Daniel Cormier doesn’t think Conor McGregor deserves to be roasted for the flying kick that led to his UFC 329 injury.
Cormier was on the call when McGregor opened his long-awaited return against Max Holloway with an early blitz and appeared to blow out his right knee within seconds, prompting referee Mike Beltran to wave off a fight that never got going. Afterward at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, the UFC Hall of Famer argued that piling on McGregor for the gamble is unfair, because the same move would have been celebrated had it landed.
I think we need to be careful when we judge because there have been times when people have done crazy things to start fights, and they’ve worked, and we praise the athlete as if they’re some genius. Tonight was one of those times that it didn’t work. I remember Fabricio Werdum just running across the Octagon and super kicking Travis Browne like he was on the game ‘Double Dragon.'
Cormier reached for another famous example of a high-risk opening that paid off.
Clearly, Jorge Masvidal did it to Ben Askren, and we all praised him for that. I think we need to be careful when we have a big opinion on something that happens because, sure, everybody’s mad. It went sideways, but had Conor landed that, everybody would praise him for what he did.
Before his five-year layoff, McGregor’s last two outings were both losses to Dustin Poirier, a second-round knockout at UFC 257 in January 2021 and the broken-leg stoppage in their UFC 264 rematch that July.
