By Allan Fox: One year after losing to Floyd Mayweather Jr. by a 10th round knockout in what turned out to be the second biggest fight in boxing history, Conor McGregor says he wants a rematch with the 41-year-old ‘Money’ man either inside the ring or the octagon.
McGregor doesn’t want the rematch with Mayweather to take place under modified rules. He wants it to be either under the rules of the sport of boxing or his beloved MMA. McGregor, 30, will be taking part in an MMA match this Saturday night in battling for the UFC lightweight crown.
Given McGregor’s two-year absence from the UFC, it’s unknown what will happen in that fight. McGregor reportedly made over $100 million in his fight against Mayweather last year in August 2017 in Las Vegas, Nevada, and he’s been inactive ever since then.
“I’m certainly considering a few options,” McGregor said to ESPN.com. “Of course then there’s boxing ventures. I’m very excited about that. ,b.”If [Mayweather] has the bottle to come over and deal with this, like he said he has, let’s see what happens. I would also like to box him again. Everything is being discussed.”
Mayweather vs. McGregor pulled in 4.4 million PPV buys last year in August. There were a lot of naive boxing and MMA fans who felt that it was going to be a competitive fight rather than a novelty fight, and they gladly forked over the $100 per household to order the Mayweather-McGregor fight thinking it would be a highly competitive and exciting affair. What they got was neither. The fight looked like a slow motion affair with a ring rusty, past his prime Mayweather seemingly taking it easy on McGregor in a contest that looked more like sparring than an actual fight.
After that horrible fight, which was about as interesting as watching paint dry, the thought of Mayweather and McGregor fighting each other again in another high-price PPV fight would be a bad idea to say the least. You can’t stop a fighter from making a living. If Mayweather and McGregor want to fight each other again in a rematch, it’s on them. It would be up to the boxing and MMA fans to decide for themselves if they want to pay their hard-earned money to see those two fight each other again. I think it would be a fight that would hurt the sport of boxing. The casual boxing fans, who rarely watch the pugilistic sport might think that the low level of excitement and skill in a Mayweather-McGregor fight would be representative to the norm. If this is what the casual fan use as a gauge for what boxing is, they might stay away from watching the sport forever if they think that all fights are like Mayweather vs. McGregor.
If McGregor wants to fight a boxer, it would be better if he tried to scrape together a fight by fighting someone like Keith ‘One Time’ Thurman, who recently expressed interest in fighting him.