The Challenger from Ireland
In challenging Nurmagomedov for the lightweight championship belt, McGregor was therefore coming up against a product of а martial tradition with deep roots. McGregor, however, possessed just enough knowledge about his Avar opponent and his Caucasian background to put himself in danger. As noted above, the Irish fighter routinely employs barbed comments and rhetorical bravado outside the cage. He does this in part to boost his fan base and bottom line, but also in order to rattle his opponents’ confidence and unsettle them psychologically. Against Nurmagomedov he escalated his psychological game in two ways. The first was a physical escalation.
As a result of McGregor’s decision to step away from the UFC in order to box Floyd Mayweather, the UFC indicated that it would strip McGregor of his lightweight belt following the conclusion of UFC 223 on April 7, 2018. Nurmagomedov was expected to win his match at UFC 223 and thereby take the vacated lightweight championship. In what was either a futile attempt to stop this, or, as is more likely, a publicity stunt to guarantee a championship match with Nurmagomedov, McGregor led a group of teammates and followers into the parking garage of Brooklyn’s Barclays center. There they mounted an attack on the bus transporting the scheduled fighters from their press conferences. During the skirmish, McGregor called out to Nurmagomedov, daring him to come out of the bus and fight. He then picked up and threw a metal dolly at the bus, shattering a window and injuring one fighter such that he had to withdraw. As the overwhelmed security detail ran around frantically, McGregor and his posse fled the scene.
The spectacle made the UFC look bad, but it refrained from punishing its star athlete. To the contrary, the UFC approved a showdown with Nurgmagomedov. McGregor thus fulfilled his first goal. He was less successful with his second goal, spooking his opponent. To the contrary, McGregor’s hooliganism and the UFC’s tepid reaction to it violated Nurmagomedov’s sense of justice and triggered his indignation.
McGregor proceeded to amplify his mistake in his attempts to rattle Nurmagomedov with his rhetoric. In the weeks and days leading up to the fight the challenger demonstrated that he done some homework on his opponent, but only enough to insult him gratuitously, and too little to discompose him. Alongside generic jeers such as calling his rival a rat, McGregor accused him of having a glass jaw, adding, “my Chechen friends, the soldiers, they told me that they had chicken jaws in Dagestan.” The Chechens and Avars have a great deal in common, both in their shared Islamic faith and especially their shared struggles in the 19th and early 20th centuries against Russian and Soviet power. But like all human societies, the Chechens and their Dagestani neighbors have their local rivalries, and McGregor’s reference of his Chechen acquaintances’ low opinion of Dagestanis was a clever way to unsettle his Avar opponent’s self-confidence, for all the same qualities that Nurmagomedov aspires to embody as a public figure are traditionally revered in Chechnya as well.
McGregor was not content to leave it at that general level, but proceeded to attack Nurmagomedov’s personal relationships. He pointed out that Nurmagomedov’s financial patron and booster, the wealthy Dagestani businessman Ziyavudin Magomedov, had recently been arrested, jailed, and charged with embezzlement and racketeering. McGregor taunted his opponent as a poltroon, saying “You took money from Magomedov. Now what? Putin locked him up! Say something to Putin about locking Magomedov up. Say something! Ask him to release him.” But it was when McGregor derided his father as a “quivering coward” who feigns respect for Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov that set Nurmagomedov afire. Not only does Nurmagomedov enjoy an unusually close relationship with his father, but he had made loyalty to his father a signature aspect of his public persona.
By directly insulting his opponent’s father in a public setting where retaliation was essentially impossible, McGregor was not merely humiliating him but subverting his integrity by forcing him to compromise his honor and image as a fearless highlander whose law is personal honor and the defense of family and faith. Wittingly or not, he mocked Nurmagomedov’s faith. Using the athletes’ pre-fight press conference as a venue to flog his new business venture, a brand of whiskey, McGregor poured a glass of the drink and slammed it on the table. Acting like a belligerent drunk, he razzed Nurmagomedov to take a taste. When Nurmagomedov averred that he did not drink, McGregor feigned disbelief and radiated a mocking contempt, dismissing Nurmagomedov as a “backward <expletive>” for his refusal to drink. Islam’s ban on alcohol is well known, and McGregor’s stunt could come across only as a direct insult of Nurmagomedov’s faith.
