When Conor McGregor incurred his second UFC loss at UFC 229 a week ago, he immediately called for a rematch. With that in consideration, his coach John Kavanagh has one requirement, in terms of how the preparations should go.
“Conor watched [the Khabib fight] right away, I hadn’t seen the fight since,” Kavanagh told ESPN’s Ariel Helwani (transcript via MMA Mania). “I got essays immediately to my phone, ‘We’re gonna do this, we’re gonna do that.’ I was like great, if we’re gonna do it, let’s do it. I would change a few things around even from a training standpoint.”
“We’d have to go … it’s kind of funny, to use a ridiculous analogy, it’s a bit like Rocky 3. We’ve got this up and coming guy and I wanna go back to get the eye of the tiger, go back and train in an old school gym. Just disappear. Get me, Conor, Artem [Lobov], Peter [Queally], and that kind of crew, and just disappear for three months.
“Really put in a nightmarish training camp, an old school training camp. If we’re going to do it again, that would be my requirement to go do this again.”
Given his current net worth and set of accomplishments, McGregor says he chooses to carry on with his fighting career for the sheer love of it. This is also why Kavanagh prefers to go all out and fully commit to their training.
“And I see Conor, from the limited amount of chat we had about it, he wants to do it again,” Kavanagh said. “And he’s excited to do it because what’s he fighting for at this stage? He’s won some titles. He’s won plenty of money.”
“So with 30 (years of age) and his second kid on the way, 31 next year, what would be driving him to do this again? It has to be that he wants to prove he’s the best. It has to be to prove to himself and to fight a great fighter like Khabib. So if we’re going to do that, let’s do it and commit to it.”
Both Khabib and McGregor are on a ten-day suspension courtesy of the Nevada State Athletic Commission for the post-fight brawl that ensued. A hearing for the incident has been set for October 24th, where indefinite suspensions may be imposed on both fighters.