Rory McIlroy is a Mayweather-McGregor conspiracy theorist

Ireland’s other extremely wealthy and famous sportsman, Rory McIlroy, is a well-known boxing fan and follower of Conor McGregor. Rory has been asked about McGregor regularly and often responds with some quick, uncontroversial, and laudatory remarks. He giggled in amusement at a press conference after watching the entertaining first stop of what then became an ugly Mayweather-McGregor world tour this summer.

So when he met the press this week ahead of the first tournament of the FedExCup Playoffs, he was asked about the one event consuming the sports world this weekend. And he didn’t exactly respond with some quick remarks, rather a two-minute-plus long answer on how consumed he’s been personally that also waded into conspiracy theories on Mayweather possibly taking a dive for a massive rematch payout. Here’s the full transcript:

Certainly that’s all I’ve done is follow the build up to this thing. Now that I’m off Twitter and social media, all I do is watch YouTube videos of Conor McGregor.

I’m intrigued. He talks a good game. If you just listen to his press conferences and what he says, you would think that this guy, he’s the one with the 50-0 boxing record. It’s amazing. I’m a big admirer of him. He talks about visualization and the law of attraction and all this stuff that he believes in it and he vocalizes it, and he has the courage to say what he thinks. I’m a believer in that stuff, and I’m a big advocate of that. And some of the stuff he does wouldn’t be my cup of tea, but he believes 100 percent in himself and he believes he’s going to go out there on Saturday night and shock the world.

I’m interested just to see how it all plays out, but I just fear that they do all this trash-talking and they go behind the scenes and they are having a laugh and thinking: I can’t believe we are talking all this public for a ride. We are all buying into it and they are like, can you believe these people believe this. I just hope it doesn’t turn into it and I hope it’s not in any way fixed.

It’s amazing, like we were talking about, imagine McGregor knocks him out in the first couple of rounds. They would get even more for the rematch. The rematch would be even bigger. So it’s just -- I just don’t know what that zero on Mayweather’s record is worth, and that’s the thing. That’s his legacy. If he goes down and lies down for ten seconds at some point in that, you know, is that worth making an extra few 100 million? That’s sort of up to him.

Yeah, as you can see, I’m very knowledgeable on it. (Laughter) yeah, I’m interested about it. I’m intrigued. We’ll see how it goes.

The fight is such a circus, such an event, that even McIlroy is bouncing around theories with his friends on how it could be fixed.

McIlroy has been known to attend the fights, but unless he misses the cut at The Northern Trust, he’ll have to sit this one out and watch from afar in New York. Or maybe if he’s hovering around the cut line come late Friday, he should take his own sort of dive on those last few holes and gas up the private jet for Las Vegas (we’re kidding!).