Chapter 1Crumlin

Foreword

At sixteen he was rising at six, taking two buses to a building site in Dundalk or Ashbourne or wherever the crew was working that week, and spending the day on his knees fitting copper pipe under the floorboards of houses he would never enter again. He was earning about two hundred euros a week. He hated it. Of everything I learned across the two years I spent inside Conor McGregor's life, this is the fact I kept coming back to, because it is the only part of the story that no camera ever recorded: a boy laying pipe in a stranger's kitchen, invisible, wiring the plumbing that would carry other people's water long after he had packed his tools and gone.

Almost everything after that was watched. The weigh-ins, the face-offs, the press conferences that were not press conferences but rallies, the walk to the cage, the thirteen seconds, the money counted out loud into a microphone — his career is one of the most thoroughly filmed lives in the history of his sport. There are hundreds of hours of him. That was the problem I brought to this book, and it took me a while to understand that it was the problem and not the solution.

The athletes I have followed are the ones the cameras loved: men whose whole careers happened at full volume and whose private lives, precisely because the public performance was so loud, the press mostly declined to follow. Covering them, I had learned that the more film exists of a man, the less we tend to know him. The camera is not a window. It is a performance the subject agrees to give, and McGregor had been giving his since he was twelve years old, standing in front of a bedroom mirror telling himself in the second person what he would become. He was, by that measure, the wrong subject for me — a man who had already narrated himself, leaving nothing, it seemed, for a biographer to find. That is exactly why I wanted him.

I expected to spend two years with a highlight reel and a mouth. I found, instead, the parts he had never bothered to perform: the plumbing apprenticeship, the hundred and eighty-eight euros a week on the dole, the girlfriend who paid the rent through the years when he had nothing, the mother who made a single phone call that saved the whole career before it had begun. I worked from the public record and only the public record — the court transcripts published by the Irish Courts Service, the memoir his coach wrote, the daily reporting of the Irish and British press, the tens of thousands of words McGregor himself spoke into microphones over fifteen years. I conducted no secret interviews and I have invented no scenes. Everything in these pages, a reader can go and check.

Some of what the record holds is grave, and I have reported it exactly as the record reports it and no further. In November 2024 a jury in the High Court in Dublin found, on the balance of probabilities — the standard in an Irish civil case — that McGregor had sexually assaulted a woman named Nikita Hand in a hotel room in Sandyford in 2018. He appealed; the Court of Appeal dismissed the appeal; the finding stands. A separate civil suit, filed in Florida, was withdrawn before any court tested it. I have set down what the courts found and what they did not, in their own terms, and left the reader to sit with it, which is the only honest thing a biographer can do with a life still being lived.

That, in the end, is why McGregor is worth a book. He is the case my usual method was built to miss: the most public man in his sport, whose private life the press declined to follow until a civil court in Dublin forced it into the open, where it could no longer be a performance. He is a boy from a terrace in Crumlin who spoke his future into a mirror and watched it arrive, and who then could not find the instruction, in any of the paperbacks that had taught him to visualize, for what a man does when there is nothing left to visualize. This book is my attempt to follow him from the mirror to the cage to the courtroom to the country that is now, warily, deciding what to do with him.

— Devon Marable, Brooklyn

Chapter 1 · Crumlin

The neighborhood sits in the southwest of Dublin, four miles from the river, built in the 1930s on what had been fields belonging to a dairy farm. The houses are small and attached in terraces of four and six, red brick facing the street, pebble-dash above the door, steel gates at the low garden walls. In summer the estate smells of cut grass and diesel. In winter it smells of coal smoke and wet stone. The streets run in grids and curves around a central green and bear the names of old Irish counties and old Irish saints: Clogher Road, Kells Road, Sundrive. The bus to the city stops at the top of the hill and takes twenty minutes in traffic. The accent is thick even by Dublin standards, with the flat vowels and clipped consonants of working-class south-inner-city speech pushed one stop further out on the number 18.

