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

by John Kavanagh

  Weigh-ins usually begin at 4 p.m. With Conor on weigh-in day, I’m in his hotel room by 9 a.m. and I don’t leave until 2 p.m. It’s a long, difficult five hours of hot bath after hot bath after hot bath. It’s well publicized by now that Conor cuts a significant amount of weight to make the featherweight limit of 145lb. He doesn’t look healthy when he steps on the scales. We’ve taken some pictures while the weight-cutting process is ongoing and it’s not pretty. I’m sure he’ll treat you to those when he writes his own story. It’s difficult to watch, particularly for Dee, his girlfriend. Fighters subject themselves to severe dehydration and overheating in order to make the weight and it’s everyone’s least favourite part of the game. At his lowest ebb while doing it, it evokes a ‘never again’ type of feeling for Conor. But when he arrives on stage to step on the scales, with the Irish tricolour draped over his shoulders and thousands of fans going berserk, the adrenaline kicks in and it ignites a fire in his belly that makes the suffering seem worthwhile.

  That evening, after Conor has had several hours to replenish his system, I’ll be in my room and he’ll send through some pictures of himself looking human again. I still worry that he might get stomach cramps during the night, but then a text message will come through the following morning: ‘Feeling great. Slept like a baby.’

  That’s always a massive relief. At that stage – bar a few minor little things that are to be said and done – my job is over. There’s not much more I can do. He’s made the weight and it’s time to fight, and that’s a satisfying feeling because that’s what we’re here for. We’re involved in mixed martial arts to become the best fighter, not the best weight-cutter. The weight-cut is just a necessary evil that has to be dealt with before the fun can begin.

  Extreme weight-cutting has become a hot topic in the world of MMA recently, particularly following the deaths of fighters in the run-up to fights in Brazil and the Philippines. It almost got to a stage where fighters were competing with each other to see who could cut the most weight, but I’m pleased to say that culture seems to be changing. The UFC’s ban on intravenous rehydration has helped, while other promotions are beginning to monitor their fighters’ weight over an extended period instead of for just one moment on the day before the fight. I welcome any move that changes the practice for the better. I’m in favour of anything that discourages fighters from putting themselves in danger by pushing their bodies beyond the limit with dehydration.

  In an ideal world, cutting to that extent wouldn’t be required, and I’m always conscious of ensuring that it doesn’t become such a chore that it ends up taking the enjoyment out of the entire sport for a particular fighter. They’re also less likely to make improvements in their last few weeks of training if the weight-cut is starting to interfere with the amount of work they’re capable of putting in.

  Eventually I think Conor will leave the 145lb division behind, but with someone as experienced as him, it’s ultimately his decision. Nowadays with my newer fighters, I use my own experience to decide which weight class is best for them. But for the likes of Conor, it’s a case of discussing what’s on offer for each fight and weighing up whether it’s worth another cut to 145lb. Despite winning his last pre-UFC fight as a 155lb fighter, Conor was signed by the organization as a featherweight because the contract offer had come via Sean Shelby, who matches all UFC fights from 145lb and below. From lightweight upwards, Joe Silva is the orchestrator. Had Joe made the initial offer, things would probably have been different. That was just the luck of the draw.

  Weigh-in day for Conor’s fight against Dennis Siver was 17 January, a date that had a real resonance for me – and not just because it’s my dad’s birthday. It was on 17 January 2009 that Tom Egan lost to John Hathaway at UFC Dublin. As a team, that was our first taste of the big time. That introduction to the highest level of the sport had shown us exactly what was required.

  When Conor weighed in, he made 145lb for the first time in the UFC. That was a statement. He’d come in at 146lb for all his previous fights, because an additional one-pound buffer is allowed for non-title bouts. The belt wasn’t on the line just yet, but Conor wanted to let the world know that he was ready for it.

  To build up the hype, the UFC brought José Aldo to Boston to sit cageside for the fight. Their plan was to bring him into the octagon afterwards if Conor was victorious. However, Aldo refused, saying that he only enters the octagon when he’s fighting – which was odd, because I remember seeing him in there playing football with Kenny Florian when they were promoting their bout in 2011.

  On fight night, Paddy Holohan – the ‘Berserker’ yet again – got us off to a positive start in front of an attendance of just under 14,000 at the TD Garden. Paddy bounced back from the first defeat of his career three months earlier by turning in an utterly dominant performance against Shane Howell to win via unanimous decision.

  Cathal Pendred was next out and he also went the distance before securing his third consecutive win in the UFC at the expense of Sean Spencer. There was plenty of controversy in the aftermath, with many observers of the opinion that Cathal was fortunate to be given the decision. Two of the three judges actually gave Cathal all three rounds. While I felt that he probably lost the first round, I thought he definitely did enough in the second and third to swing it.

  I thought a lot of the debate surrounding the result stemmed from Joe Rogan’s commentary on the fight. When Joe starts to see one guy getting the upper hand, his mind seems to be made up and he can’t see it any other way. Sean started well, so that seemed to settle it for Joe, but there’s more to a fight than the first round.

