UFC commentator and former two-division champion Daniel Cormier offered his opinion on Conor McGregor’s recent altercation with rapper Machine Gun Kelly.
On his ESPN show, Cormier asked whether McGregor is losing himself in his “gimmick”. “The crazy thing about McGregor is when I say the gimmick, I mean the billionaire with the strut and the fancy cars and the money, because the reality is it’s the WWE.
DC Blasts “Gimmick” McGregor
You get a character, your character can be The Billionaire, your character can be Vince MacMahon. Vince MacMahon is the evil boss but Vince MacMahon, when he hits that curtain in the back he becomes Vince MacMahon the CEO and Chairman of the WWE.
It’s the same with Ric Flair. When Ric Flair was Ric Flair, styling and profiling, kiss the girls and make them cry, woo, all that stuff. But when Ric Flair hit the curtain in the back, he never stopped.
He continued to live as Ric Flair and ultimately that was his undoing. That’s why at 60 you saw him still wrestling, because he had spent so much money, he had lived such a reckless life, it wasn’t sustainable.
Conor McGregor is the fighter but Conor McGregor also lives this big life and that’s where I ask, ‘Has this gimmick overtaken who Conor McGregor is as a person?’”
Conor McGregor’s antics in recent months put his previous time in the headlines to shame. That’s no mean feat, considering his old habits of throwing things at buses and punching old men in bars.
Since his second consecutive defeat at Dustin Poirier’s hands, McGregor repeatedly threatened Poirier and his family, threw verbal abuse at Khabib Nurmagomedov, and, of course, started a red carpet brawl with Machine Gun Kelly.
“You can’t turn that off. It doesn’t matter how much money you have, you can’t turn it off. You can’t turn that burning desire to hit that curtain off.
When you hit that curtain, it is the most intense thing I’ve ever seen in my life, and I’ve ever felt and experienced.” DC remained hopeful that McGregor would remain a fighter at heart, and move on from these adolescent antics.
“You come through the crowd. You walk through the crowd and the hands are reaching towards you, everybody’s screaming, that’s what you get from the UFC. But you don’t have a helmet on, your face is not hidden, you’re just you, as naked as you can be, walking through that see of fans where somebody wants a piece of you.
It’s addicting. And when that octagon door closes, that fight, knowing that that man wants to take you out, that feeling is second to none, and for Conor McGregor, who is a fighter, you can’t replace that.
A dollar amount will not equate to what you feel when you feel the mat on your bare feet, when you’re in there with the referee and the guy and you know what’s coming next.
You can’t replace that with a dollar value and I think that’s why Conor will never lean into celebrity more than the actual fighter.”
Do you think Conor has allowed his character to overtake his personality? Will he return as a true fighter someday? Let us know in the comments.
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