Conor Anthony McGregor was born on July 14, 1988, at the Coombe Women's Hospital in the Liberties, a few miles north. His parents were Tony and Margaret. His mother's maiden name was Colligan. He had two older sisters, Erin and Aoife. The family lived first on Curlew Road in Drimnagh, moved briefly to Lucan when Conor was a small child, then came back to Crumlin, to a house on Kilworth Road with a small kitchen at the back and a concrete yard beyond it. His father worked, at various points, as a taxi driver, a plumber, a laborer on building sites around the city. His mother cleaned and took in domestic work. The household was not poor in the way that some Dublin households were poor. No one went without a meal. But there was never a surplus. Pocket money was not a concept. When Conor wanted something, he was told to wait for a birthday or a Christmas. The family went on summer holidays to the caravan parks of County Wicklow and County Wexford. They did not go abroad.

He was a stubborn child and a physical one. His father later told an interviewer that from the age of two Conor had been a boy who could not be sat still, who climbed what was climbable and broke what was breakable, who, at four, had to be watched at all times on the street because he would run into traffic to chase a football. He was given to rages of a kind that his sisters were not given to, rages that passed quickly and left no resentment but which, while they lasted, were complete. He was also funny. He was the child in the family who made the adults laugh. He did imitations of the neighbors. He made faces in photographs. He had, from the beginning, an actor's consciousness of the camera when a camera was on him and an actor's disinterest when it was not.

He was sent to Gaelscoil Scoil Mológa for primary school, an Irish-language school in Harold's Cross, and then to the Irish-language secondary school Coláiste de hÍde in Tallaght. He was not an academic child. He liked English and hated mathematics. He read comic books and, later, self-help books: Napoleon Hill, Norman Vincent Peale, the thin paperbacks of American motivational literature that his father had on a shelf in the front room and that Conor, from about fourteen, began taking down and reading in bed at night. The books told him that the mind creates the world. The books told him that a man who visualized his future with sufficient detail would cause that future to occur. He believed them. He was twelve years old, thirteen, fourteen, and he was standing in front of the bedroom mirror after his mother had gone to sleep, speaking to himself in the second person, telling himself what he would be.

The violence arrived early. Crumlin in the late 1990s and early 2000s was not an unsafe neighborhood by the standards of working-class Dublin (it was not, for example, Ballyfermot or Tallaght West), but it was a neighborhood in which boys fought, and a boy who could not fight, or who would not, was marked. Conor was small. At twelve he was among the smaller boys in his class. At fourteen he was still shorter than his sisters. He did not lose fights in school but he did not win them either. He withdrew. He became, by his own later account, quiet and watchful. He developed, around this time, a habit of going home directly from school, not lingering with other boys at the shops or in the park, not engaging unless an engagement was forced on him.

When Conor was twelve his father took him to a boxing gym. The gym was Crumlin Boxing Club, on Windmill Road, a converted industrial unit down a lane off the main street, four bags hanging from the ceiling and a ring in the center that was used mostly for sparring. The coach was Phil Sutcliffe, a former Olympian. Conor was given a pair of gloves too big for his hands and told to hit the bag. He hit it for an hour. He went back the next week. He went back the week after that. Boxing, he discovered, was not violence. Boxing was the organization of violence. Boxing took the chaos that he had been trying not to feel and gave it a grammar. A jab was a sentence. A combination was a paragraph. A round was an argument. He began to go three times a week, then four, then every day. He was the smallest boy in the gym and, for the first six months, the worst. He stayed.

By fourteen he had stopped being the worst. By fifteen he was winning the under-16 bouts at the club tournaments. He never became a national-level boxer — the records of the Irish Amateur Boxing Association show him as an unremarkable club fighter, decent but not promising — but he had discovered something that mattered more than the competition results, which was that he was willing to take punishment in the gym that other boys were not. He would spar for rounds past the point when the other boy wanted to stop. He would finish a session bleeding from the nose and go home and eat dinner and go back the next day. The willingness was not courage exactly. It was closer to a refusal to feel the pain as pain. Other people seemed to feel pain as a signal to stop. He did not.