  Finally, then, it was time for Conor to seal the fight he had building towards ever since that very first call came from the UFC: a title bout against José Aldo. I’d describe the fight with Dennis Siver as straightforward, although Conor’s crystal ball was a little faulty on this one. He predicted another first-round knockout, but it was just under two minutes into the second round before the contest was brought to a halt. It followed a similar pattern to his previous outings, with Conor looking calm and relaxed as he overwhelmed his opponent with pressure and vastly superior striking and movement. Siver was tough, but it was simply a matter of time before he caved. Conor dropped him with a straight left to the body, then moved into full mount with a beautiful pass before forcing the stoppage due to strikes after one minute fifty-four of the second round. Conor was disappointed not to have finished it inside the first five minutes, but afterwards he said he felt like he was operating at a maximum of 40 per cent of his ability.

  At the end of the fight, I went to shake hands with Siver’s coach. But when he turned and saw me, he just started shouting angrily at me in German. Conor had antagonized Siver’s camp beforehand with some of the things he had said and obviously they weren’t going to let go of that. Siver himself was absolutely fine, but the coach didn’t seem to take defeat well. I’ve been on the losing side many, many times. Irrespective of the outcome, or of what’s been said in the build-up, I believe it’s important to recognize that once the fight is over, respect should come to the fore and differences should be left in the past. I just don’t understand any other way of doing things. It’s a game, albeit a very intense one. As long as you’ve worked as hard as you can, you should be at peace with the result, whether it goes in your favour or not. Luck also plays a bigger part than we’d all care to admit, so don’t be too hard on yourself when you lose and don’t go overboard with patting yourself on the back when you win. That’s been my approach from the start and it will continue to be until the end.

  Conor, meanwhile, had other things on his mind once the fight ended. He laid eyes on José Aldo in his seat cageside, then scaled the cage and made a beeline for his next opponent. With the champion smiling back at him, Conor roared into his face: ‘Eire! Eire!’

  Aldo looked like he was enjoying it. In an interview afterwards, he said he was excited about the fight because it was going to make him a lot of money and it wo
uld be an easy defence of his title. You’re right about one part of that, I thought.

  The cageside confrontation between Conor and José made for great television and it kindled the rivalry that was to develop between them. No date for the fight had even been agreed yet, but you immediately got the sense that this was going to be very, very big. It was an exciting way to round off another monumental night for SBG. Three UFC wins, one of which secured a shot at a world title. I couldn’t imagine a better way to celebrate my thirty-eighth birthday.

  15

  While Conor McGregor’s win against Dennis Siver attracted most of the publicity from that night in Boston, it was also very satisfying to see Paddy Holohan return to winning ways. Having lost for the first time in his career in his previous bout, Paddy was eager to get back in there again as quickly as possible in order to right the wrongs from his defeat to Chris Kelades in October 2014.

  Paddy didn’t perform as well as he’s capable of against Kelades, but we still extracted positives from it. Perhaps the main one for me was that Paddy, having been unbeaten in his first eleven professional contests, now knew what it was like to lose. Nothing illustrates the value of winning quite like a loss. That’s not to say that Paddy didn’t fully appreciate the taste of victory until that point, but it certainly left him more motivated and focused than he had ever been before. That manifested itself in a superb performance against Shane Howell in Boston.

  It was an exciting time in Paddy’s life. He was finally competing – and winning – in the UFC, which had always been his aim, but there was also something else on the horizon that was perhaps even more important to him.

  Within a year of opening the new gym on the Naas Road, membership had grown to the point where it was already time to think about expansion. We would end 2015 with 700 members. I was interested in the idea of opening a second premises in Dublin, and we agreed that Paddy would spearhead the project. At the time of writing it’s still a work in progress, but we hope SBG Tallaght will be up and running before the end of 2016.

  Paddy is a proud native of Tallaght, so to be in a position to open a gym there meant the world to him. He still has many years of fighting at the highest level left in him, but it’s been clear to me for a long time that Paddy will also go on to become a very good coach – a process he has already begun with us at SBG. I believe people are either born to teach or not. Paddy has got what it takes.

  Owen Roddy has got it too. Paddy is still an active fighter, so he’s balancing both commitments for now, whereas Owen has already retired from fighting, so coaching is his sole focus. As Conor McGregor’s striking coach, Owen is deservedly beginning to receive a lot of recognition. In my opinion, he’s way ahead of the majority of his peers in terms of what he’s doing. Both Owen and Paddy will be successful coaches for a long time to come.

  In order to be a successful coach, you require first and foremost the ability to communicate effectively with a wide variety of personalities. More often than not, the biggest mistakes I see coaches making can be traced back to communication. Some coaches may have been great fighters and they might find it difficult to comprehend that their students are unable to do things the way they could. The student may simply have a different style, but a coach might insist on forcing their way on to everybody.

  You need to be able to adapt. I believe I’m quite flexible: I can work with different personalities and styles. When it comes to high-level athletes, you often encounter big egos, so you need to find a way to communicate your ideas in a manner that suits them.

  Patience is also vital. If you’re a strength and conditioning coach, for example, you might have an image in your head of coaching a bunch of Olympic athletes. However, the reality is that most of your clients will probably be Joe Soaps who are just trying to stay fit and healthy. The point is that you must be patient when you’re teaching people with different levels of skill and competence. Not everybody is going to turn out to be a UFC-level fighter.

