One more Conor controversy: Welcome to UFC 257 fight week

It wouldn’t be a Conor McGregor fight week with out controversy.

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McGregor (22-4 MMA, 10-2 UFC) and Dustin Poirier will sq. off in the lightweight primary event of UFC 257 on Saturday in Abu Dhabi, and the stakes in both competitors’ occupations are big.

Can the former UFC lightweight and featherweight winner make a statement that he’s bought his head on straight and has a person a lot more title operate still left in him? Can Poirier, who was knocked out in less than two minutes by McGregor in their 2014 battle, cap his own rise by taking away an old blemish from his report? How will UFC president Dana White’s teenage crush-like thirst to lure retired lightweight champ Khabib Nurmagomedov back again to presumably battle the winner loom over the 7 days.

At any time given that the UFC arrived in Abu Dhabi very last 7 days, the buzz has steadily created. For better or even worse, McGregor’s occasions are however the biggest in combined martial arts, the types that get the relaxation of the mainstream athletics world to fork out focus in a way he on your own can command, at the very least considering that Ronda Rousey retired.

Then arrived Tuesday’s information that McGregor has been been named in a multimillion-dollar lawsuit in his homeland of Ireland stemming from a December 2018 sexual assault allegation, and we ended up reminded that each time McGregor resurfaces, baggage is particular to adhere to.

In this circumstance, a woman submitted a particular damage fit from McGregor, and her mom submitted a separate assert. The particulars of the case, as noted by the New York Situations, are not very. We’re not casting judgment both way on the deserves of this precise situation. The timing of the news, right as the week’s media hoopla starts, was clearly meant to increase consideration, and it has succeeded in that regard.

But this is also significantly from the first time McGregor’s title has popped up in the press for the completely wrong explanations. There was the infamous April 2018 assault on a bus transporting Nurmagomedov and numerous other folks from a UFC 223 media working day in Brooklyn. The arrest in Miami just after taking a fan’s cell phone outside a lodge and stomping it. The time he allegedly punched an old guy in a Dublin bar soon thereafter. The pair of New York Occasions stories in 2019 that he was underneath investigation for sexual assault. An arrest in France for but an additional assault assert.

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Conor McGregor at UFC 246. (Mark J. Rebilas, United states These days Sports activities)

It’s possible this is just a lengthy string of “mo’ revenue, mo’ problems” coincidences, gold diggers coming out of the woodwork at each and every transform. Or maybe the place there is smoke, there is fireplace.

We can presently be reasonably certain what the UFC will do about this. We got our answer after and for all when Endeavor took footage of McGregor’s prison functions in New York and employed it to construct the greatest battle in the background of the promotion, McGregor’s fourth-spherical submission reduction to Nurmagomedov at UFC 229.

And, yes, the media plays a function, as well, and we’d be hypocritical if we didn’t acknowledge it. That McGregor provides the most significant visitors to MMA internet sites is rarely a point out top secret. If you consider for a minute that White, a week into this “Fight Island” stint, has nevertheless to be pushed on his help of Donald Trump in the wake of Trump fomenting an insurrection on our nation’s capitol on Jan. 6, then you can be confident a considerable part of the media will be a little bit far too articles to just pass along whichever statement is unveiled about McGregor’s circumstance and go on with the rest of the 7 days as if it never ever took place.

The truth of the subject is that the struggle business is amoral, just one in which people who make the most revenue usually have an unsavory side, and often the more trouble in which they get, the a lot more well-known they come to be.

Think about the magnitude of Mike Tyson’s fights after the previous heavyweight winner served time in an Indiana penitentiary for rape. Or that Floyd Mayweather produced income that left even the LeBron James and Ronaldos of the sporting activities planet in his dust just after he did a stint in jail for domestic violence.

Give the supporters a battle they want to see, and they’ll enjoy. The persons are not heading into this expecting people today who concuss a person a different for a residing to be choir boys. McGregor vs. Poirier might be the most sizeable rematch held with as substantially distance between the two fights as this sport has at any time witnessed, and it has the probable to be a sensational struggle.

But the distinction concerning McGregor and his celebrity boxing friends is that the other people critically had been held to account by the legal procedure at some issue along the way for their transgressions. Tyson has rehabbed his picture to the point he’s regarded as a lovable grandfatherly determine, and Mayweather, if practically nothing else, has not been again in significant problems.

As still an additional accusation comes down in opposition to “The Notorious,” without repercussion, you simply cannot assistance but surprise in which this is all headed.

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