The build-up to Conor’s fight with Aldo was generating an unprecedented amount of coverage for an MMA bout, and almost every social media post from those of us in the house seemed to be turned into an article by the media. The output of one Irish website in particular seemed to consist entirely of events inside the Mac Mansion. You’ll never believe what Conor McGregor ate for breakfast today, click here to find out … that sort of thing.
I’m sure the pictures and videos we were sharing online made it seem like we were having the time of our lives, but they only captured the brief highlights of each day. For the most part, it was mundane and it was boring. Apart from the few hours that were spent at the gym each day, we were stuck in the house for almost the entire ten weeks. On a few occasions we tried to arrange to do something together away from the house, but it never happened. For example, on the way to or from the gym, someone might spot a billboard advertising one of the shows in Vegas: ‘Let’s go and see that on Saturday night.’ It was usually Artem who ended up responding: ‘Yep, let’s add it to the growing list of shit that we’re never going to do.’
I guess there were just so many people there that it never really suited all of us to get up and do something at the same time. While one group might be in the mood to go out, another preferred to rest and recover from training, and vice versa. Getting Conor out of bed for anything other than training is no easy task either, so that also didn’t help matters.
This was my first experience of coordinating a training camp for a world title fight. I suppose I made the natural assumption that longer is better. But, as I came to realize in the latter stages, ten weeks was a little too long. It became difficult to sustain the intensity in training and the guys were getting a bit agitated towards the end. It was another lesson learned. No matter how long you’re involved in this, or any other, sport, you’ll never master it entirely. Anyone who claims otherwise is just not being honest.
Because the house was in a gated community, it was safe enough for us to keep the doors unlocked. But we were located at the back of the estate, and kids would often show up on the other side of the perimeter walls and shout Conor’s name, hoping to catch a glimpse of him.
On a random Tuesday afternoon, we were chilling out at the house when the front door suddenly opened and a loud, distinctive, familiar voiced filled the hallway and living room.
‘Ah … so this is what a world champion training camp looks like. Why is nobody lifting weights?’ the visitor laughed.
Holy shit! It was Arnold Schwarzenegger. He had met Conor before, through his partner Heather Milligan, the physical therapist who had played such an important role in Conor’s recovery from the ACL injury. Arnie was in Vegas and decided he wanted to stop by to show his support. He’s a very cool guy and it was incredible to be paid a visit by someone of his stature.
Over the course of this journey, meeting people like Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Jean-Claude Van Damme and Mike Tyson and discovering that they’re huge admirers of Conor has been quite surreal. I am a child of the eighties, and these guys were all heroes of mine. Now they’re fans of a fighter I train. It’s crazy.
Around the time he first met Tyson, Conor had been thinking about buying a Lamborghini. Mike gave him some financial advice: ‘If it depreciates, rent it. If it appreciates, buy it. That’s all I’ve gotta say.’
Cristiano Ronaldo also got in touch with Conor after he wore a pair of the football star’s CR7 brand underwear at the weigh-ins for the fight against Diego Brandão. When I look at Conor, even now, I still see the same guy who first walked into my gym all those years ago. But stuff like that does serve as a reminder that he’s now a global superstar.
Midway through the training camp, I had to leave for a few weeks for Mexico City, where Cathal Pendred claimed his fourth straight UFC win, against Augusto Montaño. When I left, I was concerned that the routine we had established at the house in Vegas would collapse in my absence. The drill was that at 8 p.m. every evening, we all left together to go and train at the TUF gym, where The Ultimate Fighter is filmed. There were two reasons for training at night: because UFC fights take place at night, and because of Conor’s body clock. We put the work in at TUF for a number of hours before heading back to the house, usually around 1 a.m. But while I was in Mexico, everyone just started doing their own thing: 8 p.m. quickly became 8.30 p.m., then 9 p.m., 9.30 p.m. and so on. From what I was told, that had a detrimental impact on the mood in the house. That little bit of structure had kept us on track and given everyone a sense of purpose.