The family, during these years, was struggling. His father had work and did not have work in alternating cycles of months. His mother worked constantly. Conor, at sixteen, left school and took an apprenticeship as a plumber. He hated it. He rose at six, took two buses to a building site in Dundalk or Ashbourne or wherever the crew was working, and spent the day fitting copper pipe under floorboards in houses he would never enter again. He was eighteen. He was earning about two hundred euros a week. He was going to the boxing gym in the evenings. He was telling anyone who would listen, and some who would not, that he was going to be a world champion at something, he was not yet sure what.

He met Dee Devlin in a nightclub in Dublin in the spring of 2008. She was twenty. She worked at a tanning salon and, during the day, as a receptionist in a doctor's surgery in Walkinstown. She had grown up a few streets away from him. She was blonde, slight, pretty in a way that was not flashy, with the kind of calm manner that Conor, who was himself not calm, was immediately drawn to. He asked her to dance. He told her that night, the way he told everyone those years, that he was going to be a champion. She did not laugh. She did not believe him exactly, but she did not laugh. She gave him her number. The relationship that began in that nightclub would last the rest of his life — through the welfare years, through the rise, through the money and the cameras and the verdicts and the trials, through a period when he would be one of the most recognized men in the world and a period when he would be one of the most despised, through four children and two decades. At every step along the way Dee Devlin would remain the one person who had known him before any of it, who had loved him when he had nothing, and whose loyalty the biography would never be able to explain.

By Dee Devlin's own later account, the man she met that night in the Dublin nightclub where she then worked was, even at twenty, entirely certain of his own future in a way that she found, she said, both ridiculous and compelling. She had not, she said, thought he would make it. She had thought he was deluded. She had given him her number anyway. The giving of the number was not, in her account, a declaration of belief. It was a beginning. The belief came later, she said, watching him in the gym, watching him train in a way she had not seen other men train. By 2010 or 2011, she said, she had believed. By 2012, when the Cage Warriors double title was won, the question was not whether she believed but what believing meant for the practical arrangement of their shared life. It meant paying the rent. She paid it. The biography does not know what it meant beyond that. The biography knows that she paid it, and that the paying mattered, and that the rest of the story depended on it.

A year later he quit the plumbing apprenticeship. He came home one afternoon and told his parents he was not going back. His father, a working man from a working family, did not accept this calmly. There was a fight. There were several fights. His mother, quieter, asked him what he intended to do instead. He told her he intended to fight. She asked him how he intended to pay rent. He told her he did not yet know. He went on the dole, the unemployment benefit of the Irish state, which in 2009 paid a single man under twenty-five a weekly sum of one hundred and eighty-eight euros. One hundred and eighty-eight euros was the amount he would later repeat, in press conferences and interviews, as if it were a catechism. I was on welfare. I was collecting 188 euros a week. The repetition was not accidental. The repetition was the thing he had climbed out of. The repetition was the measure against which everything that came afterwards was being weighed.

The Irish social welfare system, which he was navigating in 2009, required a claimant under twenty-five to register with the employment services agency and to be available for suitable employment or training. Conor was, on paper, available. In practice, he was at SBG from eight in the morning until six in the evening, six days a week, training to be a professional fighter. He was not lying to the welfare office exactly. He was available for employment in the sense that a man can be available for something he has no intention of pursuing. He was, however, clearly directing his energy toward a career that the welfare system's administrative design did not contemplate: a young Irishman on social assistance training to fight professionally in a sport that was not yet regulated in Ireland and that paid, in its early stages, amounts that would not have qualified as income under the welfare rules even if he had declared them. He declared them anyway, eventually, when they grew large enough to matter. Until then, he was, in the official records of the Irish state, an unemployed man of no fixed occupation from Crumlin, available for work, collecting his hundred and eighty-eight euros a week and spending every daylight hour trying to make it unnecessary.