Nurmagomedov, who only recently started to learn English, had no chance of keeping up with McGregor. When, however, McGregor implied (erroneously) that Dagestan’s Avars had been chased from their lands by the Russians while boasting that his clan had stood and fought the British empire, Nurmagomedov fired back by asking McGregor why it is that he speaks the language of his conquerors, English. It was a potentially deft point, as English is the dominant language in Ireland. McGregor, however, did not skip a beat and replied in Irish (formerly known as Gaelic). The press conference concluded shortly thereafter.
In terms of theatrics, McGregor dominated the press conference. The mouthy Celt overmatched the laconic highlander. His effort to project an appearance of calm disinterest notwithstanding, Nurmagomedov betrayed discomfit. He uncharacteristically snapped at an unwitting journalist for hailing him with the traditional greeting of Muslims, “as-Salaam aleykum” (Peace be upon you), and then in the same breath congratulating McGregor for his whiskey.
When the two fighters entered the ring, however, Nurmagomedov became the dominator. He decisively won two of the first three rounds, and even stood toe-to-toe and traded blows with McGregor, an accomplishment in its own right given that McGregor was considered the more talented and dangerous striker. Then in the fourth round Nurmagomedov put his vaunted wrestling skills to good use by putting a fulcrum choke on McGregor and forcing him to “tap out,” or surrender.
It should have been an immensely satisfying victory for Nurmagomedov. He had first demonstrated a clear and consistent all around superiority and then won decisively by compelling McGregor to tap out. During the fight, as Nurmagomedov manhandled him, McGregor declared that the insults he had hurled at the press conference were just “business” and nothing personal. Nurmagomedov only taunted him to talk further while raining blow upon blow upon the suddenly humble McGregor.
Yet just one moment after his victory, the Dagestani threw it in jeopardy by scaling the cage and leaping out of the ring in an attempt to pummel a teammate of McGregor’s, Dillon Danis, who was standing in the audience. The sheer athleticism and fearlessness of the leap was awesome in the true meaning of the world. A melee then ensued as Danis tried to engage the new champion and multiple security guards pounced to separate the two.
Just as that melee began, a series of scuffles erupted inside the ring as three of Nurmagomedov’s teammates from the Caucasus, including a cousin, one after another exchanged blows with McGregor. Confused security guards, coaches, and others scrambled to protect McGregor and to prevent a still larger explosion of violence.
For an organization that had spent two and a half decades clawing its way to respectability and was seeking to consolidate an image of professionalism by beaming its biggest promotion to date live around the globe, the post-fight brawls were a disaster. UFC 229 concluded not with the ritual celebration of athleticism that is the post-fight cage interview but instead ended in mayhem. Commentators prior to the fight had speculated about the possibility of fisticuffs between opposing fans, but no one had thought that the fighters and their teammates would indulge in such violence. UFC President Dana White put it in an understatement, “I’ve been working hard to promote this sport, this is not what a mixed martial arts event is normally like.”
White was certainly correct, but he should not have been surprised. In its ardor to stoke excitement and sell the fight, the UFC had condoned McGregor’s outrageous assault on the bus in the Barclays Center and his incendiary rhetoric at the press conference. As Nurmagomedov plaintively put it at the post-fight press conference, “He talk about my religion, he talk about my country, he talk about my father, he come to Brooklyn and he broke bus. He almost kill a couple of people. Worry about this. Worry about this [excrement]. Why people talk about I jump over the cage?” The result blew up in everyone’s face. McGregor was humbled and humiliated, the UFC was embarrassed, and Nurmagomedov besmirched his own reputation as well as that of the UFC.