Eddie Alvarez recently had an interesting feature interview with MMA Fighting where he discussed various topics as they walked down the streets of Philadelphia with Ariel Helwani, Esther Lin, and E. Casey Leydon. Apart from opening up and sharing intimate details about his life growing up, one of the talking points for the new UFC lightweight champion was Conor McGregor.
“People get confused, they think the more popular you are, it means you’re good at fighting. That’s not the case,” he said. “I think he’s a guy who’s fortunate to have a country on his back.”
“Because the business is coming before the sport now, the perception is becoming more important than what really is. This is why I said I don’t think they’ll take the fight,” Alvarez said. “If the perception is most important, then you don’t try to beat the best guy in the world. You don’t go after me. You go after the guy who looks like the best guy in the world, but really isn’t.”
Alvarez, who said the rumored super-fight hasn’t been offered yet, spoke about not being impressed with McGregor’s skills.
“In a sparring room, there’s always a guy, we call him the rest round,” Alvarez said about Conor. “He’s the rest round. He’s the guy you grab when you’re super tired and you go, ‘Hey, c’mon man, let’s do a round.'”
“To me, to the level of guys we train with. He comes to our gym and trains, he’s the rest round. For everyone, not just me. For Frankie (Edgar), for Edson (Barbosa), for Marlon (Moraes), for any one of us,” he said. “It’s comical. It’s laughable that a guy like that says he would finish me.”
He also addressed the Nate Diaz bout, and how he thinks McGregor would match up against him.
“I was impressed by like about seven minutes of it,” Alvarez said about McGregor’s last bout. “The first seven minutes and then it all looked really sloppy and didn’t look championship caliber to me. It didn’t look like a guy who spent $300,000 on a training camp. I could have did that sh-t for $5, what just went on there. I think he could have spent a lot less and got a lot more.”
“Past the eight-minute mark, I don’t see anything but being dominant,” Alvarez said about the potential match up. “I think he can do well, because it’s easy to be technical in the first round or two. It’s easy to be technical. But when the sh-t hits the fan and it turns into a fight, I will f-cking dominate this guy every step of the way. When it turns into when he’s a little bit tired and he has to dig down, it’s over. It’s all over.”
“If this fight happens, if it gets signed, I feel like I’m about to tell the whole world that there’s no Santa Claus. And everybody is gonna be disappointed,” he said. “It was a lie and I’m gonna steal the magic from everyone.”
Watch the clip of the entire interview above. It is certainly a must watch, as they discuss other intimate topics with the champion opening up like never before.
About the author
