At this point in time, Conor McGregor is saying he's back on the UFC 200 card. It's difficult to know whether to take that at face value and there are quite a few factors at play which would suggest that you probably shouldn't be booking (or re-booking) your flights to Vegas just yet.
He may be the one that all the fans direct their ire at but the reality is that Dana White is a figurehead and that's a part that he's well payed to play. And, it must be said, he's very good at it. The reality is that the Fertitta brothers are the kingmakers and they are the ones pulling the strings.
For all his bravado, Conor McGregor was/is still just another puppet in the Fertitta's money making factory. He may have been well rewarded (relative to his peers) but the Fertitta's have been getting the better deal. And judging by suggestions this weekend, it would seem that they were not willing to give up that status.
Dana White is the one coming before the press and taking the flack for pulling McGregor from the show, he even suggested that Lorenzo Fertitta was the one who was essentially mollycoddling McGregor, but it seems that the reality of what has gone on behind the scenes is rather different.
This is all one big game of smoke and mirrors and in that world, it's difficult to know who to trust but if there are some whispers coming out, it's a fair assumption that veteran MMA journalist Dave Meltzer is as trustworthy a source as you're likely to get. Speaking on his Wrestling Observer radio show this weekend, Meltzer has opened up a very interesting window into exactly what has gone on over the past couple of weeks.
It goes back well before any of this came out. They already had the showdown. From what I gather, it was not Dana, it was Lorenzo who made the call and it was Lorenzo who was talking to Conor [or his management]. They were the ones doing the talking and that's one of the reasons why Dana probably didn't bad mouth him.
But Dana wasn't involved in this, it was Lorenzo and basically it was a case of 'I've done so much for you', 'Well we've done so much for you' and it kind of got into a stalemate. No body said anything for a while and then Conor did the retirement thing. Neither side was going to go public but then Conor went public and then Dana went public and you had the press conference and he didn't come and he missed the television commercial and there you go.
That Facebook thing that Conor thing, you know, it was brilliant for fans so it kind of puts leverage in his hands. There's a lot of stuff that's happened with them (the UFC) and they've given Conor what he wants over and over and over again and I think they felt that they need to make a stand but when it comes to $40 million, you know, pick your stand.
Meltzer has accepted that, along with Ronda Rousey, there has been a reluctance on McGregor's part to do some of the lower end media stuff. However, at the end of the day, as Meltzer said, 'you don't miss a $40 million payday off of flying to Las Vegas for one day, that's ridiculous'. This is a power struggle and the media commitments vs training argument is a fairly transparent veil.
That update from Meltzer was after UFC 197 on Saturday. Things have changed significantly since then with McGregor's latest tweets but the word around the MMA world this morning is that there's every reason to believe that McGregor is trying to force the UFC's hand. The Fertitta's are savvy individuals and they're very savvy gamblers. If Lorenzo was indeed the one giving McGregor some extra slack on his lead, it was more than likely a case of keeping your friends close and your enemies closer.
Now that McGregor has decided to go public (at the most inopportune time possible for the UFC) you'd have to think that things won't be sorted out as easily as McGregor is making out this morning. It was slightly before 11 o'clock Vegas time last night when the Dubliner made his announcement. That means that the wheels will really go into motion when that side of the globe wakes up in a few hours time.
If McGregor is telling the truth, then he's won the biggest gamble of his life, if he's leading us all up the garden path then he's just upped the ante and that's something that Lorenzo Fertitta is not likely to back down from.
[Via Wrestling Observer Online]
