The news that greeted many of us as we awoke this morning was that Conor McGregor had been reinstated on the main-event of UFC 200, however, having been so incredibly confused by the last announcement the Dubliner had made on twitter, the news was taken with scepticism here at Balls.ie.
Sure enough, as the day went on we learned that this information was false, and that the decision to put McGregor Vs Diaz II back on was news to Dana White.
So what the hell was going on? Thankfully, Ariel Helwani managed to get a hold of John Kavanagh for The MMA Hour, and the SBG head coach gave his views on how all of this drama unfolded over the past week.
Firstly, he explained that McGregor's announcement regarding UFC 200 this morning was news to him.
I do know that we left Iceland very early this morning, which I guess was that time [of the tweet] and we ended up getting separated and went different ways. I turned my phone on, I was with Gunni [Gunnar Nelson] and Paddy Holohan, and things start going crazy.
I saw this message, now I didn't know about this and neither did his manager, so it was news to both of us. I haven't been speaking to Conor since, because I've had a bit of a day with Paddy, so I presume I'm going to see Conor this evening, in training, and find out the exact news, but that's how I heard about it.
Kavanagh then explained how he heard the news of Conor's initial tweet, on his retirement, and his reaction was absolute gold. With McGregor arriving late for training and sincerely claiming that he had retired, his coach insisted that they train first and talk later.
That was not a joke.
I'll tell you how I found out, I was coaching in Mjolnir in Iceland, he showed up late for the session and I was kind of berating him a little bit trying to get him on the mat and he said "Oh yeah, I just retired."
I said "Ok, well, let's just do the session and then we'll talk about that." So we trained for a couple of hours, I went outside and turned on my phone and saw that he put it out there.
But yeah, he was content to leave it at that. That was not a joke.
John Kavanagh then revealed that he himself had a conversation with Conor where he expressed his feeling that the reaction was a little rash, but soon it became clear that he would not be retiring.
Then comes the Las Vegas press conference, and Kavanagh's explanation of just why that was such a big issue makes it even more frustrating that the UFC were not willing to allow him to miss just this one... Especially when you consider how focused Conor was in his preparations this time around:
Did they really need to spend $10m on an ad, like?
Couldn't have said it better.
This is a fight that sells itself, Conor proved that you don't need all the press conferences and ads for this one with the frenzy he generated on twitter, so again we are left to hope for the future, and hopefully a scenario where the UFC relents and gives the fans what everybody wants to see.
As for the possibility of that happening, Kavanagh gave the following view:
I'm 51% optimistic, 49% pessimistic.
So we really don't know what is going to happen next.
It was an excellent, informative interview with Ariel Helwani and you can watch it in full below:
