Conor McGregor

Bio

Conor McGregor is, first and foremost, a mixed martial arts phenomenon — the brash Dubliner who became a two-weight UFC champion and one of the biggest pay-per-view draws combat sports has ever seen. But he earns a spot on these pages for one reason: in August 2017 he crossed the great divide and boxed Floyd Mayweather, the finest defensive operator of the modern era, in one of the most lucrative spectacles in the history of the sport.

Make no mistake, McGregor was no embarrassment that night. He had his moments in the early rounds, throwing with that famous left and showing real composure for a man making his professional boxing debut against an all-time great. But class told. Mayweather, as he always did, worked McGregor out, took over from the middle rounds, and got the stoppage in the tenth. It left McGregor 0-1 as a professional boxer — and the experiment, for all its riches, confirmed what the purists suspected: a brilliant MMA fighter is not the same animal as a brilliant boxer.

Since then, McGregor's combat career has been defined more by inactivity and injury than action, and he has spent as much time in the headlines for business ventures and outside-the-ring noise as for anything inside it. Yet the man still moves the needle like few others. Whenever his name is linked to a crossover bout — and it frequently is, given the eye-watering sums on offer in the modern era — the boxing world stops and listens, even if it then rolls its eyes. Love him or loathe him, Conor McGregor remains one of the most marketable names in the entire fight game.