I now know how my granny felt when she first saw pictures of the Beatles in the hands of my teenage mother. Born in an era where everything had to be neat, socks pulled up and hair parting just so, she was, put simply, aghast. “What on earth are these?!” she barked at my mother. “What are they wearing? What’s wrong with their hair? What’s that facial hair? What kind of specs are those? What do you see in them at all?”
Well, about a month ago, the Teenager in the house started dropping the name McGregor in his conversations, along with “yeah the big fight”, and asking where we were going to be on August 26, at 4am, and if we were 100 per cent sure we would have internet connection, what speed it would be and a million other technical requirements. “Hang on,” I said finally. “What’s the deal, who’s this chap, what’s going on?”
Promptly he raised an eyebrow in tandem with a “What?! You never heard of Him?” He whipped out his phone and showed me a picture. Conor McGregor, a fiercely scowling man in a ginger beard and boxers, wearing the Irish flag as a cape, flexing his muscles in a very strained manner to show a massive tattoo of his own name covering his abs.
At that very moment, I had a generational déjà vu. I knew exactly how my granny had felt so many years ago. Wh-what? I said to the Teenager, my face looking pretty much like that popped- eyes emoticon. What is he wearing? What’s wrong with the hair? What’s that facial hair? What kind of specs are those? What is this man?
“Yeah,” he said in that slow-paced drawl that only chillaxed teenagers who wake up at noon muster. “That’s Conor. He is, like, the most cool.”
Is this the role model we want for our kids?
Humph. Some quick googling helped me catch up. Nicknamed ‘The Notorious’, McGregor, 28, is a Mixed Martial Arts athlete. Here’s a quick explainer for readers my age: remember back in the 80s, on Italia Uno, they always used to air this American show of guys wrestling in a ring, mock-fighting while wearing the most flamboyant costumes? MMA is the real version of it – athletes work their way round the ring in staccato bursts of punches, kicks, grapples and lunges. Sometimes they shed blood. They have proper rules, top-ranked fighters and all, with headquarters in Las Vegas.
Forbes magazine named McGregor as the 24th highest paid athlete in the world, mostly because he’s a showman. After yesterday week, he’s probably gone up some ranks, seeing as he deviated slightly from his discipline to fight one of the ‘best boxers ever’ Floyd ‘Money’ Mayweather.
The booty was the trophy belt made 1.5kg of solid gold and 3,360 individual diamonds (classic example of a waste of diamonds, if you ask me). But of course it was also a money-spinning fight, with pay-per-view, sold-out ads and so on.
“Floyd Mayweather is obsessed with money,” said the Teenager. He is the owner of a chain of strip clubs, he said, knowing that that will make me strike him off the list forever. “And he even calls his team the ‘Money Team’.”
Oh, so for McGregor it’s not about money? “Yeah. But for him it’s more than that. Because he was like, nothing before, he was a plumber and he worked his way up. He’s good guy deep down.” He has a yacht now, which he called The 188 – the amount in euros he received on welfare right up until his first official American fight in 2013.
At that very moment some of McGregor’s most popular quotes jumped on screen: “People think I’m a celebrity. I’m not a celebrity. I break people’s faces for money and bounce.” Or: “Me and Jesus are cool. I’m cool with all the gods. Gods recognise gods.” And this: “I guess I have a little bit of an ego. I’m confidently cocky, you might say.” Okay.
In the end all the family got sucked into this fight, with the Teenager convincing us all that we have to side with the Irish underdog and even the daughter at some point told us that McGregor would be “mentally winning the game”. Oh right.
All the build up to it was a classic example of compulsive, addictive PR-entertainment – that menacing about on stage, the shouting, the taunting, the beating of the chest. I think it was the closest we ever came to watching gladiators in a Roman arena. In the end, the agile Mayweather won, in the 10th round by a Technical Knock Out. The professional boxer made some $100m and is now a billionaire, and McGregor is rumoured to have gone home with a kitty close to the $70m. “Conor was doing well but then got tired,” was the Teenager’s verdict.
Sounding very much like a granny, I kept asking myself if this was the role model we wanted for our kids? That everything was about money? Funnily enough, the more MMA clips I watched, the more I started saying ‘yeah’. The sport is all about hard work, about how you could be anyone if you put in the time and have the right determination. There’s certainly worse things that our youngsters can watch. By the end of this week I was a convert to this kind of sport.
I suppose it is what always happens, doesn’t it? By the time I came along, my granny was humming the Beatles songs.
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Twitter: @krischetcuti