Conor wasn’t too bothered. He’s the type of person who can get up at any time of the day or night and decide that he wants to train. From my experience, most fighters favour routine. They like to know the what, where and when of their training schedule. Conor is an exception. There’s no pattern whatsoever to his desire to train, but the problem is that not everybody can function according to his body clock. On some evenings while I was away, it would get to a stage where it was so late and Conor still hadn’t emerged from his bedroom that the guys would assume that he wasn’t going to train that night. As they settled in for the evening to watch a movie, prepare for bed or whatever else, a message would then come down from upstairs: ‘We’re leaving in ten minutes.’ That wasn’t ideal, and I think everyone was relived when, with just under four weeks to go until Conor’s fight against Aldo, I returned to Vegas and re-established the status quo.
When I got back, I also discovered that the guys hadn’t been sticking to the strict dietary rules we had put in place. We used a minivan to transport us to and from the gym, and there was an outlet of In-N-Out Burger on the route. I hopped into the van one day and found a burger wrapper on the floor underneath one of the seats. I couldn’t believe it. I asked for an explanation and Tom Egan admitted that they had slipped up, but it was ‘a one-off’. But James Gallagher was a little more honest: ‘Ah, we’ve been going all the time. Sorry, coach.’ I pulled Conor up on it later.
‘What’s going on with the burgers?’ I asked.
‘We only went once, I swear,’ he claimed.
‘James said you’ve been going there most nights.’
‘All right, fuck it, we have, but that’s the end of it now. Honestly. No more.’
While I was in Mexico with Cathal, news emerged from Brazil that there had been some confusion over a drug test that had been administered to José Aldo. In early June, a tester from the Drug Free Sport lab, Ben Mosier, had seemingly been prevented from collecting a urine sample from Aldo at his gym in Rio de Janeiro. The tester, under instruction from the Nevada State Athletic Commission – who would be overseeing the fight in Las Vegas on 11 July – was challenged by a police officer who was a member of Aldo’s gym. The police officer told the tester that he didn’t possess a valid visa to carry out his duties in Brazil. Aldo’s camp got the Brazilian MMA Commission involved, and the sample was collected by them the following day instead. According to the NSAC’s report, the police officer had confiscated Mosier’s passport, and the Brazilian tester asked Aldo for a picture and an autograph after collecting the sample. It all sounded like a very bizarre situation, but there wasn’t much we could do about it. Conor had been tested a couple of weeks earlier while he was attending UFC 187 at the MGM Grand. A tester pulled him aside and Conor gave both blood and urine samples. It was as straightforward as that. They’re called random tests for a reason. Being given twenty-four hours’ notice is not random. When one of my fighters is subjected to a drug test, they do so without asking for paperwork or anything like that. We don’t see the need to complicate what should be a simple process.
As a team, we take a hardline stance against performance-enhancing drugs. I believe there is a culture of PED use in certain gyms and certain parts of the world. There seems to be a pattern of guys from the same teams or countries being caught in recent years. It must be something that becomes a topic for discussion in the changing room. I know for certain that if somebody broached the subject
with anyone in SBG, they’d be absolutely shredded. Of course, the coach has an important role to play in establishing that type of environment. It’s something I’m very serious about. My first wave of fighters and I have been so vocal in our opposition to the use of PEDs that the younger guys coming up know it’s not even to be considered. But if you’re in a gym where there’s a different attitude to it, it’s probably only a matter of time before you get sucked in.
A week before the aforementioned incident with Aldo’s drug test, the UFC announced strict new rules to combat PEDs in the organization by bringing the United States Anti-Doping Agency on board to police it. I believe that a lot of fighters who were previously using banned substances have since been forced to stop taking them as a result. Fighters don’t take drugs because they want bigger biceps. It’s all geared towards allowing them to work harder in training. A typical rhythm for a clean fighter might be to train hard for two days, then go easy on the third day. But with the benefit of PEDs, fighters were training hard three times a day, every day.
