​Let me tell you a story about the last time Conor McGregor fought in the UFC. I was there, and it was strange in a way that sticks with you, with many moments I’ll carry forever. It was the summer of 2021, easy to remember as the first summer after the world began loosening the chokehold of the COVID-19 era. The summer of 2020 had been defined by social distancing, hand sanitizer, and the scalding heat of wearing face masks. The summer of 2021 felt like a reentry into normal life, the first season after vaccines rolled out, when a lot of us felt suddenly protected and ready to stop fretting about unknowingly passing the virus at a birthday party or a dive bar. The mood in Las Vegas echoed that relief, which is another way to say the city seemed to be in a state of unmasked exuberance, as if half of America had decamped to the sunny strips to unleash their feelings. Las Vegas in July is always crowded, but this time it felt different, as if the entire place were adrift in a sea of sunburned, exuberant revelers just letting loose.
It was hard to separate the energy of a Conor McGregor fight week from the broader atmosphere. He was a huge presence at the time, perhaps not the colossal force he had once been in 2017 after the Floyd Mayweather boxing spectacle, but still a marquee name whose swagger and walk anyone tuned into the cultural current would recognize. McGregor stepped into the Octagon on July 10, 2021, with his usual brash confidence, and he would leave on a stretcher. The moment felt cinematic, a clash of spectacle and consequence.
This particular weekend in Vegas was electric for reasons beyond the UFC. A Garth Brooks show at Allegiant Stadium loomed on the horizon, and Justin Bieber had three performances lined up in twenty-four hours. Dave Chappelle and Joe Rogan were hosting a dual comedy show the night before the big fight. In the words of sports writer Arash Markazi, it was “the unofficial grand reopening of Las Vegas,” and stepping out of the hotel to grab a bite or a drink certainly carried that sensation.
Yet with the excitement came a certain looseness in behavior, a looseness that hadn’t quite found its footing since the shutdowns began the year before. I’d spent years covering fights in Vegas and had witnessed a spectrum of antics, from the ridiculous to the dangerous, but this felt different somehow, as if the steam that had been building since the spring was finally ready to blow. There was a sense that the city’s edge was back, but with it came a fresh, almost reckless wave of energy that was both exhilarating and a touch perilous.
In one memorable moment, I struck up a conversation with a group of middle-aged women wearing matching T-shirts that read “The Drunk Friend.” They were close-knit friends who had gathered in Vegas every summer, though they’d missed the previous season because of the pandemic. The sober member of the group joked about their mission for the trip, and the others laughed, trading stories about summers past and the chance to make up for lost time. It was a small vignette, but it captured the mood: a city and a crowd hungry for release after months of caution, eager to revel, yet somehow threading the line between celebration and chaos.
If you’re wondering about the breadth of the experience, the weekend offered a surreal blend of sport, spectacle, and social reckoning. The UFC fight itself stood as a centerpiece, a culmination of hype and history, but the surrounding scene—Vegas in its summer jubilation, the sense of a city reopening to the world, the conversations and crowds—gave the whole event a texture you don’t forget. It was a moment when many people decided to live a little louder, a little bolder, and a little more present, both on the streets and inside the arena.