Are Conor McGregor’s fighting days numbered after TKO loss to Dustin Poirier?
“The elation that one might have expected to see from Dustin Poirier was absent.“
The following written content by Kevin Iole
The elation that one might have expected to see from Dustin Poirier was absent. He’d hit the MMA lottery by knocking out Conor McGregor on Saturday at UFC 257 in Abu Dhabi, but he didn’t look or act like a guy who’d had that one-in-a-billion winning Powerball ticket.
You win the Powerball and you jump and you yell and you cheer and you can’t believe your good fortune.
Poirier did none of that. It was like he expected to do what he’d done on one of the most remarkable nights in UFC history.
It was McGregor who was all smiles afterward, the strut that so many love to imitate absent but the grin and the good humor still there. McGregor said he’d be back, sort of blamed the loss on his inactivity and said he’d fight again this year.
It was hard to tell if he were serious. The smile could just as easily have been one of relief.
Perhaps the calf kick and the left and right hand that followed it removed a massive weight from McGregor’s back.
He’s worth around a quarter of a billion dollars or more, entirely due to his ability to beat people up while regaling them with one-liners before he does it.
He has everything he could want in life except for one very important thing:
Peace.
He’s hounded everywhere he goes. There are no quick trips to the grocery store or a leisurely browse at the latest drivers in the golf store. He requires an entourage the size of a presidential Secret Service detail to run his errands.
He’s as fierce a competitor in the sport, but there comes a time in every athlete’s life when he knows that, well, things are different.
Maybe that time has come for McGregor.
Poirier had quietly become one of the greatest fighters in the world after getting starched by McGregor at UFC 178 on Sept. 27, 2014, in Las Vegas. He lasted 106 seconds that night and was never really in the fight. Read more from Yahoo! Sports.