He walked into Straight Blast Gym Ireland (SBG, a Brazilian jiu-jitsu and mixed martial arts gym in Rathcoole, west of Dublin) for the first time in 2007, at eighteen, brought by a friend named Tom Egan who was already training there. The gym at that point was not the gym it would later become. It was a few mats on the floor of a community-hall space that the proprietor, a thin, bookish-looking man in his early thirties named John Kavanagh, had rented on a month-to-month basis. Kavanagh, from Rathfarnham, had been bullied as a child, had discovered Brazilian jiu-jitsu through a videotape his friend rented at a shop on George's Street when he was nineteen, and had built up a small but dedicated gym over the following decade. He looked, as he himself later observed, more like a primary school teacher than a cage fighter. He was in fact the first serious mixed martial arts coach Ireland had ever produced.

Kavanagh had written a book, published in 2016 as Win or Learn: MMA, Conor McGregor and Me: A Trainer's Journey, that documented his own formation as a coach alongside Conor's formation as a fighter. The book is one of the primary sources available for the early SBG years, and it reveals, in its account of the Tuesday and Thursday evening sessions at Rathcoole, a training environment that was not yet a professional facility but was run with the discipline and methodology of one. Kavanagh had, in early 2007, been promoted to a black belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu by Matt Thornton, the American founder of the Straight Blast Gym International association, becoming the first BJJ black belt in the Republic of Ireland, and had introduced to his small gym a structured approach to drilling that the other Irish gyms of the period did not practice. Where other Irish boxing and kickboxing gyms taught technique by demonstration and imitation, Kavanagh taught it by isolating each component and repeating it in pairs under his observation, correcting errors in real time, and then, only then, introducing live sparring to test whether the correction had been absorbed. The method was, in the terminology of sports science, deliberate practice. It produced, in athletes who accepted it, a rate of improvement that gym-trained fighters working from instinct alone could not replicate.

Aisling Daly, the female fighter who had been present at Conor's first session and who would go on to a UFC career of her own, was already training with Kavanagh that year. So was Tom Egan, who would become the first Irish-born fighter to compete in the UFC, debuting on January 17, 2009 in a welterweight bout at UFC 93 in Dublin — the organization's first event in Ireland — and losing by TKO in the first round to John Hathaway. Egan's debut and loss, a night that Kavanagh and several SBG members attended at the arena in Dublin, was formative for the gym's collective ambition. Egan had been good enough to reach the UFC and not good enough to win there. The result established a clear challenge: the question was not whether an Irish fighter could sign with the organization, but whether an Irish fighter could be prepared well enough to win inside it. Kavanagh carried the question back to Rathcoole. Conor, who had by then already turned professional himself, was watching. The loss was not a deterrent. The loss was a calibration tool.

Conor walked in and, before he had even taken off his coat, told Kavanagh he intended to become a UFC champion. Kavanagh had heard this before. He had heard it from boys who would not come back after the first session and boys who would come back for three months and boys who would train hard for a year and then get girlfriends and disappear. He gave Conor the standard first training and, at the end of it, when Conor was asked to spar with one of the gym's female members, a woman named Aisling Daly who would go on to have her own UFC career, Conor hit her hard enough to double her over. Kavanagh came out of his office. He put Conor in the ring and, in Kavanagh's later phrase, took him down and beat him up until he received the message loud and clear: these people are your teammates, not your opponents. Conor, after being beaten up, looked Kavanagh in the eye and said: Yeah. I deserved that.

The relationship that began in that ring that afternoon would last, at the time of writing, nearly twenty years. It would produce the fastest title knockout in UFC history. It would produce the first simultaneous two-division champion in UFC history. It would produce, also, a civil verdict for rape, a pub assault, a bus attack, a broken leg, and a slow descent out of the sport into a kind of grotesque public spectacle. Kavanagh would stay. He would stay through every version of it. He would call Conor his little brother and mean it. He would also, on certain nights in the years to come, sit in his car outside his own gym and wonder whether he had helped produce a world champion or released something that should have stayed in Crumlin.

