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“That can drain a man’s mind,” McGregor said a couple years back. He used to have to borrow his girlfriend’s car to get around. He and his own father, a longtime factory worker, had, at one point, a falling-out over the career path. Or maybe procrastination built on delusion. In Crumlin, a tough, tightly packed neighborhood southwest of Dublin, where he was raised as a child and walked as a young man, they saw it as an excuse for laziness. If he were such a big deal, then why, four-plus years into his MMA career, entering his mid-20s, was he still fighting for peanuts? This was poverty of choice, and no matter how many times McGregor tried to talk up the possibility of being a big-money fighter, telling people that this new sport would one day make him internationally famous, he noticed most people’s eyes just glaze over. No one blames a kid for growing up like that. This wasn’t the poverty of youth, the poverty of circumstance. Week after week McGregor needed to show his ID, show he had no job, show his face to whomever else was in there or walked by, shaking their head at an able-bodied man who apparently couldn’t support himself. He could only survive financially by signing up for the Irish welfare system, marching down to the government offices and standing in a queue each week to get a check for roughly $200. The training for the latter took too much time to do the former. He was a plumber by trade an aspiring, long-shot fighter by dream. McGregor was about to turn 24 but stuck in a painful reality. Cage Warriors, especially then, was a local outfit, mostly running cards in McGregor’s native Dublin, Ireland, in London and occasionally the Middle East. There was almost no fanfare and even less respect. Just a few days prior he’d won his first championship belt – in the featherweight division of the Cage Warriors MMA promotion – yet with the hardware came little else. Neville wrote back, nearly a week later.Īt the same time, early June 2012, Conor McGregor was teetering through mixed emotions. Jail officials were unimpressed, promising to refer him for medical and psychological assistance but little more.
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I can’t work out and I need some type of exercise.” He said he needed surgery and promised a lawsuit. He bristled at being cooped up, a stunning change for an elite athlete.Īt one point, in a jail letter, he claimed he’d busted up a rib when he heard “something pop” while reaching for a bottle of lotion that had rolled under his bunk. He saw his weight drop and his blood pressure rise. He refused the jail food, subsisting on commissary items – mostly candy bars, beef jerky, Chili Cheese Fritos and soda. “Out of 168 hours in a week, I only get five outside my cell,” Mayweather wrote. He argued that considering his misdemeanor plea, he shouldn’t be “treated like a murderer or a child predator.” He begged to be moved to general population or out to a separate facility in suburban Henderson, Nev.
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Mayweather complained vehemently about his treatment in a letter included in his Clark County inmate file, obtained via open-records law. (L) and Conor McGregor face off during a news conference on July 14. Podcast: Mayweather Promotions’ Leonard Ellerbe predicts a Floyd KO Yahoo’s Dan Wetzel on hypeįloyd Mayweather Jr. Mayweather expressed outward confidence however, displaying the unflappability that has helped him dominate in the ring. He was trading his 22,000-square foot mansion for a 6-by-10 foot cell. Now he wondered if this was going to finish him anyway.
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He could have been hit with 34 years for that, ending what was already a rich career.
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Mayweather took the deal to avoid a trial on a slew of felony charges for assaulting his then-girlfriend and mother of three of his children in 2010. He was serving a three-month stint as part of a guilty plea on misdemeanor domestic violence.
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Full of anxiety, he scratched out letter after letter to officials, pleading for better treatment. The concept of such success was a fading vision back in the summer 2012, as Mayweather sat in a tiny jail cell in downtown Las Vegas. 26 when he puts his 49-0 record on the line to fight mixed martial arts star Conor McGregor in what may be the richest prize fight in history.
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