On Conor McGregor (and Tom and Suzie's terrible morning show)

There’s a war of ideas brewing between Conor McGregor and the UFC. Actually, after his today’s statement on Facebook, maybe we’re well past the brewing stage and all the way to boiling over.

Look closely and you’ll see a clash over who owes what, and to whom, but also about the best way to get a productive and profitable message across in this modern world of ours.

Somewhere in the mix is a fighter at a critical crossroads, trying not to repeat the mistakes of the past – his own, sure, and other people’s too – while the whirlwind he’s riding refuses to slow down long enough to let him get a good look around.

And somehow, “Tom and Suzie on the nobody gives a [expletive] morning show” are mixed up in this too. Because of course they are.

As ridiculous as it sounds, the central conflict here is this: The UFC wanted McGregor (19-3 MMA, 7-1 UFC) to do one of those media tours (yes, another one) to promote July 9’s UFC 200 rematch with Nate Diaz (19-10 MMA, 14-8 UFC) in Las Vegas, while he wanted to scale back the media so he could stay in the gym and train for the actual fight.

According to McGregor, he asked for a slight adjustment to the schedule, and the UFC told him to get on that plane or else. He chose or else.

He also declared his retirement via Twitter, seemingly just to show the UFC what promotional power he could wield using only his thumbs. The UFC responded by yanking him from the card and then sending UFC President Dana White on a media tour of his own, seemingly to demonstrate why you shouldn’t feud with people who know people.

That’s how this became a surprising battle of media platforms. In a matter of hours it was the UFC, with its broad reach over traditional mediums like TV and talk radio, against McGregor with his army of likes on Twitter and Facebook.

Conor McGregor and Nate Diaz

Not so different from the flashpoint itself, which was the UFC’s insistence that McGregor promote his fight the old school way, with press conferences and endless interviews, while McGregor felt pretty sure he could drum up some interest without sitting through another bizarre interview on “the money channel” this time.

Usually, in this business, the hype is about the fight. This time, the fight is about the hype.

It’s tough not to sympathize at least a little bit with McGregor’s position. He’s fought three times in the past nine months, and shouldered a heavy promotional burden for each one. He toured the world and scowled for the cameras, and he did it all for, what, a travel per diem and the hope of future riches?

That’s where you get the hints of real frustration in his Facebook statement. Right at the top he tells us that the part he gets paid for is the fight itself, while he is “not yet paid to promote.”

The promotion – where he’ll go and who he’ll talk to, all to convince people to buy the fight when the time comes – happens according to a schedule that the UFC sets, and without much input from the fighters who’ll do the heavy lifting. McGregor gets paid at least in part as a result of the promotion, but who’s to say he couldn’t do a little less, or do it a little differently, and still get the same check in the end?

If this seems to be a new concern of his, just consider what happened in his last fight. He took a short-notice replacement opponent in a weight class well above his own, and he spent the days before the fight hustling to sell the show. Then he got beat up and choked into submission, and the blood was barely clotted by the time they’d booked a rematch.

That fight was a little more a month ago. The rematch is three months in the future. That’s not much time, especially if you feel like you’ve got problems to fix and gaps to close.

UFC executives might give priority to the money they’re spending to promote the show, but to the guy who’s got to step in the cage at the end of the night it probably doesn’t feel quite so important. If that guy is a student of MMA history – even just recent MMA history – he’s seen what happens to the superstars who get run into the ground and then beaten bloody.

If he wants to be bigger than the cliche, there are worse ideas than to get back into the gym.

That the UFC wouldn’t understand this isn’t so surprising. That it would go so far as to pull the company’s biggest draw from the company’s biggest show all because he didn’t want to spend a day in Stockton, Calif., saying all the same stuff he could say from Dublin, that’s just baffling.

The result was a power struggle that, maybe inadvertently, proved McGregor’s point. Think he needs to get on a plane to generate interest in his next fight? Just look at all the media attention he’s gotten, three months in advance, for saying he wouldn’t do it.

Even Tom and Suzie can’t stay away from this story now.

For more on UFC 200, check out the UFC Rumors section of the site.