Even if you can’t stand boxing, there’s no way you could have escaped the historic Conor McGregor v Floyd Mayweather fight earlier this year.
It was playing on every pub, every television screen, and on a fair few streams as well, if the three million people who illegally streamed it are any count to go by.
McGregor lost, of course, fatiguing in the tenth round, but to make his professional boxing debut at one of the biggest boxing matches in history was just another win for the Irishman.
Four years ago, the Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) fighter was living on benefits. Now he’s one of the biggest names in the world, earned an estimated $US 27 million in 2016–17, has appeared in video games, launched a fashion brand (‘August McGregor‘, a line of suits marketed to millennials), and has endorsement deals with Beats by Dre, Monster Energy, Reebok and Bud Light.
He’s also the star of a new documentary about his life. Filmed over the course of four years, Conor McGregor: Notorious is the all-access pass to the fighter’s meteoric rise of one of the greatest athletes of our time.
Ahead of its release, we had a chat to McGregor’s head coach John Kavanagh – the man who’s trained him since the beginning – about what it’s like coaching the most notorious fighter to have ever graced the sport, and how despite the whole ‘MMA champion’ thing, he’s actually the laziest person you’ll never meet.
PEDESTRIAN.TV: Have you watched Notorious?
JOHN KAVANAGH: No, I think I’m the only one in the movie who hasn’t seen the movie. So tomorrow night is my first time. I’m just hoping that Conor hasn’t edited it so I look like an idiot, ‘cause he would do that just to spite me.
What do you think makes MMA superior to other sports?
For me, I’m the laziest person you’ll ever meet. There’s no way I could go to a gym and run around on a treadmill or lift weights. I’d rather watch paint dry. With MMA, and I say this for any sport, you’re getting a workout and you don’t realise it. Say it’s tennis. If you really like tennis, you play a match and you’re enjoying the sport, you’re enjoying the game, and at the end of it you realise your t-shirt’s drenched. That’s how I approach MMA. I’ll just try and learn a new technique, or take a class, or wrestle with Conor or whatever, and at the end of it my shirt’s drenched. I’m like woah! It’s like I just ran for half an hour.
There is some people that really enjoy running. They can just run for an hour. I don’t understand them, I think it’s kinda weird, but there is people like that. And that’s great. For me, I wasn’t able to do it and I didn’t like running around after a ball, so it kind of limited me, I was left with fighting, so it worked for me.
You say you’re lazy, but I’m sure you’re not, and I’m sure Conor isn’t either, but–
Oh he is lazy.
Really? Does he ever give you excuses for not working out?
[Laughs.] No! He’ll be incredibly poor and lazy at doing interviews and stuff like that. [Note: this smarts a bit, because I’d been trying for weeks to tee up an interview with McGregor only to be told he was sick. TBF, he appeared on the red carpet for Notorious a day or two later and sounded pretty damn sick.]
Put it this way: he’s very lazy about anything he doesn’t want to do. But when he’s doing his sport, when he’s doing boxing or MMA you can’t get him out of the gym, cause that’s fun to him. You’re not going to get him up at 8 in the morning to go golf or something cause he doesn’t like that. We’re both very narrow field of focus of what we’re prepared to spend energy on.
He’s got such a personality – his insults are legendary. Why do you think he doesn’t like doing interviews?
I don’t know, he just doesn’t operate like any other human being I’ve ever seen. You’ll be like, okay, be there Tuesday at 3pm. He’ll show up Friday at 5pm. He just doesn’t operate on the same level of consciousness of any of them I’ve met before, he’s just on a different planet.
He’s obsessed about fighting and that’s all he’s ever thinking about. The thought of driving somewhere to do an interview about feelings, what’s your thoughts on this and whats your feelings towards that – he doesn’t care, he just wants to do. He likes to act. He likes action, rather than talking about feelings. [He puts on another voice] ‘If we were supposed to talk about feelings we’d called them talkings’.
I’ve read recently that he’s a late riser, sleeps through the day and gets into the gym at 10pm, 11pm at night. As his trainer how do you deal with that?
Yeah. It’s kinda handy when we travel from Ireland to the States for a fight, it takes me a week or two to adjust, he’s actually always on American time because he just has a very wild sleep pattern. He’d go through periods of sleeping through the day and then being awake at night, he gets all over. When we’re away for fight camps, we’ll sometimes hitting around the house, and then suddenly we’ll a text comes through and it’s midnight, and it’s like okay guys lets go to the gym, and you have to be ready to go, that’s what we’re there for. It can be challenging.
