Daniel Cormier has seen enough to conclude that Conor McGregor’s recent actions go far beyond trash talk and into something much more internally deep.
After losing to Dustin Poirier in the UFC 264 main event, Conor McGregor unleashed an outburst at Poirier and his wife that included threats, taunting, and insults after he had suffered a broken tibia that resulted in a premature end to the bout. Some have speculated that McGregor’s comments in his Octagon interview were the product of the raw emotion felt in the heat of a disappointing and pain-ridden moment. However, we are now weeks removed from UFC 264, and McGregor has continued to stir multiple pots.
This week, Conor McGregor posted and soon deleted a string of tweets, but there was one tweet that was particularly thought to have gone too far by a large number of people, including another former UFC double-champion, Daniel Cormier.
When Conor McGregor appeared to use the death of Khabib’s father as a weapon of retaliation for Khabib celebrating Dustin Poirier’s UFC 264 victory, that’s when Cormier had seen enough (h/t MMA Fighting).
“After the fight with Dustin Poirier, a lot of people questioned whether or not Conor McGregor was reaching to try and get in the head of Dustin Poirier,” Cormier said on his ESPN show DC & RC. “Reach back to a time where he had trash talk that could affect people. It didn’t seem to work against Poirier. I feel like from him talking about Dustin’s wife to now Khabib’s father, he is just taking it way too far.
“When you’re dealing with death and COVID and all these other things that we’ve dealt with over the last year and a half, that’s all off limits. We talked about wives and families being off limits, but when you’re talking about a man’s everything—Khabib’s dad was his everything — and you’re talking about him being gone today due to something that has been so terrible for our entire world, you use that in a sense to get back?”
The precise tweet McGregor submitted read, “Covid is good and father is evil,” in an apparent response to Khabib’s post-UFC 264 tweet that read “Good always defeats evil” captioned beneath an image of a victorious Dustin Poirier and a fallen McGregor in the aftermath of their trilogy bout.
It’s one thing for McGregor to let his temper and emotions get the better of him in the moments after his painful defeat, but to continue to react with such malice weeks later is what is most telling for Cormier regarding McGregor’s mental state.
“You know what’s most disturbing? This wasn’t done the day after the fight or the same night of the fight,” Cormier said. “This was done weeks after the fight, so it feels like it was thought of and it was thought through for Conor to tweet something like that.
“Absolutely crossed the line. I think when stuff like that is being said, it’s a cry for help. Conor has all the money in the world, he has all the fame, but now when you start to dig at that level, it’s like somebody needs to get to McGregor and help him to start to kind of re-shift his mind and his focus and get him back to a better place. It’s unfortunate.”
Cormier also revealed that he reached out to Khabib to check if he was alright after reading those comments since the retired Dagestani will not be able to exact vengeance on McGregor inside the UFC Octagon. But in actuality, Khabib could theoretically always unretire to fight McGregor if he so chose.
Perhaps that was the method behind the madness of McGregor’s controversial if not disturbing tweet: to serve as a veiled effort at luring his nemesis back into the cage for the rematch McGregor had requested for so long. Or perhaps Cormier is right in that this behavior has no connection to the sport whatsoever and is instead something that requires an intervention.
