in the day – about four weeks out from the fight – before the process to apply for one actually began, and obtaining a US work visa can be difficult enough at the best of times. For reasons I didn’t understand, the UFC advised us that the quickest way to resolve it was to fly to Canada, spend a couple of days in Ottawa while doing some paperwork, then fly from there to Las Vegas to complete more paperwork. Apparently entering the USA via Canada would speed up the process. With the fight less than a month away, interrupting our training camp to fly all the way to North America – before heading home to Ireland and then back across to Boston again a couple of weeks later – wasn’t ideal, but it had to be done.

  Not long after we landed in Ottawa, Conor’s tooth started acting up again. It appeared that the cabin pressure on aeroplanes was aggravating the issue. He was in a lot of discomfort. Just as we had done in Stockholm, Conor and I took off through Ottawa in search of a dentist. I’ll never forget the guy we ended up paying a visit to. He reminded me of Dr Nick from The Simpsons and he ran this very tacky place called ‘No More Pain’ – which we later christened ‘More Pain’, because the guy wasn’t able to do much for Conor’s tooth. In fact, he was more interested in getting photos with Conor and calling his friends to let them know that a UFC star was in his surgery. That really took us by surprise, because we had been under the impression that Conor’s newfound fame was mostly confined to Ireland. Yet here we were in Canada and some dentist was acting as if Al Pacino had just walked in: ‘Oh my God! You’re the actual Conor McGregor!’

  As for the tooth, I made sure that Conor underwent surgery to have it removed after the Holloway fight. We’d had enough of roaming the streets of random cities to find dentists at that stage.

  From Ottawa we moved on to Las Vegas to complete some more paperwork. It was the first of many trips to Vegas for Conor and it gave him a chance to spend time building up his relationship with UFC bosses like Dana White and Lorenzo Fertitta. Conor and I stayed at the Palace Station Casino. It’s a very basic hotel and a far cry from the suites at the Red Rock which Conor would eventually become accustomed to. Then we headed back to Dublin to complete the training camp, before flying back out to Boston a couple of weeks later.

  It was great to get to Boston. As well as being a home away from home for the Irish, it also allowed us to catch up with Tom Egan. Tom had moved over there a few years earlier, so we hadn’t been in touch for a while. Since his loss at UFC 93, he had continued to fight at a good level, though he hadn’t been able to put together a streak of wins that would capture the UFC’s attention again. He was beginning to develop into a promising coach, too. Seeing him again was fantastic. He was also able to help us out with somewhere to train during the final few days before the fight. We worked out at Peter Welch’s boxing gym, which was also where we had Conor’s media day. That was really interesting because it was the first time the US media had had direct access to Conor. He delivered the goods and they lapped it up. The main event in Boston was Chael Sonnen versus Maurício Rua, but the vast majority of the media coverage was being reserved for Conor. His clash with Max Holloway was still only on the preliminary card, but there was no mistaking which fight the fans were most looking forward to.

  On the Wednesday before the event, Conor and I were walking down the street in Boston when I sensed a change in his demeanour. He stopped talking mid-sentence and his back went up like a dog anticipating a fight. That’s when I noticed a group of four guys walking towards us. I didn’t recognize any of them, but they were all staring intently at Conor. I was starting to feel on edge, thinking to myself: Okay, what on earth is going to happen here?

  When we reached them, they gave us a wide berth and passed on either side. Both
groups then just continued on their way.

  ‘Little rat!’ said Conor, as he looked back in their direction.

  ‘What the hell was that all about?’ I asked.

  ‘That’s that fucker. He was talking shit.’

  The name Conor mentioned meant nothing to me, but he explained to me that he was a UFC featherweight who was also fighting on the Boston card, and apparently he had spoken negatively about Conor in an interview or on social media.

  ‘He disrespected me,’ Conor added. ‘I don’t like that. I don’t like that at all.’

  Even though he was only one fight into his UFC career, many fighters had already been calling Conor out in the media. Perhaps they were envious of the publicity he was receiving. Guys who had been in the UFC for years were now seemingly being ignored, while Conor, this cocky newcomer, was suddenly the centre of attention. Some of them expressed their frustration by trash-talking Conor. When they did, Conor marked it down. Every single time. If you’re a UFC fighter who has ever had something negative to say about Conor, rest assured that he has taken note.

  That doesn’t just apply to fighters. I remember Conor once recorded a ‘Good luck on your wedding day’ sort of video message for a friend of a friend of a friend of Owen Roddy. Later that day, I was chatting to Owen in my office when Conor burst through the door.

  ‘Don’t send that video!’ he shouted at Owen. ‘I just realized why I recognize that guy’s name. He’s a snake.’ Seemingly the guy who was getting married had given Cathal Pendred a hard time on Twitter a couple of years earlier.

  I’ve always liked that about Conor. He gets the lion’s share of the praise, attention and recognition, but if somebody speaks negatively about anyone at SBG, Conor takes it on board. He looks out for his teammates with an elephant’s memory. Even if I mention to him who Paddy Holohan is fighting next, Conor will say something like: ‘I’ve watched his last few fights, here’s what we need to watch out for …’