At the end of his first year at SBG, Conor turned professional. His debut, in March 2008 at a small promotion called Cage of Truth in a hotel function room in Dublin, was a win: a second-round stoppage of a fighter named Gary Morris, for a purse of a few hundred euros that came out of the ticket money he himself had sold to his family and friends. His first professional defeat came soon after, on the same circuit. His opponent was a Lithuanian fighter named Artemij Sitenkov. Sitenkov was an experienced grappler. Conor, who did not yet respect grappling, walked forward in the first round throwing his hands and was submitted by a kneebar in sixty-nine seconds. He lay on the canvas as his leg was held straight by a man he had never met, and he tapped. The crowd, most of whom he knew, most of whom had paid for their tickets from his own hand, fell silent. His parents, in the third row, watched their son lose in just over a minute.

The Sitenkov loss was the loss that almost closed everything. But it was not, in the formal record, his last early defeat. He would lose one more bout in his professional career before the run that took him to the UFC — a submission loss to Joseph Duffy in November 2010, at a Cage Warriors event in Cork. Duffy, a Donegal man, would later sign with the UFC himself and compile a respectable record. The loss to him was not a humiliation but a data point, and a fast one: Duffy submitted him in the first round, in thirty-eight seconds. Conor had been outgrappled again, the same weakness Sitenkov had exposed. The grappling weakness, the dimension that Sitenkov had exploited and that Duffy had reinforced, became, in Kavanagh's training philosophy, the organizing priority of the following two years. Conor spent 2010 and 2011 on the mats more than on his feet, drilling guard passes, back-takes, and submission defenses until the discipline that had always been there in his striking became present also in his wrestling. He was not, when the UFC signed him, a complete grappler. He was, however, a man who could no longer be submitted easily by an opponent who had figured out his habits.

He went home that night. He did not train for a week. He did not train for a month. He stopped answering Kavanagh's calls. He took the money that he owed Kavanagh for the tickets and spent it. He began to drink. He began, by his own later admission and by his mother's, to drift. He was twenty years old, back on the dole, with a loss on his record and a coach who had given up on him and a girlfriend who was paying his rent and a father who had warned him this would happen and a future that, from the point of view of anyone looking at him in the spring of 2008, appeared to be closing.

The month he spent drifting after the Sitenkov loss was the month that, in every subsequent interview, he would describe as the lowest point of his life before the rise. It was not, in absolute terms, a spectacular degradation. He was sleeping in his own bed, eating his mother's food, drawing his welfare payment. But it was the first time, since he had walked into Crumlin Boxing Club at twelve years old and discovered that the chaos could be organized, that the organization had completely failed him. He had been submitted, in sixty-nine seconds, by an opponent he had walked in against without respect. He had been submitted by grappling, the discipline he had publicly scorned as something that happened to other people. He had been submitted in front of everyone he knew. He had not understood what to do with the failure, which was the actual problem: not the failure itself, which any honest assessment of his preparation would have predicted, but the absence of a method for processing it. He had not yet, at twenty, encountered an adult set of tools for understanding loss. He had understood, from the Napoleon Hill books, that a man visualizes success. He had not been told what a man does when the visualization fails. He had been told, by the visualizations, that failure was not a possibility if the visualization was correctly performed. The failure of the Sitenkov fight was therefore not a correctable athletic error. It was an epistemological event. It meant that the system he had been running since he was twelve years old did not work. The month of drinking was the month of discovering this. The Monday that followed his mother's phone call was the month of discovering that it might work differently than he had imagined, but that it might still work.

What happened next was that his mother made a phone call. She called John Kavanagh. She asked him, in the quiet and undramatic way of a Dublin mother who did not know what else to do, if he would come to the house and speak to her son. Kavanagh, who had written Conor off, drove out to Crumlin on a Wednesday evening. He sat in the front room. He looked at the boy across from him — who had lost weight, whose eyes were not steady, who was not, at that moment, anything that resembled a future champion — and he told him, without a raised voice, that he had one chance. Come back to the gym on Monday. Pay what he owed. Train. Do not miss a session. Stop drinking. Stop lying. Do the work.

