We all have that childhood friend. The one you’d never choose in adulthood. The one you’d walk to school with. Play football with. Sneak your first smoke with. Sit beside in class and wind up teachers, trying to impress the girls. Funny. Cheeky. Good at sports. Effortlessly brilliant athlete.
The one who’s as casually cruel as he was suddenly kind. The one you slowly started to drift away from in secondary school, when your world gets bigger, and theirs somehow got smaller. The one you feel guilty avoiding at Christmas in the pub. The one who bad-mouths your sudden coldness towards him. The one who labels you “too cool for school.” Spreads a rumour, maybe, then withdraws it, says he’s only joking, winking at you as he does it.
The one whose car you dread seeing pulled up outside your house. The one you wished was not sitting inside your kitchen, charming your otherwise distracted mother. The one who gets you in a headlock on the way out the door, and you don’t know whether he’s joking, or going to break your neck. The one you block on social media.
The one you suspect is behind the barrage of unsolicited male-pattern-baldness paraphernalia sent to your inbox. The one who shifts your ex-girlfriend, despite bad-mouthing her for years. The one who suddenly starts texting your sister, wondering how she’s getting on in college.
This, to me, is who Conor McGregor is. Though I never followed MMA or subscribed to any theory of him being Ireland’s greatest anything, I was mildly impressed by his strut and arrogance when he first started doing whatever it was that was getting him noticed.
My uncommitted admiration lasted just about as long as Jose Aldo did in McGregor’s breakthrough fight (13 seconds, for the uninitiated). Maybe that’s because I played sports, so was aware of what admirable sports-people looked and behaved like, or maybe, as his brand grew and his shtick turned from chutzpah to weaponised hubris, I recognised the bully in him, the rumour-spreader, the fella you once laughed and loved with, who was suddenly doing the headlock thing, sneering as his grip tightens and your breath disappears.
His every public appearance now elicits this thought. Melting Christiano Ronaldo’s brain ringside at some big fight somewhere. Like, imagine how utterly cringeworthily awful your company must be to melt Christiano Ronaldo’s brain?
Ronnie, an avowed narcissist himself, has at least got the self-awareness to confine his narcissism to himself. McGregor, though, finds ways of showing up on social media platforms even though I don’t follow him, have never followed him, and honestly wouldn’t follow him into an ice bath if I was on fire.
He has become the poster boy of testosterone-riddled toxicity which somehow seems to have cultivated a following among … well, among who? Disenfranchised young men? Disenfranchised from what, exactly?
Overexposure has cost McGregor his true “king of the working class” tag. His origin story is no more Sonny Liston than my own. Yet, there he is, vying with that Andrew Tate fella for the chairmanship of a club whose only condition of membership is swearing allegiance to being an absolute arsehole. The more dangerous an arsehole, the better.
McGregor’s cameo at the Emirates Stadium after Arsenal’s Champions League tie this week was a depressing reminder that, you can literally do anything in public life besides human trafficking, and, so long as your numbers are high and earning potential higher, you will always be welcome to sit in privileged seats and stuff your face on fish eggs while the masses go hungry.
“Eat the money,” I remember a stranger saying to me at a fancy wedding I never should’ve been invited to, and that’s what McGregor has always done. Weaselled his way into rooms he’d never otherwise been welcome in, but, now there, he understands the only thing required to stay is a following.
Even if your disciples are cheering as you fan the flames of far-right hate, as McGregor has undoubtedly used his platform to do, once you have a following you are welcome.
I often wonder does his eejitry mask a deeper, bigoted malaise, or is it the other way round? Is the deeper malaise a performative front, and all it actually masks is the fact he is a vacuous eejit, drunk on attention?
Whatever. You usually feel sorry for the fella in the pub who nastily winds you up only to show up in your kitchen the following day, peeling spuds with your mother.
You shouldn’t. Invariably, he’s just after spreading a malicious rumour about you, only to tell her he’s only joking.