UFC 194: Conor McGregor rules after stunning KO of Jose Aldo
Conor McGregor is the main man in UFC after his incredible knockout of Jose Aldo at UFC 194, and there might be nobody better for the role.
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2 min read
Ladies and gentlemen, meet your newest combat sports supernova.
Just four weeks after the octagonal organization's flagship had her Mike Tyson aura kicked to the Australian outback, a tough-talking Irishman swooped loudly into the Nevada desert and pieced together the fragments of UFC czar Dana White's marketing heart.
Conor McGregor, whose ego arrived in Las Vegas long before his flag-draped entourage did, nevertheless managed to make his latest MGM Grand appearance a historic one with the quickest title-fight stoppage in the promotion's two-decade existence.
In far less time than it took to order the pay-per-view -- a mere 13 seconds -- the unapologetically brash 27-year-old landed a left hand that simultaneously separated featherweight champ Jose Aldo from his consciousness, his hardware and the unbeaten run he had been on for more than 10 years.
The Brazilian was all but comatose by the time he hit the floor, and the two more hammer-fists that viciously finished the job might as well have confirmed McGregor's booking on the Tonight Show, The Voice and Dancing with the Stars, all at the same time.
"Nobody can take that left-hand shot," he said. "He's powerful and he's fast, but precision beats power and timing beats speed. These are fundamentals. That's all it takes."
And though Aldo sheepishly claimed that the quickness of the result warranted a rematch, the one-sided nature of both the fight and the promotional hoopla that preceded it indicates that McGregor -- more so than anyone else on the talent roster -- is the man around whom the near-term future revolves.
They're both elite fighters. But only one of them is an elite "it" guy.
The purists whose late money made Aldo a favorite will have no choice but to respect the way their nemesis backed up months of trash talk. The contrarians who wax rhetorical about the ills of political correctness will have him to turn to as a hero in case other flavors-of-the-month turn sour.
And the folks in the middle? Well, they'll have to at least concede his entertainment value.
"I'm carrying this whole damn game, and I love it," McGregor said. "It feels light. But the game, I'm carrying it on my shoulders, but it honestly feels light to me. I feel like they don't see the squats with the whole game on my shoulders because it ain't nothing."
From White's aforementioned perspective, his breakthrough couldn't have been timed any better.
Though Rousey's ascension allowed the UFC to expand into Brazil and Australia, her shocking demise put a damper on future promotional imperialism -- at least until she's able to win a rematch. But McGregor's win restarts the quest for world domination, presumably starting in his North Atlantic homeland.
White promised him beforehand that a win would grease the skids for a title defense at Croke Park, a Dublin venue that seats better than 80,000 for concerts and just more than 73,000 for rugby. Given those numbers, it's easy to imagine an easy smash of the company attendance record, which was set at 56,214 for the Rousey-Holm match in Melbourne.
"I would love for the Croke Park event to happen. It would be a dream come true," McGregor said. "But I respect good, clean business, so we'll discuss. We'll see. We have post-fight celebrations over a nice whiskey and discussing more big business."
And after that, batten down the hatches.
Not even the big screen is safe from turning "Notorious."
"I'd like to collect in action movies going forward," he said. "Hollywood is screaming for me, yes, so we'll see what happens in the future."
