Conor McGregor has said that the death of Joao Carvalho in a Dublin MMA fight affected his decision to withdraw from the promotional tour ahead of UFC 200, writes Stephen Barry.
McGregor was ringside at the tragic fight between his teammate Charlie Ward and Carvalho last April, in which Carvalho sustained fatal injuries.
McGregor released a post on Facebook at the time that paid tribute to Carvalho and outlined his own struggle to process the Portuguese fighter’s death.
In an exclusive interview with ESPN’s Sports Centre, McGregor said about the follow-up to the tragedy: “I had f—— journalists knocking down my mother’s door.
“That’s not what I signed up to do – have people knocking on my mother’s door, talking about a kid dying.
“It’s not nice to see a kid die like that. It does something to you. And there’s been show after show cancelled in Ireland since that.
“It’s f—– up to be a part of it, and I didn’t want to bring it back up and put it more on a public scale.
“After all that, I did not want to be put in front of a camera and made to dance. I just wasn’t feeling it.”
A week after his Facebook post on Carvalho’s death, McGregor announced that he’d decided to “retire young”.
“I’ll tell you what, it blew up,” McGregor said of the flurry of publicity that followed the tweet, which was retweeted 170,000 times.
“I was kind of having fun to start, half-hearted. Then all of a sudden it’s, ‘you’re off 200!’ I was like, ‘alright, well f— you too, then.’
“All said and done, there were times (I thought), ‘I should have just jumped on the damn flight.’ But sometimes you’ve got to do what’s right for you and not what’s right for everybody else — especially if you’ve done what’s right for everyone else a million times over.”
Since then, McGregor’s next move has been the subject of plenty of speculation, with Floyd Mayweather courting a boxing bout with the Dubliner.
“I’m committed to the fight game,” said McGregor, without revealing his likely next fight.
“I enjoy competition. I enjoy challenges. If a challenge is in front of me and it appeals to me, I will go ahead and conquer it.”
