Conor McGregor, trash talk and the lasting impact of first impressions

It is, in fact, true what they say about first impressions. And if you, like me, were unfamiliar with a certain Irish fighter before the World Tour headlines hit, then, well, he didn’t make a great one. But let’s back up.

When it was officially announced that Floyd Mayweather Jr. would fight Conor McGregor on Aug. 26, I was sitting at my desk, watching the office MMA Slack channel blow up and writing about NBC’s beloved family drama, This Is Us. I couldn’t tell you whether I knew such a fight was even on the table, but when I heard Mayweather’s name, I very simply thought: pass.

I don’t watch boxing because I don’t enjoy watching people get punched in the face. More specifically, I don’t enjoy looking at people who have been punched in the face. (I’m fine with the actual blows, it’s the disfiguration and the swollen eyes and the spitting of teeth that bothers me.)

Which is just to say that in that moment all I knew about Mayweather and McGregor was what had made it all the way to the mainstream. In the case of Mayweather, that was almost exclusively his history of domestic violence. And so, most days, I want little to nothing to do with him, even as I see him support and be supported by some of my favorite people.

McGregor turned out to be a more complicated case. Because before I could throw my lot in with Ireland’s own, the beloved son of MMA and dapper cover star of various men’s magazines, the World Tour happened. You know, that delightful four-city extravaganza where the two fighters traded racist (McGregor), homophobic (Mayweather) and misogynistic (both) insults in the name of … something.

I have a rule that if I’m not already familiar or invested in someone when I learn they are — for lack of a better word — problematic, I just don’t bother. There are enough athletes, musicians, actors, directors, public figures, etc. I already love and whose terrible opinions or nauseating behavior I must already grapple with, that I’m just not going to actively put myself in a position to take on another moral quandary. And so it seemed the World Tour would be both the beginning and end of my consideration of one Conor McGregor.

But lo, I also had an assignment. I sought out just about every profile I could. (Mayweather, it turns out, has been conspicuously, but not necessarily wrongly, absent from such coverage.) But Conor: I read features about Conor in Esquire, in GQ and then also in GQ Style and lastly in ESPN. I read these stories, watched a few late-night interviews and I wanted to like him. I wanted to be taken in by the brash charm, the humor, the accent. I wanted to be able to cheer for the one-time plumber, the low-key family man, the guy so delighted by a new and unfamiliar wealth he spends as furiously as he fights, the fighter who was possibly insane to take this match on.

I can get behind almost any good story. Here, all these profiles would suggest, was one.

Wright Thompson’s recent ESPN piece on Conor was just the latest to underscore what could have been. I couldn’t help but feel it was trying to sell me on the Conor McGregor Underdog/Come-From-Nothing/Working-Class-Hero (Great-White-Hope?) Narrative. And it almost worked — he has an amazing story, he’s an underdog (albeit of his own making, in this particular match) and I have a totally unrelated but deep and abiding interest in the socioeconomics of the Dublin that’s portrayed, apparently inaccurately, in Thompson’s article. Conor McGregor is a damn Tana French character come to life. I should be all in.

But in the back of my head there was my first impression: “Dance for me, boy” — which, with the right response, could have been excused. But Conor’s response was instead to say he couldn’t be racist because he’s “half-black from the belly button down.” And then to identify Rocky 3, in which Rocky trains at a black gym, as the one with the “dancing monkeys.”

In the same recon that led me to those profiles, so too did I find pieces detailing McGregor’s racist track record when trash talking, or as he calls it, speaking the truth. Mayweather’s response(s), terrible as he is otherwise, aren’t inaccurate. We delight in one man’s lavish lifestyle and condemn the other’s. (Let’s keep condemning the violence, though.)

I’m not sure what to do with Conor. He seems more than willing to exploit a history and present of very real racism for headlines and trash talk. (He’s also quite willing to exploit a domestic violence victim for the same reasons.) But then very few people in sports, entertainment, really anywhere, aren’t willing to do that.

Still, it does no one any good to pretend these words don’t have meaning or to pretend Conor speaking them doesn’t have an impact on his fans and their willingness to parrot them in their own lives. I want to root for Conor McGregor, I do, mostly because I don’t want to root for Mayweather, but I just don’t have the energy for those mental gymnastics, not in this 2017.

My first impression was the World Tour, and that lasts.