One of my colleagues, who’s the biggest Conor McGregor fan in the world…
I get told that every day, by the way.
…says he’s been partying a bit more since the Mayweather fight. How do you balance partying and drinking with training?
Your friend is asking a good question there. The last year or so has been different than the first couple of years.
There’s a joke in the boxing community that if you become a champion, it’s hard to motivate yourself to do hard work if you’re wearing silk underwear. There was a joke that Conor used to say, that the plan was he could just blow all his money in between each fight, so that by the time the next fight came around, he’d be broke and he’d have to fight again. But now, it’s actually been difficult, because he can’t blow all his money, there’s too much.
He’s gotta figure out what his motivation is now, because it used to be money, that he wanted to make enough money that he could retire without being worried. Fighting is a dangerous game and it’s a difficult game, and you’ve only got a couple of years, and if you don’t make enough money, you’re a 40-year-old guy doing security at the weekend, because you don’t have any other skills. That was always his big concern. Now he’s ticked that box, now that he has more money than he can spend, he’s got to decide for himself: what is his motivation? What is going to get him up and doing those hard training sessions?
[For example], Conor has no interest in playing the piano. I could give him the best, Dr. Phil motivation speech and he still wouldn’t practice the piano for six hours a day, because he doesn’t like it.
You cannot motivate someone to do what they don’t want to do. He does love fighting, and all I can do is be here. I’m in the gym, the gym is open, and if he comes in, we can work out. And if he doesn’t, I wish him the very best. He’s made stupid amounts of money. He’s doing well, I’m doing well, the gym’s doing well, and he can ride off into the sunset. That’s something the individual has to do for himself. You can’t force someone to do it.
You said he literally cannot blow his money right now, because he’s got too much of it. Where is he trying to blow it?
Oh, I don’t know. I just come across his social media posts and he’s on some big yacht or on some holiday, got new clothes… it’s not really my thing if I’m being honest, I’m more of a simple person, but he seems to find ways of spending it.
He showed me this golden lion, a Christian Dior lion, to me it just looked like a plastic lion, but apparently it was worth a lot of money, so I was afraid I’d knock it over.
What did you think of the pin stripe suit with ‘fuck you’ sewn into it that he wore to the weigh-in?
Very subtle, that’s what I thought. It’s exactly Conor. It is what it is.
Conor McGregor wasn’t lying about his suit 😂 #MayweatherMcGregor pic.twitter.com/aZUJUY10n0
— VERSUS (@vsrsus) July 11, 2017
So just going back to the Mayweather fight. There were rumours that Mayweather threw the first three rounds, what do you think about it?
Yeah, I read that too. I would understand it if I hadn’t of seen the shots he took in the first three rounds. Any of those shots could have knocked him out. So it would be a very dangerous game to play, to let somebody hit you with a knock-out punch.
Conor has a very, very hard punch. There’s been fights were Conor has knocked people out in the first round. He beat the damn champion Jose Aldo in 13 seconds; that’s not someone you let hit you. So when I look at the evidence, it doesn’t add up, that he would let someone like this hit him.
I do think that he probably was more efficient in the first few rounds, just kind of showed up and tried to weather the storm, which turned out to be a very smart tactic. That’s what you get when you’re dealing with the same sport for over 30 years every day of your life, he’s very very good at it, there’s no two ways about that. I don’t think he in any way let Conor beat him for the first few rounds to kind of make him look good, that just doesn’t make sense to me.
How did you feel watching the fight, particularly in the tenth round?
[Mocking me] ‘What were your feelings?’ My feelings were… No, look, it’s very very hard for me. We’re a small team, we’ve all come up together in the last ten years, and he’s much more to me than just another member in the gym, just a client. He’s like my kid brother. When you see your family member, when you see someone who’s close to you get hit hard in the head, it actually physically hurts you.
It was very, very tough to watch. He was well paid out of it. When it’s all set and done, when the team’s calmed down, you have to look back and smile and say, ‘You know what, look at us, a couple of Irish kids who were never involved in pro boxing before…’ – I’d never cornered a boxing match, amateur, in my life, never mind the biggest professional boxing match of all time.
These three kids from Dublin that have trained together the last ten years went to Vegas, challenged the Mayweather dynasty, and took him ten rounds, and landed more shots than Pacquiao. We were told we wouldn’t even hit the guy once, but we hit him more than Pacquiao hit him.
At the end of it all, we have to smile and say, ‘Not a bad old ride’.
Conor McGregor: Notorious is in select cinemas now and available for home release from November 29. Watch the trailer below.
