For Conor McGregor, it was all slipping away. The lead. The fight. The promotional power. Like a slow-motion free fall, it had to feel both horrific and out of his control. He had already lost to Nate Diaz once, taking a chunk from his mystique. His aura seemed to crumble. Leading after two rounds at UFC 202 but fading, McGregor looked up to the clock, only to see eternity staring back at him—or at least something close to it.
He shuffled right, he trotted left. There was nowhere to go. Diaz had him cornered everywhere, his length cutting McGregor off, his sharp angles threatening to chop him down at every pass, the same way he had done back in March.
A loss would be, if not catastrophic, at least devastating, a crushing blow to his box-office magnetism. McGregor was a man teetering on the edge.
The greats have an inherent sense of realizing those moments and responding, and on Saturday night, McGregor answered many of the questions that have been raised since he suffered his first UFC defeat. He did not mentally break again. He did not surrender to fatigue. He summoned the will of a champion.
With everything on the line, McGregor found a reserve tank and emptied it, fighting gamely to the final horn and emerging with a majority-decision victory. Against Diaz, that is saying something. This is an athlete who runs triathlons for fun.
McGregor was always fighting from behind on stamina, but he would never acknowledge it. Instead, he came through when it counted most. Which means, in this bizarre feud between the UFC featherweight champ and a longtime lightweight contender, it’s time for a trilogy.
“Surprise, surprise, the king is back,” McGregor said in the cage directly after the final scores were read. “If you want this trilogy, it’s on my terms. I came up to 170, now you’ll come back to 155 and we’ll finish what we’ve started.”
Aside from any current UFC featherweights, there won’t be many objections. And within seconds, Diaz confirmed what we all suspected. He was in, too.
“I want No. 3,” he said. “I gave him No. 2, so let’s do it.”
While the fighters want it, and the fight world might want it, too, the UFC shut down the idea, at least for now.
“We’re definitely not doing this a third time right now,” UFC president Dana White said in a Fox Sports 1 interview after the bout.
But of course, White has been known to change his mind, and he was also quick to acknowledge the trilogy's lure. And the new UFC ownership team—the sale was officially completed earlier this week—may have its own ideas, too. Would they really let this box-office gold slip away?
Ronda Rousey vs. Holly Holm II will never be worth as much as it could have been had it taken place shortly after the first match happened. Has that lesson been learned?
What a battle. Wow. I'm in awe of that fight. Two different spots where each guy looked completely done. Give us a trilogy.
— Bill Simmons (@BillSimmons) August 21, 2016
On top of it, these are two newly empowered fighters. For the first time in UFC history, both fighters in a match were guaranteed seven-figure paydays, according to the Nevada Athletic Commission (via Yahoo’s Kevin Iole.) McGregor made a $3 million purse; Diaz got $2 million. Both likely got a piece of the pay-per-view pie, too.
There are multimillionaires who will try to call their shot as they did this time around, when they basically dug their heels in the dirt and declined to fight anyone but each other. In the immediate aftermath of Saturday night's fight, McGregor seemed ready to do battle again.
"How can they strip me of my belt?" McGregor said in the post-fight press conference. "I knocked out the interim champion in 13 seconds."
While the collision course between fighters and promotion nears, Saturday's bout was truly won by McGregor in the pivotal fourth. He had won the first two rounds only to watch Diaz storm back and take the third, overwhelming him late with a barrage against the cage that was so one-sided, one judge scored the round 10-8 for Diaz.
All of the momentum had swung back to Diaz’s side, and McGregor seemed drained. The low leg kicks that had characterized his first two rounds had all but been abandoned, and he seemed more interested in circling out of danger than actually engaging.
But against one of the all-time most active strikers in UFC history—Diaz’s 238 strikes landed against Donald Cerrone at UFC 141 remain a one-fight record—McGregor didn’t wilt. Instead, he actually out-landed Diaz in the fourth, 46-36, according to FightMetric. The display of will was enough to survive a final fifth-round burst from Diaz.
Adding to the degree of difficulty, McGregor may have broken his foot during the fight, according to the UFC’s broadcast announcers. After the bout, he could be seen limping out of the cage and was later shown on air walking on crutches backstage.
The suspected injury might well explain why McGregor went away from his best early weapon, the low kicks that hampered Diaz’s mobility. According to FightMetric, a full 24 percent of McGregor’s strikes were to Diaz’s legs, but that was hardly the extent of the damage he did. He dropped Diaz three times in the fight—once in the first and twice in the second—with thudding but measured left hands. McGregor was much more surgical and precise this time around, but he was still threatened by Diaz’s undying durability.
Every time after being dropped, Diaz was back on his feet in seconds and returning fire. While he wore the damage all over his body, from bruising on his legs to several cuts on his face, to his credit, he made it a fight in a situation where many others would have been finished. In some ways, there was no way he should have been there, but there he was, too, all the way to the end.
When it was over, Diaz helped McGregor up. The fierce opponents have clearly found common ground amid a kinship of competition. When they're not busy fighting each other, they like taking on the sport's power brokers. In doing so, they set themselves up for a trilogy fight, and another money match. When it mattered most, McGregor came through, and yet somehow, they both left as winners.