It has never happened so far, but if one of my fighters were to come to me, curious about sampling PEDs, I’d be absolutely devastated. It would almost be like being dumped by a girlfriend. I’d feel like I had failed as a coach in setting the kind of environment where it’s never even thought about. If you’re not good enough to train without drugs then you shouldn’t be training at all. At SBG, you either fight clean or you go elsewhere. Thankfully we’ve never had to implement it but we have a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to drugs. And that goes for every single person in the gym.
With just over two weeks to go until the fight, Conor’s knee was approaching 100 per cent again and we were glad to be coming to the end of a long training camp. The final two weeks are just about keeping the body fresh and loose, so we weren’t going to use them for any last-minute cramming of the wrestling drills that he had missed out on over the previous couple of months. That wasn’t a concern for me. He was looking so good that I was fully confident of an emphatic win against José Aldo.
One morning, Dana White and Lorenzo Fertitta arrived at the house. They’re both based in Vegas – maybe they were just stopping by to see how everything was going? That’s what we hoped. But the look on their faces suggested that there was bad news in the post.
‘It looks like José is out,’ said Dana. ‘His rib. It seems there’s a fracture.’
Fuck! Here we go again. We were well used to having Conor’s opponents withdraw by now, and we were always relaxed about a change of opponent, but this was different. Other guys can be easily replaced, but not the champion. We wanted that title and the only way to get it was by beating Aldo.
Dana and Lorenzo explained that it would be a few days before there was clarification. Apparently Aldo was undergoing medical examinations to discover the extent of the injury so he hadn’t yet officially pulled out of the fight. But it wasn’t looking good. We began to discuss alternative options.
Part of me wondered if this was a good opportunity for Conor to pull out too, given that he had also been carrying an injury. But that idea was never going to get off the ground. Thousands of fans had already paid a lot of money to travel over for the fight. It was a massive pay-per-view event for the UFC too. Conor wasn’t going to let that fall apart. Whether it was Aldo standing across the octagon from him or somebody else, Conor was going to be fighting at UFC 189.
As Dana and Lorenzo began to explore replacement opponents, I knew who I wanted to avoid. Conor had virtually no wrestling drills in the bank during this training camp, so the worst-case scenario here was a fight with Chad Mendes. An NCAA Division 1 All-American wrestler, Mendes was as good as they came in that department. Without any injury problems, I’d have no issue with Conor facing Mendes. But this was one time when he could be a bit of a banana skin. Mendes was ranked as the top contender in the division, so his name was obviously in the mix. Another possibility was Frankie Edgar. Nate Diaz’s name was also mentioned, but Diaz seemed unlikely because he was a lightweight and the UFC were keen to keep this as a featherweight bout. Their plan was to put an interim title on the line in the event of a confirmed withdrawal from Aldo. The final say on a new opponent ultimately rested on their shoulders, but Conor let them know that he was ready for anyone they chose. It didn’t matter to him.
The confusion surrounding Aldo’s involvement in the fight dragged on for a week until I eventually received a call, eleven days out from UFC 189, from Dana. It had been confirmed. Aldo was definitely out. His replacement? Chad Mendes, of course.
It was around midday when the call came through, which is approximately dawn in Conor McGregor’s time zone. I went upstairs and knocked on Conor’s bedroom door until I was answered by a grunt from inside. I opened the door.
‘Aldo is out,’ I said. ‘It’s Mendes.’
Conor opened one eye, muttered, ‘They’re all the same,’ then went back to sleep.
He wasn’t perturbed by the fact that the goalposts had been moved. I wasn’t so relaxed. Against novice strikers, Mendes fancied himself as a boxer. But against Conor his game plan was going to be to look for the takedown and win the fight on the ground. A wrestler of his calibre was very capable of doing that. Conor’s knee was much better than it had been, but his mobility was still very restricted. His sprawl and takedown defence are usually excellent, but that wasn’t the case now. There wasn’t much we could do in eleven days to prepare for the guy with the best takedowns in the division.
