Conor McGregor responded to UFC President Dana White’s decision to strip him of his lightweight belt in typically understated fashion: by tweeting an unprintable insult, crashing a pre-fight media event in Brooklyn, N.Y., chucking a barricade and prompting a scene of general mayhem that left at least one fighter injured and organizers stunned. For his trouble, McGregor landed in some.
McGregor turned himself into police Thursday and was arrested and charged with three counts of assault and one count of criminal mischief after his role in Thursday’s fracas that left UFC fighter Michael Chiesa in the hospital with a facial laceration, Reuters reported.
According to the Independent, McGregor was held overnight and remained in police custody early Friday morning as he awaited a court appearance in Brooklyn. MMA Fighting reports that Cian Cowley, McGregor’s SBG teammate, also was charged with one count of assault and one count of criminal mischief over the incident.
Three matches scheduled for Saturday’s UFC 223 card have been scrapped because of the fracas. Chiesa, who was to fight Anthony Pettis, was cut in the face and was in the hospital; he has been deemed unfit to fight by the New York State Athletic Commission and the UFC medical team. Ray Borg, a flyweight who was scheduled to battle Brandon Moreno, also was deemed unfit to fight after suffering corneal abrasions. Artem Lobov, a McGregor ally who was apparently part of the incident, also was pulled from the card.
[ Conor McGregor says he’s done prizefighting, wants to ‘legitimize’ UFC title ]
It was unclear whether Thursday’s incident was prompted by White stripping McGregor of his belt, or by previous bad feelings between McGregor’s camp and Khabib Nurmagomedov, scheduled to fight Max Holloway for McGregor’s vacated belt in Saturday’s main event. Nurmagomedov was filmed in a confrontation with Lobov, the McGregor ally, earlier this week.
On Thursday, McGregor and his entourage approached a large vehicle full of fighters that was leaving Barclays Center in Brooklyn after the media event, according to MMA Fighting’s Ariel Helwani and videos posted of the incident. “Chairs were thrown through the van window and one passenger on the van was injured,” Helwani reported, in an apparent reference to Chiesa.
Videos posted to social media show a chaotic scene, with at least one guardrail being flung and general disorder. (A fuller video of the bus incident is here; it contains explicit language.)
“Conor went bananas and put a beating on the van that we were in,” Chiesa’s coach Rick Little told MMAjunkie. “A million security guards had to restrain him. Mike’s cut up now. He’s got marks on him, for sure. I don’t think too serious. Everything happened so fast, it was just like we got jumped.”
Little told the site that his fighter had been cut by shattered glass. And some media members at the arena reported that the target of McGrergor’s ire was apparently Nurmagomedov, who seemed to believe that was the case.
“I am laughing inside,” the Russian told Helwani. “You broke window? Why? Come inside. If you real gangster why don’t you come inside? This is big history gangster place. Brooklyn. You want to talk to me? Send me location. I am going to come. No problem.”
White, meanwhile, called the incident the most despicable thing in UFC history, according to ESPN’s Okamoto.
“You want to grab 30 [expletive] friends and come down here and do what you did today?” White said in a video posted by Okamoto. “It’s disgusting. And I don’t think anybody is going to be huge Conor McGregor fans after this. I don’t know if he’s on drugs or what his deal is, but to come and do this and act like this?”
Later Thursday night, the UFC issued a statement regarding the incident:
Thursday afternoon, following the UFC 223 media day at Barclays Center in Brooklyn, an incident in the facility injured two athletes on Saturday’s card, forcing them to be pulled from the event.
Lightweight Michael Chiesa, who received several facial cuts, was deemed unfit to fight by the New York State Athletic Commission and the UFC medical team, and he was removed from his bout against Anthony Pettis.
Flyweight Ray Borg, who was scheduled to face Brandon Moreno, was deemed unfit to fight as well due to multiple cornea abrasions.
Also removed from the card was the featherweight bout between Artem Lobov and Alex Caceres due to Lobov’s involvement in the incident.
UFC 223 will proceed as scheduled with 10 bouts.
White’s anger toward longtime UFC moneymaker McGregor seemed genuine, but others quickly pointed out that a McGregor-Nurmagomedov fight might be more lucrative after Thursday’s drama. Daniel Cormier, one of the sport’s stars, tweeted that McGregor should be taken into custody and escorted to the arena Saturday “to make him fight Khabib … That’s true punishment!”
White had announced earlier this week there would be “no interim champ” following Saturday’s scheduled lightweight main event between Max Holloway and Nurmagomedov.
“When this fight is over, champion,” White said at a news conference, gesturing to Nurmagomedov and Holloway. “One of these guys will be the champion.”
This news was not taken well by McGregor, the previous permanent holder of that title.
“You’s’ll strip me of nothing,” he tweeted very early Thursday morning, before calling UFC officials an unprintable word.
McGregor won the lightweight title by defeating Eddie Alvarez at UFC 205 in a November 2016 bout but stepped away from the octagon to train for last year’s lucrative boxing match against Floyd Mayweather. Tony Ferguson stepped in to win an interim lightweight belt in McGregor’s absence, but White said Saturday’s bout between Nurmagomedov and Holloway will decide a new official champion.
“Tony Ferguson isn’t being stripped. The only person here who is losing a belt is Conor. Conor’s losing the belt, these two are fighting for the belt,” White said at the news conference.
“The interim belt that he had, those two [Nurmagomedov and Ferguson] were supposed to fight — doesn’t happen. One of these guys will be the champion. Tony is still the number one contender.”
Before Thursday’s fracas, White insisted that McGregor “is coming back this year, 100 percent,” adding, “We’ll see how this thing plays out [with the lightweight title], and we’ll go from there.”
He later reiterated that stance on Fox Sports’ “UFC Tonight,” saying: “Conor does want to fight. Conor and I have been talking a lot. Conor does want to come back, he does want to fight, so he will fight this year.”
Again, he said this before Thursday’s events.
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