Conor, the boy from Crumlin who had been told for eighteen months that he was going to be a champion and who had just been shown that he was not, looked John Kavanagh in the eye and said: You're right. Let's do it.

Both men, Kavanagh later wrote, cried.

The following Monday, Conor walked back into Straight Blast Gym. The career began on the Monday after his mother made the phone call. Everything that came afterwards (the thirteen-second knockout, the double belt, the bus, the money, the penthouse, the pub, the broken leg, the verdict, the wedding at the Vatican) was possible because a thirty-two-year-old mother in a terrace house on Kilworth Road picked up a phone and called a man she barely knew and asked him if he would please, if it was not too much trouble, give her son one more chance.

She did not know, when she made the call, what she was saving him for.

The Cage Warriors period, from roughly 2011 to 2013, the two years before the UFC signing, is the period in which the fighter that anyone outside Ireland would eventually recognize took the shape that would endure. Cage Warriors Fighting Championship was a British-based MMA organization, founded by Dougie Truman in 2001 (its first event came in 2002) and, from 2010, owned and run by Graham Boylan from its head office in London. It was the largest professional MMA promotion in the United Kingdom and Ireland, operated under the sanction of the British and Irish Athletic Commission, and paid professional purses that were, by the standard of early-stage European MMA, reasonable. A headliner at a Cage Warriors event in 2011 or 2012 could earn three to five thousand pounds for a win. The organization drew from a pool of British, Irish, and European fighters who were good enough to have moved beyond regional shows but had not yet secured UFC contracts.

Conor fought repeatedly for Cage Warriors across 2011 and 2012, winning every bout. The wins were not, in the main, close: a run of finishes and one decision in which his striking control was evident from the opening seconds. He took the Cage Warriors featherweight title in June 2012, submitting the English fighter Dave Hill in the second round at Cage Warriors 47. Six months later, on the final night of 2012, he knocked out Ivan Buchinger in the first round at Cage Warriors 51 to win the lightweight title, becoming the first man in Cage Warriors history to hold titles in two weight classes simultaneously. The double title was a distinction the press release stated clearly. The press release was read, in Las Vegas, by the UFC's signing team.

His striking coach at SBG during those years was Owen Roddy, a Tipperary man who had himself been a professional fighter and who had, after retirement from competition, become one of the most precise striking coaches Ireland produced. Roddy's contribution to the McGregor system was precise: where Kavanagh built the overall game plan and the tactical framework, Roddy worked the hands and the feet in isolating detail, drilling the left-hand counter off the jab, the level-change that opened the straight left, the lateral movement away from the opponent's power side. Conor's left hand, which would knock out Dustin Poirier in one minute forty-six seconds and Jose Aldo in thirteen, was Owen Roddy's left hand as much as it was Conor's own. The acknowledgment was made by Conor in interviews. The acknowledgment was also made by the hand itself, on the canvas of the MGM Grand Garden Arena, on the night of December 12, 2015.

There was also a movement coach named Ido Portal. Portal, an Israeli practitioner of a discipline he called Movement, taught Conor — from approximately 2015, when they first worked together in a camp in Brazil — a series of crawling patterns, animal-movement drills, and proprioceptive exercises that had not previously been part of an MMA fighter's standard preparation. The press made some of these sessions look eccentric: photographs of Conor moving across a gym floor on all fours, or balancing in positions borrowed from gymnastics, circulated in 2015 with a skeptical edge. What the photographs did not capture was the training's functional effect, which was a recalibration of Conor's spatial awareness in the cage: the sense of where his body was in three dimensions, and where the opponent's body was relative to his own, at the precise moment of contact. Kavanagh, who was not himself an Ido Portal devotee but who deferred to evidence, noted in his book that Conor's footwork and angle-finding in the post-Portal camp were measurably better than they had been before. The thirteen-second knockout was partly attributable to that improved angle-finding. Aldo had thrown the hook because Conor's body had been in the precise position that made the hook the correct shot. Conor had moved his body into that position on purpose.