As I’ve noted, we don’t train specifically for opponents, but that’s not to say we don’t take a look at them. With this change of opponent, we had gone from facing a kick-boxer to a wrestler. Aldo and Mendes occupied positions at either end of the MMA spectrum. I believed Mendes was a serious threat but, given time to process the situation, I was glad we were going ahead with the fight. When Jon Jones refused to fight Chael Sonnen as a last-minute replacement for Dan Henderson at UFC 151 in 2012, the entire event fell through. We couldn’t allow that to happen again on our watch.
We had anticipated a massive following in Las Vegas for UFC 189 fight week, but absolutely nobody expected the numbers that actually turned up. There must have been at least 10,000 Irish people in Vegas for the fight. For such a small country, we certainly know how to make our presence felt. It doesn’t matter how long we’re in this game, I don’t think that support will ever not be overwhelming. There have been times when Conor has been finding the weight-cut tough, wondering whether it’s all worth it, but then you show him a video of fans around Vegas chanting his name and it reminds him of how big this really is.
‘Look at these guys, champ,’ we’ll say. ‘They’ve spent their hard-earned money to come all this way to support you. Let’s put on a show for them.’
It’s little things like that which give him the extra push when times are tough.
Over the past couple of years, I’ve heard so many stories from fans who say they feel like they’ve been given a new lease of life by the success of Conor and SBG as a whole. They may have been down in the dumps, struggling in life, but seeing what we have achieved on a global stage has made them proud to be Irish. It has inspired them to embrace life and make the most of every day.
The sacrifices they make to attend the fights are unbelievable. They’re spending every penny they have just to be there. There have been plenty of times after fights in the US when Irish fans have told me that they have to go straight back into work once they get off the plane after the overnight flight home. It’s remarkable dedication. We could never truly express just how grateful we are for the support.
A few days before the fight against Mendes, I was walking down the strip in Las Vegas when somebody stopped me to ask for a picture. While it was being taken, a big group of Korean tourists came over for pictures too. I must have taken at least twenty with each and every one of them. When they all had a photo, one of the tourists turned to me and asked: ‘So, who are you?’ I guess we haven’t quite cracked the
Korean market just yet.
People sometimes ask if having so many fans on our side adds to the pressure. The reality is that when you’re preparing for fights, particularly at this level, you’re just too busy to even let that enter your thoughts. It doesn’t happen and we can never allow it to. If the coach is nervous then the fighter will be too. A novice might pull you aside before a bout to go through the game plan again for reassurance because they’re a bit tense. They just want to hear you say: ‘You’re going to be okay. We’re ready for this.’ But I’ve never had that with Conor. By nature, we’re both very relaxed.
That the prize was an interim belt instead of the undisputed title may have detracted slightly from claims that UFC 189’s main event would be the biggest UFC fight ever, but the final few days before the show certainly had the feeling of something huge and unprecedented. For the first time ever, the UFC decided to open up the entire MGM Grand Garden Arena for the weigh-ins. Over ten thousand people were there to watch Conor step on the scales. Two and a half years earlier we could barely draw a thousand to watch him fight.
As expected, the staredown between Conor and Mendes was heated. It had been another taxing weight-cut for Conor, so he was a little bit narky. Mendes, on the other hand, seemed to be on a high. He had stepped in at short notice in an attempt to capitalize on a huge opportunity, for which he’d be paid more money than he had ever earned before. He had nothing to lose and his demeanour reflected that.
Before the weigh-ins, much was made in the media about an altercation Conor had in the hallway of the arena with Mendes’s teammate Urijah Faber. The truth was that there was very little to it. They engaged in a bit of playful grappling, and it irritated Conor because he was already cranky from the weight-cut. But there were no hard feelings. It was just a bit of handbags. If you don’t like Urijah Faber, there’s probably something wrong with you. I think he’s one of the nicest guys you’ll ever meet and I know Conor feels the same.
Win or Learn: MMA, Conor McGregor and Me: A Trainer's Journey Page 19