He sparred Owen Roddy first,” Daly says as she pushes her glasses up the bridge of her nose and smiles at the memory of McGregor’s opening day. Daly was an early star of Kavanagh’s gym and, as a woman, she was a pioneer and inspiration in Irish MMA. Her love of fighting, despite being so calm and thoughtful and having to retire earlier this year after a brain scan, is obvious.
“I remember Conor hit Owen really hard in the head and made him wobble. John was thinking: ‘Who is this guy? What does he think he’s doing?’”
Kavanagh, trying to dilute the intensity, asked McGregor to spar Daly. She was used to fighting men and was not intimidated. “Conor sparred really hard,” she says, “and dropped me with a vicious body shot. It must have really been a tough shot for me to go down. John had seen enough. He was like: ‘Conor get your MMA gloves on.’
“John took Conor down straight away and dominated him on the ground. He didn’t do anything horrible like hitting him in the head but he softened up his body – wiping the breadbasket with nasty little shots to show Conor what it meant. ‘You want to do MMA? Well, this is MMA.’”
The next time Daly and McGregor sparred, she remembers, “I could maul him. At that stage I probably was a purple belt training in jujitsu for four years and Conor was a new white belt. It was easy to control him. He was obviously tough and strong but I may have choked him.”
Daly laughs demurely when asked if she had taken offence to the way McGregor had hit her? “Not at all. I was used to guys with egos because some of them think: ‘I’m not going to be shown up by a girl.’ Sometimes you had the opposite: ‘Oh, I can’t touch you!’ – like you were made of glass. Conor gave me more respect. He fought me like I was any other fighter.”
This is probably the article that you're on about Olyy? Aisling Daly in an interview with the Guardian/Irishtimes, it's a **** thing to do but on your first day in a gym with Ireland's premier, and only credible, MMA coach it's understandable.
To add to Rats' point the disconnect from fighter to fans is completely incomparable between the two. Mayweather "I bought it [A new Rolls Royce] for me but she [his daughter] wanted it so she got it", in an interview with Ariel Helwani McGregor was stating how he wanted his son to know that he has to work to be successful, that he doesn't want him to live off his father's wealth. Mayweather has absolutely no social skills, he doesn't understand other people, interviews like a robot, his life is boxing and wealth. There's a lot more to McGregor, he's really very relatable in his more candid moments whereas Mayweather isn't in the slightest.
