Conor McGregor insists he will beat Floyd Mayweather Jr. on Saturday and even promised a first-round knockout in the final days before the fight. But he sang a much different tune about Mayweather when he was just a boxing spectator.
Conor McGregor tweeted 2 years ago that Floyd Mayweather can’t be beat in boxing
Once upon a time, McGregor thought boxing was not the style of fighting that could defeat Mayweather.
Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images
In May 2015, Mayweather defeated Manny Pacquiao — long considered to be the most dangerous threat to his undefeated record — by unanimous decision. It improved his record to 48-0, and McGregor tweeted shortly after the fight that “boxing is not the style of fighting” to defeat Mayweather:
At the time, McGregor was more than two months away from his first UFC title fight and had no reason to think he’d ever face Mayweather. It was a couple of months after his tweet that the mixed martial artist appeared on Conan and first publicly entertained the idea of a fight with the boxer.
“If you’re asking would I like to fight Floyd, who would not like to dance around the ring for $180 million?”
There’s plenty of cynicism surrounding the stakes of the fight. Both will make staggering amounts for a maximum of 36 minutes of fighting Saturday, and there are plenty of conspiracy theorists — including golfer Rory McIlroy — who are concerned that the fight and trash-talking are all staged as a way to dupe the public out of money.
McGregor’s tweet from two years ago that Mayweather’s bout “felt more like a business transaction than a fight” is only going to fuel the conspiracies.
In the two years since his tweet, McGregor has had five MMA fights and earned the UFC’s featherweight and lightweight titles. Mayweather fought just one more time, in Sept. 2015, and then retired.
Evidently, McGregor’s thoughts on boxing being a style that can’t take out Mayweather have evolved in the last 27 months.
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