Conor McGregor must be careful or he could end up as an Icarus-like cautionary tale
THE key elements of sport, by definition, are physical exertion, skill, competition and entertainment. It’s a suitably loose definition that has seen everything from darts, Formula One, gaming and propoker fall under the banner of ‘sports’.
One particular sport has fought harder than most for acceptance as an actual sport – mixed martial arts, or MMA. Twenty years ago its biggest franchise, the UFC, was deemed just about worthy of a slot on the late night Channel 4 show ‘Eurotrash’, where we could all marvel at the deranged violence and think deep thoughts about the decline of Western civilisation.
Two decades on and UFC has become more a global phenomenon, albeit one with a special appeal for the Irish, thanks to its brightest light, Conor McGregor.
We’ve all been there – you’re late for work, running for the bus and it pulls away just as you get close. The usual response is to shout at the driver, or at the sky, perhaps using some powerful language, and then stand there like a loser for the next bus to come along.
You do not pick up a metal dollie and chuck it through the side window of the bus, and you certainly don’t do it whilst being filmed from several different angles. Obviously, McGregor wasn’t trying to get on the bus because he thought he was going to be late for work, but rather because he wanted to engage in fisticuffs with someone onboard.
Within minutes of the footage appearing on the internet, guys with McGregor’s photo as their avatar started MMAns plaining about how it was a display of incredible loyalty, and that anyone who thought it looked like a worrying act of madness was actually just jealous. Then came the long-game theorists who said that McGregor was actually making a clever play, and went on to explain a conspiracy of such complexity that Tyrion Lannister would wonder what the hell was going on. Either way, it’s hard to see what happened as anything other than the logical progression of McGregor’s Icarus-like trajectory. Of course, not everyone was so enamoured by the melee. In the aftermath, UFC president Dana White said what happened in the garage was the most disgusting thing to happen in the history of UFC. Bold words for a man in charge of a sport that at one point allowed opponents to direct hammer blows to their opponent’s groins, but White also seems to have forgotten the existence of an ex-UFC fighter named War Machine.
Jon ‘War Machine’ Koppenhaver has become a cautionary tale for any combat sports person, as he blurred the lines between the ring and the real world, unable to find peace inside or outside the octagon.
Koppenhaver’s fall from grace was so spectacular that White disputes the use of the term ‘ex-UFC fighter’ in connection with him, as Koppenhaver only ever fought in two matches before he was expelled for making crass, inaccurate comments about the death of another fighter. Given what happened after his expulsion, it is little wonder that White wants War Machine’s brief role in UFC history erased.
AFTER he was kicked out, Koppenhaver continued in another MMA franchise, Bellator, whilst also branching into acting in porn films. He started dating another porn star, Christy Mack, and one night in 2014 he almost beat her to death. He knocked out some of her teeth, broke others, broke 10 of her bones, cracked one of her ribs, lacerated her liver, sawed off her hair and tried to rape her. He is currently serving a 36-year sentence.
MMA is a sport that struggled to be taken seriously, and now that it is a multi-billion dollar empire, White would do well to remember that in a sport built on displays of balletic violence, mental health is more important than in other, less aggressive pursuits.
CLEARLY, McGregor is nothing like War Machine – McGregor’s occasionally enjoyable pantomime antics at press conferences really only serve to push his brand, while War Machine’s downward spiral was the result of a deeply troubled childhood and an adulthood filled with dysfunction and steroid abuse. However, when you see McGregor flinging metal trollies at buses you have to wonder if he too has lost a sense of where his sport ends and real life begins.
He has a long way to fall before he descends into darkness like War Machine, but it’s hard not to worry about him.
UFC has a code of conduct which states that fighters shall conduct themselves in accordance with commonly accepted standards of decency, social convention, and morals. If UFC and MMA generally wants to stay mainstream, it needs to start celebrating mental health as well as the ability to ground and pound. McGregor has made White massive amounts of money, raising the profile of the sport, using his athletic ability as well as his sharp mind and quick wit – in return, White needs to ease off the soundbites and actually start caring about his fighters, or UFC will struggle to ever move beyond John McCain’s blunt assessment of the sport as “human cockfighting”.