If Conor McGregor really is coming back, he may be in for a more difficult return than he’s imagining.
For years now, the MMA world has waited for the return of Conor McGregor, who has not competed in almost five years. “Notorious” was scheduled to return last summer for UFC 303, but withdrew from the fight due to injury, and has yet to step back into the cage. But all that may be changing soon.
While McGregor has continually teased a possible return to the UFC, this past weekend, even UFC CEO Dana White, who has been fairly noncommittal about the possibility, got in on it, saying that a McGregor comeback is “looking good.” And former UFC middleweight champion Chris Weidman agrees.
“He’s in the drug-testing pool,” Weidman said on UFC on Paramount’s YouTube channel. “For you to come off of stuff, get back in that drug-testing pool, you’d better fight. Otherwise, you’re just going to feel worse than you used to feel for no reason. So, I think he fights, for sure.”
McGregor has not fought since shattering his leg in his trilogy bout with Dustin Poirier at UFC 264 in 2021. It was the sort of injury that Weidman is intimately familiar with, having snapped his leg against Uriah Hall just a few months before McGregor did. The traumatic nature of the injury forced Weidman out of the cage for two years, and he was never quite the same upon returning. “The All American” warns McGregor of similar issues he may face in his comeback.
“That was in 2021. He’s had enough time to recover, but I will say, your first time coming back — because I went through a very similar injury — it is hard to be the person you were beforehand, for sure,” Weidman said.
“I hope the best for him. But I remember in training camp … I was throwing kicks like crazy to try to get used to throwing kicks again. And I was fine in training, but when I got into the actual first fight since that leg injury, I was getting kicked, and as soon as I went to throw my kick back — because that was always the instinct, you get kicked, you kick back — I just couldn’t do it. My body wouldn’t let me do it. It’s just crazy when you go through a traumatic injury like that, how it can affect your head.”
And the head, Weidman says, is what it’s all about. Even at the height of his athletic career, McGregor was a mercurial personality outside the cage, and now he also has the long layoff and injury comeback to contend with. If McGregor really is coming back, Weidman says the mental part of fighting is what’s going to make or break him.
“Listen, Conor’s really good,” Weidman said. “He’s a great fighter. … It’s all about his head; where’s his head at? It seems like, from the outside looking in … now he’s more in touch with his faith, and it seems like he’s getting life in order. … That’s the type of thing I feel like he needed. So, hopefully this keeps him on track and gets him focused, back in the training room.”
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Of all the things I don’t want to have happen to me, snapping my leg in two is pretty high up on the list. It does not sound like a fun time, even less so when you’re going to use that leg to kick things for your job.
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