Conor McGregor and a rash guard that’s been washed, like, twice

Combat! blog was going to be about some dumb Hillary shit today, but Conor McGregor stepped in and saved us all. “I have decided to retire young,” he tweeted yesterday at a reasonable hour. “Thanks for the cheese. Catch ya’s later.” Did you know you can almost always delete the last sentence of any tweet? Regardless, Twitter is binding, and the UFC has duly removed him from UFC 200 on July 9th in beautiful Las Vegas. Props to Agent Foxhole for the link. And thanks to the Ultimate Fighting Championship for announcing this dramatic change to their most important event of the year ten weeks in advance, just as soon as McGregor “retired,” so we’d all have time to change our plans.

One suspects McGregor might fight again. What we have here is a bluff called. If the UFC genuinely believed he had impulsively retired, they would not cut him from their flagship event the next day. They would not respond to his tweet at all. When your champion retires via Twitter, it’s an occasion for mokusatsu. The UFC spares itself the indignity of answering McGregor’s retirement haiku by not acknowledging it. In doing so, they minimizes his embarrassment at having tweeted it.

That’s some good mokosatsu, right there, but it’s not what the UFC did. Instead, they took McGregor’s three-sentence retirement announcement at face value and canceled his hot-ticket rematch with Nate Diaz the next day, thus eliminating the possibility that he would change his mind. Brash 27 year-old phenom uses social media to retire after first setback loss? You saw Twitter, boys—shred his tax records.

If the UFC believed Conor wanted to retire, they would wait for the sun to come up in Iceland or whatever and hope he changed his mind. He’s in Iceland, by the way. Although he is retired, the reason he missed marketing events and press conferences in Vegas this week is that he’s training over there.

“Conor did not want to come to Las Vegas and film the commercial or be a part of any of the marketing we have,” White said. “He’s in Iceland training, and that’s not possible.”

I hope McGregor really has retired and is sending White a series of “training” photos from roadside bars, but this story strains credulity. I think the UFC believes McGregor is negotiating with them. Maybe he’s only negotiating the number of press conferences he attends. But by pulling him from the event unnecessarily, this far in advance, the UFC has declared he is not valuable enough to get it.

Or they’re bluffing back. Conor McGregor is aggressive, but he’s not dumb. If he thinks there’s another $200,000 and fewer appearances in his ongoing relationship with the UFC, he might be right. He seems to be making a play to get it. Unless he just did too many burpees and picked up his phone.

It’s entirely possible that McGregor impulsively tweeted about retiring and then, when everyone freaked out, was too proud to delete it. That’s a story I could believe. So is the one where the UFC concludes it can tolerate any speech in its loudmouth champion except what threatens the event, and it corrected him. All McGregor has to do is say he’s not retiring after all. He just had a tough day of training. That would contradict his crowing-confidence persona, but the gimmick would probably survive.

But does he think too much of his own persona to do that? If he were a professional wrestler, ¹ his foolish pride would keep him from fighting until he leaped into the ring, at the last moment, to brain Dana White with a chair. Maybe this is a standoff between two such cartoonish figures. The UFC and Conor McGregor are in a pissing match, ladies and gentlemen, and it’s airing free.

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