  If you’re only pretending to enjoy coaching, people will see through that very quickly. You either love and embrace it or you don’t. There’s no middle ground. If you open a gym solely to make money, it’ll be destined to fail. You need to be able to appreciate the thrill of what I call the ‘wow moment’ – when you explain to somebody how a certain technique works and their eyes light up after they manage to put it into practice. Moments like that probably give me more satisfaction than a big UFC win for one of my fighters.

  Some athletes insist on training with a coach who also had a successful career as a fighter. Others just want to know that the coach has the ability to demonstrate to them what they need to do to keep improving. Take Greg Jackson in New Mexico, for example. He’s regarded as one of the best coaches in the game – and he was never a fighter himself.

  Ultimate success or failure depends on the athlete in question, of course, irrespective of the coach’s record in the octagon, and I believe it’s probably a sign of immaturity and lack of self-confidence when someone wants to be trained only by a coach who was a great fighter too.

  As a coach, you also have to be prepared to put up with a lot of shit. You’re constantly dealing with narky fighters who are trying to make weight while arguing with their girlfriends, teammates and seemingly everyone in their lives. In my case, you’re also often semi-managing their careers. From the outside, people might see me as a guy holding pads or shouting at someone to do five more reps, but it’s certainly much more complicated than that.

  Taking the helicopter view is essential. You need to rise above everything and see what your fighters don’t, that a certain sparring partner or perhaps a nutritionist needs to be brought in, for example. There are many layers involved and they’re being added to all the time. I’m still learning myself. No matter how long I remain a coach, that journey of education will never end.

  With people like Paddy Holohan and Owen Roddy, I can only hope that I have inspired them in the same way that coaches like Kieran McGeeney, Eoin Lacey and John Connor have influenced me. All three of those guys have taught me so much from their own experiences about striving for the highest standards.

  Eoin and John run the Irish Strength Institute in Dublin, and they’ve been working with my fighters on strength and conditioning since 2009. Kieran first came to SBG in 2009, when he was the manager of the Kildare football team. He brought the Kildare players in – out of curiosity as much as anything else – to do some Brazilian jiu-jitsu as part of their pre-season training. Seven years later, Kieran isn’t just a member at SBG, but he’s also one of our BJJ coaches. He competed at the highest level of his own sport for years and I’ve learned so much from him about having a competitive mindset. Kieran is obsessive regarding the pursuit of success and perfection. He’s been a massive influence for me.

  I’ve often been told that I have a methodical approach to coaching, in that everything is broken down concisely into parts. Cathal Pendred likened me to his school rugby coach, who was also a maths teacher. It may not be a complete coincidence that, if I had been forced to use my engineering degree to earn a living, I probably would have looked into teaching maths. People sometimes assume that my coaching methods stem from my academic background in engineering, but I think it’s a reflection more of my personality than of my education. Even though it was my mother who pushed me in the direction of the engineering course in DIT, I had the right kind of personality to be enthusiastic about it.

  In college, I always loved working in the labs because there was a rational and logical pattern to everything we did – A led to B, B led to C and so on. Following a set of steps in order to reach a definitive solution, basically. That’s why maths and science always appealed to me in school more than other subjects. It wasn’t like English, where you might be asked for your opinion on Macbeth. I hated that. I just didn’t see the point in me, some random teenager in a school in Dublin, trying to come up with something more interesting to say about Macbeth than the best English teachers and scholar
s already had. We used to get sample answers in our textbooks which were only to be used as a guide, but I just learned them off by heart and used them word-for-word. Trying to come up with some forced opinion just seemed like bullshit to me.

  With maths, however, there was just one right answer and it was up to you to work it out. There was no doubt or uncertainty. If you couldn’t find the one correct answer, you were just wrong. Follow the steps that have been explained to you and you’ll find that right answer. I think you can apply that to sequences in grappling and striking too. It’s not magic. For the vast majority of the time, there are only a limited number of positions you can find yourself in so you can work on deducing the right responses to those. That’s the role of a coach; to ensure that the athlete has the right answers to the most common positions. Then it’s up to the athlete to find the area in which they particularly want to express themselves. I want my guys to be rock-solid in the over-under clinch hold, the double-leg and single-leg takedown and on how to throw a jab. After they have that foundation, their personalities will lead them to specific styles of fighting.

  After Conor McGregor’s defeat of Dennis Siver, I was inundated for days with social media messages from fans who were planning to attend the title bout against José Aldo. There had been some idle talk about the fight taking place at Croke Park in Dublin, but I felt then – as I still do now – that the prospect of a UFC event there was unlikely. All the indications were pointing to Las Vegas and speculation in the media suggested that UFC 187, on 23 May, would be the date. However, what we were hearing behind the scenes was that the fight was being lined up for UFC 189 instead. Fans were so keen to be there to see Conor become the first Irishman to challenge for a UFC title that they went ahead and booked their flights and hotels for Vegas for the May date. They were even tweeting screenshots of their bookings to me.