The Crumlin Plumber

A Dublin jury's verdict, November 2024, is the document this book has to hold. Nikita Hand won a civil judgment against Conor McGregor after the jury found he had committed sexual assault at the South County Hotel on December 9, 2018. Devon Marable does not treat it as a coda. He treats it as the fact the rest of the career now has to be read through.

The career itself is short and enormous. Conor Anthony McGregor grew up in Crumlin, a working-class neighbourhood of southwest Dublin, apprenticed as a plumber under Brendan Egan, and signed on for unemployment benefits at twenty. He made his professional debut in mixed martial arts in 2008, trained at Straight Blast Gym Ireland under John Kavanagh, took the Cage Warriors featherweight title, and signed to the UFC in February 2013. He won the featherweight belt with a thirteen-second knockout of José Aldo at UFC 194 on December 12, 2015, and the lightweight belt with a second-round knockout of Eddie Alvarez at UFC 205 on November 12, 2016, becoming the first UFC fighter to hold titles in two weight classes at the same time. On August 26, 2017 he boxed Floyd Mayweather Jr., lost by tenth-round technical knockout, and earned an estimated $100 million.

Marable follows the whole line: the Lourdes Celtic GAA years, the Aldo knockout, the featherweight-and-lightweight reign, the UFC 229 loss to Khabib Nurmagomedov in October 2018 and the brawl that followed it, the retirement-and-comeback cycles, the first-round knockout of Donald Cerrone in 2020, the leg-break against Dustin Poirier in 2021, the 2022 sale of Proper Twelve Whiskey to Proximo Spirits, and the political flirtation that included a lunch with Donald Trump in September 2024.

What emerges is a portrait of a Crumlin plumbing apprentice whose ten years in the UFC remade what a combat-sports athlete could earn, and of a verdict his sport will spend the next decade absorbing.