THE REAL CONOR McGREGOR
A former plumber who cried in defeat, picked up €188 on the dole and likes using moisturiser
THE pawnbroker who made Conor McGregor cry is dredging up an old transaction. He wrestles with his memory but can’t quite get a choke hold on the figures.
‘They paid me €400,’ Artemij Sitenkov tells Sportsmail. ‘Or it might have been 500. It was a long time ago. At the time, I didn’t think anyone would care about it now, nine years on.’
With that, the 34-year-old laughs down the phone from his home in Lithuania. He’s happy enough, this jack of all trades who manages gyms, trades antiques and runs a pawn shop.
He also does mixed martial arts when he needs extra cash, balancing 16 defeats with 15 wins from Kazakhstan to Ireland, where he rocked up in June 2008 to a hall in Drimnagh, Dublin.
It was McGregor’s third professional MMA fight and his first defeat, with the former plumber tapping out after 69 seconds.
‘He was crying after and was being comforted by his trainer,’ Sitenkov says. ‘I went home and didn’t think of him again. Then, a few years later, wow. UFC, fame, everything. This thing with Floyd Mayweather, wow.’
It’s the anomaly that looks like a mismatch at best and a freak show at worst. But how has a non-boxer, who was drawing dole cheques in 2013, talked and grappled his way to a payday worth in excess of £60million?
Not much of it makes sense. Except, that is, to those in Dublin who know McGregor best and who know about the self-help book, the gorilla video and the women’s skincare products. To them, their mad friend has had this date from the start. PHIL SUTCLIFFE is grinning in his recollections. He runs the Crumlin Boxing Club, a mile from where McGregor grew up.
It is not the grenade-ravaged hell of a recent ESPN profile but it does get tasty, and for McGregor that meant being hassled by a group of six lads one day in 1999, when he was 11.
The tale goes that he did an Ali shuffle before throwing a left hook and he took a pasting in return. That soon led him to the boxing gym.
‘He had been playing football,’ says Sutcliffe. ‘He had his muddy boots on and walked straight over our clean floor to hit a bag. We told him to get out.
‘He was back a few days later in kit and that was him started.’
In the home of Mags, his mother, and his father Tony, a taxi driver for 26 years, is a trophy of a boxer with its left hand snapped off.
The son peaked as Irish Under 16 schoolboy champion and it is interesting to consider what path his career might have taken if the family had not dragged McGregor screaming to the calmer suburb of Lucan when he was 16.
He continued to blag lifts back to his club for a while, but, significantly, kick-boxing became a rival fascination and then there were also the conversations with Tom Egan at his new school. They had seen the Ultimate
Fighter cable show and got hooked on a combat with fewer limits. Eventually it came at the expense of boxing.
‘Conor and me were training at Crumlin the same time — he was a very good boxer,’ says Jamie Kavanagh, a 20-1-1 pro. ‘ We’re still friends and who knows what he might have gone on to in it.
‘He wasn’t as much into the technical side, but his eyes lit up in a fight.
‘He didn’t get in many street fights compared to some — I can only remember one when we were away with the club in Malaga. Some guys started and we didn’t lose, put it that way.
‘The thing with Conor, he has always had great focus. He really could have boxed to a top level but with the intensity this guy has, you wouldn’t have bet against him at any sport.’ McGREGOR first walked into John Kavanagh’s Straight Blast Gym for MMA in 2006.
It was a year when two other important things happened — he left school at 17 to be a plumber and Rhonda Byrne’s book, The
Secret, came out, espousing the power of positive thinking.
Upon reading it, McGregor entered Kavanagh’s gym determined to make an impression and famously clattered Owen Roddy, the top dog, in sparring.
Then he was put in with Aisling Daly, a female star of UFC, and floored her with an excessively hard body shot. At that point, Kavanagh joined McGregor on the mat and battered him.
‘It is not the done thing to beat up on people in the gym and John was making a point,’ Daly says.
McGregor trained alongside his work as an apprentice plumber, which saw him leave home at 5am each morning. He hated it and quit after 18 months, going on the dole for €188 a week, all eyes on MMA. But even then it was far from straightforward.
McGregor’s first fight was in 2007 and when he lost to Sitenkov a year later he was still making €100 a go. He fled the venue with €500 of ticket money he owed Kavanagh and appeared finished until McGregor’s mother begged the coach to talk her 19-year-old son out of his bedroom.
Kavanagh wrote off the debt and tweaked something in McGregor’s mind.
‘He had something in him — this obsession to get better, to make a different life,’ Daly says. ‘You have never seen anything like it.’
It is the recurring term used by all who know him. John Kavanagh tells of the time McGregor sent him footage of gorillas wrestling and asked if their holds were transferable. McGregor became the only fighter to have his own key to the gym because Kavanagh grew tired of getting called for it at all hours of the night.
Gradually, the wins mounted up until he became a two-weight world champion in the Cage Warriors branch of MMA. But while the rapidly-growing UFC is familiar to millions, Cage Warriors and McGregor were invisible.
‘Funny thing is, his personality then, when he had nothing, was the same as now,’ Daly says.
‘At the gym, I had a female changing room and every day he’d swagger out in a tiny towel, his hair smelling like my nice shampoo and wearing my moisturisers. He always had loads of charisma, and if you have charisma and can fight, you are on to something. Look at Ali.’
By 2013, McGregor was still broke. He was a good fighter and talker but was stranded on a tiny platform. ‘No one doubted what he would do with the right break,’ Daly says.
And then he got it — a call to appear on a UFC card in Stockholm. Before he flew, he stopped to collect his €188 dole cheque. FOUR years on, McGregor is a two-weight UFC world champion, has a speedboat called 188 and owns a £2m property with his long-time girlfriend. His 2016 earnings of £26m were ranked by Forbes alongside Gareth Bale’s.
How? Because the UFC love bombast and violence in ways the rest of society often dislikes and no one does either quite like McGregor, the snarling face of a snarling brand. His gym mates tell tales of unseen humility — he calls a 13-year- old kick-boxer Nate Kelly ‘Nate the great’ and gives him pointers.
But it is the face he presents to the public that has made this fight. It remains to be seen if it all ends in tears again, though the sense around Crumlin is that their man has already won.