​LAS VEGAS — Not quite a decade ago, while trying to film a UFC 205 pre-fight show outside Madison Square Garden with Ariel Helwani and Marc Raimondi, chaos erupted in quintessential fashion. As soon as we started rolling, a mob of Irish fans surged toward us, hundreds strong, singing, prancing, and turning the scene into pure pandemonium. The entire broadcast felt like Ariel clinging to the mic for dear life while Raimondi and I were swallowed by a sea of green. Those were the days of Conor McGregor, rough-edged and untamed.
Back then, McGregor was preparing to challenge Eddie Alvarez for a second title, this time at lightweight, and he loomed as a near-god among MMA fans. I carried that memory with me as he showed up to the UFC 329 press conference on Thursday—punctual, if you can believe it—to hype his bout with Max Holloway. The Irish crowds who used to mortgage second mortgages to cross the Atlantic to see their hero were gone. In their place stood a broader MMA audience, UFC fans who gave McGregor the loudest ovation when he hit his familiar notes, yet the energy wasn’t quite the same.
I heard someone in the media call McGregor’s performance “cosplay,” a fitting description for a version of Conor who, perhaps, has found faith and wanted the world to know that “the Mac was back.” The crowd did rally behind him, but the sense of unwavering conviction wasn’t quite there. And maybe “conviction” is the wrong word to lean on too much, because today the situation feels more complex than it once did.
A telling example happened as I headed out of the T-Mobile Arena. I asked two fans, one wrapped in the Irish flag, whether they believed McGregor would win after five years away. The flagbearer, in a non-Irish accent, declared, “I don’t think there’s any way he’ll be denied!” His companion added, “Well… maybe that’s not the best way to put it.” It was a moment that underscored the elephant in the room: McGregor’s 2024 sexual assault liability case, a reality many would rather mute in a fight-hype environment, especially in Las Vegas. The fact of it hovers over the event, injecting a dimension that hadn’t existed during the sport’s earlier, more exuberant love affair with him.
In the end, the scene remains a study in contradiction. It used to be easy to adore Conor McGregor, to marvel at his ability to electrify the human spirit with a single moment or knockout. Today, there is a stronger pull toward skepticism, to maintain emotional distance, to keep the “asterisks” unmistakably in view. If you map the man to the fighter, the journey hasn’t been smooth. If you can separate the man from the fighter, you might still see McGregor pursuing what could be the greatest comeback fight in modern MMA—an almost unfathomable feat in the face of everything that has happened.
Nostalgists, in particular, struggle with letting go, clinging to the memories of the exhilarating “wow factor” that once defined him. Those moments still register on the emotional Richter scale for many, even as they also serve practical uses in the realm of SEO and digital nostalgia. The arc of McGregor’s career—its highs, its scandals, its improbable chances at redemption—continues to captivate, even as the public’s relationship with him grows more ambivalent and multifaceted than ever.