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I wanted to be taken in by the brash charm, the humor, the accent. I read these stories, watched a few late-night interviews and I wanted to like him. (Mayweather, it turns out, has been conspicuously, but not necessarily wrongly, absent from such coverage.) But Conor: I read features about Conor in Esquire, in GQand then also in GQ Style and lastly in ESPN. I sought out just about every profile I could. (Photo by Brandon Magnus/Zuffa LLC/Zuffa LLC via Getty Images)īut lo, I also had an assignment. And so it seemed the World Tour would be both the beginning and end of my consideration of one Conor McGregor.
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I already love and whose terrible opinions or nauseating behavior I must already grapple with, that I’m just not going to actively put myself in a position to take on another moral quandary. There are enough athletes, musicians, actors, directors, public figures, etc. I have a rule that if I’m not already familiar or invested in someone when I learn they are - for lack of a better word - problematic, I just don’t bother. You know, that delightful four-city extravaganza where the two fighters traded racist (McGregor), homophobic (Mayweather) and misogynistic (both) insults in the name of … something. Because before I could throw my lot in with Ireland’s own, the beloved son of MMA and dapper cover star of various men’s magazines, the World Tour happened. McGregor turned out to be a more complicated case. And so, most days, I want little to nothing to do with him, even as I see him support and be supported by some of my favorite people. In the case of Mayweather, that was almost exclusively his history of domestic violence. Which is just to say that in that moment all I knew about Mayweather and McGregor was what had made it all the way to the mainstream. (I’m fine with the actual blows, it’s the disfiguration and the swollen eyes and the spitting of teeth that bothers me.) More specifically, I don’t enjoy looking at people who have been punched in the face. I don’t watch boxing because I don’t enjoy watching people get punched in the face. I couldn’t tell you whether I knew such a fight was even on the table, but when I heard Mayweather’s name, I very simply thought: pass. 26, I was sitting at my desk, watching the office MMA Slack channel blow up and writing about NBC’s beloved family drama, This Is Us. When it was officially announced that Floyd Mayweather Jr. And if you, like me, were unfamiliar with a certain Irish fighter before the World Tour headlines hit, then, well, he didn’t make a great one. It is, in fact, true what they say about first impressions.