A lot has been made recently about the comments Conor Mcgregor made in an Interview with Ariel Helwani in Manchester on Jan 28th 2017. He was a attributed to have said basically that he could negotiate directly with the Floyd Mayweather camp amd bypass the UFC, citing the Ali act. Some Journalists allied this to his opening comments which were basically ‘Fuck the UFC’ and proceeded to put them to Dana White post the UFC show that was on in Denver the same night. Dana White basically responded to the ambush that it would be a very quick and steep fall if Conor tried to do this.
Here is my problem. Lazy Journalism. Sensationaling and editing a 70 minute wide ranging Interview into a soundbite question designed to extract a soundbite answer from Dana White. Dana being Dana he is normally too happy too oblige!.
However if you listen to the full interview Conor GOES OUT of his way to stress that the whole Event will run a lot smoother with the UFC involved in the promotion. He is Highly complimentary to both the Fertita brothers (the former Owners) and Dana White. He spends a large portion of the interview in glowing admiration of how they took a $2 million company and turned it into one sold for a little over $4 billion dollars. In fact he said he was flying to Las Vegas to tie up some business, which includes getting his Nevada Boxing Licence, dealing with the $150,000 fine from the Diaz 2 fight and also chasing down the Mayweather camp to get this fight over the line.
I read the situation as follows. Both he and Mayweather want the fight but Conor wants to take control of the negotiations to get it over the line. This does not mean he wants to jettison the UFC in my opinion. As he said himself ‘ I’m hunting Floyd now’ – expect developments one way or the other in the next couple of weeks.
