Khabib Nurmagomedov’s settle the score with Conor McGregor UFC 229, but he admits his dominant win didn’t come easily.
UFC 229, Oct. 6, 2018, marked the culmination of a longstanding feud between the lightweight stars. Nurmagomedov claimed the UFC lightweight title in McGregor’s absence, with “Notorious” relinquishing his belt to book a massively successful crossover boxing bout with Floyd Mayweather Jr., and McGregor had his chance to win it back from the undefeated champion.
The build-up to the fight was deeply personal with McGregor willing to take shots at every aspect of Nurmagomedov’s life to throw him off, but Nurmagomedov came out on top in the end with a fourth-round submission victory. He then proceeded to attack McGregor’s corner, putting a blemish on the moment.
Suffice to say, McGregor’s words got to Nurmagomedov and he revealed in an interview with Lex Fridman that McGregor was his most difficult challenge from a mental standpoint.
“One hundred percent,” Nurmagomedov said. “Because fighting’s all psychology, you know? It’s a mental game. Mentally speaking, that was my toughest fight. At that point, yeah. But a tougher fight came later.”
That tougher fight was Nurmagomedov’s October 2020 retirement bout against Justin Gaethje. Nurmagomedov’s father and lifelong coach Abdulmanap died earlier that year, shaking up “The Eagle” and putting his career in perspective. He would go on to defeat Gaethje and subsequently announce his retirement from MMA with a spotless 29-0 record.
Like the McGregor fight, it was the internal struggle that was most important to overcome.
“First and foremost, it was because I had lost my father,” Nurmagomedov said of the Gaethje fight. “It was hard to pull myself together. Everything piled up at once. My father was gone. And training without my father, without the person I was doing all of this for, the person I wanted to become champion for, first and foremost, to prove to him that I could become the best.
“And then the training camp itself, physically I was not in the best shape. I had injury after injury after injury, but mentally speaking I stayed completely sharp.”
Regarding what made the McGregor fight so challenging, Nurmagomedov pointed to the deeply personal attacks that McGregor frequently lobbed in his direction. At the same time, he acknowledges that McGregor’s powder keg-persona was key to selling their fight.
“The way he talked, what he stirred up, the lines he crossed, touching on family, religion, and then somehow on one side you had Conor, this really interesting champion who knew how to hype himself up,” Nurmagomedov said. “On the other side, you had this undefeated somebody from nowhere, from the mountains. You know it is.
“It all somehow, all of it just kind of happened naturally. And it wasn’t staged. It was real. We had a real rivalry, unlike the way a lot of people now just hype up interest in a fight. But people feel that energy. It doesn’t go anywhere. People can tell what’s real and what’s fake and because of that we went beyond our own sport. That’s what made this fight so massive.”
Asked if there will ever be a bigger UFC fight, Nurmagomedov put the question in perspective by bringing up the most famous bouts from boxing and what has allowed them to stand the test of time.
“Let’s look at the history here,” Nurmagomedov said. “I mean, our sport is still very young, say 35 years old, starting from the ‘90s, put it this way. Take, for example, the sport most similar to MMA, which is, let’s say boxing. How old is boxing? A hundred and fifty years? Like, when you think boxing, what pops into your head? ‘Thrilla in Manila?’ Mike Tyson had big fights, but Mike Tyson never had that signature rival like Muhammad Ali had in Joe Frazier. [Evander] Holyfield-Tyson is no Ali-Frazier. … People called it the greatest rivalry and it still is. In the 20th century, there was nothing that could compare.
“In the 21st century, the only thing you could compare it to, purely based on the numbers, is [Manny] Pacquiao vs. Mayweather. Yes, there was public interest, but there wasn’t the energy that there was with Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier.”
While Nurmagomedov puts the likes of Ali on a pedestal, he can also see how his heated feud with McGregor captured the imaginations of fight fans in a similar way.
“It was the exact same thing when I fought Conor,” Nurmagomedov said. “That fight went beyond our sport. It impacted every sport because athletes of all kinds of different sports, everyone who loves to compete, it didn’t matter if it was football, basketball, soccer, or boxing, everyone was following this. And honestly, will there be a fight like that? Well, it’s hard for me to say, but I think it’ll happen. It’ll happen for sure. There will always be champions. There will always be rivalries. But when it’ll happen, that’s just a matter of time.”
