Conor McGregor and the Winds of Change

Conor McGregor celebrating with his paymasters

The cult of personality around celebrities of any stripe is always unnerving. The idea that a particular talent gives one's words more weight or that being well known makes any expression of basic niceness a sign of amazing virtue has disquieting implications for what it means to be a social individual in our mass culture. It also shows how easily taken in we can be by a little charisma from someone corporations have elevated for the sake of enriching themselves. It is touching the royal robe taken to an absurd extreme.

More disturbing is the idea that celebrities, but particularly athletes, owe their fans a perpetual obligation. They literally give us their flesh, on fields, courts, ice, tracks, mats, rings and cages. For this, they are well compensated, to be sure, but that compensation is between employer and employee. It's hard to imagine the level of effusiveness toward their customers required in sports being asked of any other profession. In most other vocations, workers are asked to treat their customers with courtesy, but most importantly, to do a good job. Somehow in sports, watching the athletes perform can feel like we are participating (and because of the profit structures, in a sense we are). Through this quasi-participation we demand our pound of flesh, but we also demand a sort of deference that borders on servility. It is not enough that athletes, and fighters in particular, give us their bodies and receive payment for it, but we also demand they be grateful to us for allowing them to make that sacrifice. For all the glorious pretense of sport, there is still something deeply ignoble about earning money with one's body and so we insist on supplication to enforce illusions of status over people who are physically gifted.

In light of the grueling training camps and weight cuts fighters go through and the documented trends of severe social anxiety among those who choose beating and getting beaten as the best way to earn their daily bread, it seems they can be forgiven for not always being affable. Brooding over entering a cage to hurt or be hurt is a grim affair. The fighter who can approach it with enough aplomb that managing mass fan interactions is an easy assignment seems more suspicious, not less.

And more importantly, populists who give the media and fans the "corn," as Ali called it, can be mistaken for deserving more than they do in the naturally meritocratic fighting world. At this point, most people don't even debate that Conor McGregor should be in a title fight and when they rationalize how he managed to earn it, it's mostly promotional regurgitation. It is only the invincibility of Jose Aldo that has created this opportunity. McGregor's talent is real, but it is the loudness of his questioning Aldo's invincibility that has made the fight of interest. Due to the tactics employed, there have even, startlingly, been comparisons to Muhammad Ali, which tragically misconstrues the context of resistance to oppression in which Ali's performances operated.

In drawing Chad Mendes instead, the narrative changes to being more about Conor proving his worth, though the promotional engine would have one believe it's simply a coronation. Mendes represents a bulwark against the subversion of meritocracy in MMA in favor of base hype. A meritocratic rise to the top fueled by a pure love of combat is fairly sacred among fighters and some fans. It's one of the reasons why taking dives or easy fights is considered so deplorable as just performing for the money is insuffficiently transcendent to fit the metaphors we would graft onto watching people batter each other. Talking big and gladhanding fans is an equally reprehensible way to the top in some quarters, but fighters know how hardscrabble the business is, so few will object unless they feel overlooked or unless pressed by a relentlessly questioning media.

Conor McGregor is unique right now, but he's barely treading new ground. A victory over Chad Mendes, however the fight came about, will launch him into serious conversation in earnest, but until he accomplishes such a feat, the show he and the Zuffa promotional team are putting on should be greeted with skepticism. It may bode ill for the sustainability of our sport despite the short term spike in revenues it brings to a UFC that has gotten used to flash in the pan stunts in the wake of becoming a global brand. For McGregor's sake, I hope he's everything he claims to be. After UFC 189, we will at last be able to judge him based on what he's done rather than what we've been told. How fandom reacts or is reshaped by this bright and unexpected star may well impact the sport for some time to come.