A bar is, on reflection, the best place to watch a bar fight. Ultimately, for Conor McGregor, there was time for neither much thinking nor a lot of what the Irishman would regard as proper fighting. He roughly doubled his Warholian 15 minutes of fame and considerably enhanced his wealth, while retaining a good deal of dignity in defeat.
Yet, from our noisy spot in front of a screen in the Lansdowne Road Bar (where else?) in New York City on Saturday night, it was clear that what mental and physical space Floyd Mayweather allowed the mixed martial artist on his grown-up debut in a squared ring in Las Vegas was way more intense than anything McGregor can have imagined during his youth back in Dublin. His diddling about during a handful of teenage amateur boxing bouts in Crumlin, topped up by preparation for this fight that had its infancy in sparring a year ago, was the most uninformative preparation for what engulfed him from the midway stages of the nine-and-a-bit rounds it lasted.
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