‘​Conor McGregor​:​ Notorious​’​ on Netflix: Some Men Just Want To Watch The World Burn

Full Disclosure: I’ve been practicing martial arts for 15 years; Tae Kwon Do for the first three, and then Brazilian jiu jitsu to this day. (Literally, I’m on my way to class when I finish typing this.) When I was just starting, in one of my first sparring rounds, in a windowless basement in Ann Arbor, Michigan, a second degree black belt (who had about 60 pounds and 5 inches on me) did a spinning round house kick that clipped me in my left eye. I was pretty lucky, just a few stitches and a scratched cornea, nothing permanent, but a solid introduction to the world of martial arts injuries. A couple years later, while grappling in a windowless basement in New York, New York, a guy rolled over my left thumb, detaching a ligament. Eventually, this injury would require orthopedic surgery, and a cast, and physical therapy. I’ve got a torn meniscus in my right knee. Most of my toes have been broken and healed weird. Most of my fingers hurt from the early onset arthritis I’m developing from gripping the thick collars of heavy gi jackets. I popped my left elbow in training about four years ago and it still clicks a little bit, which probably isn’t great. Just a couple of weeks ago I think I broke my nose although it’s not crooked so there’s nothing really to do about it.

All of this is to say that even practicing martial arts as a casual hobbyist requires a special kind of, well, let’s call it a mindset because “mindset” is less pejorative than “psychosis.” You need a certain tolerance for pain, and a willingness to spend an inordinate amount of time outside of your comfort zone until somehow the discomfort becomes normal, and then, later, entirely comfortable. For example, you have to wear special clothing, which is almost always ill-fitting and awkward at first. If you start training as an adult, you have to get used to being terrible at something in front of other adults for a very long time, which an easily avoidable embarrassment in almost any other area of one’s adult life. In the study of Brazilian jiu jitsu, a foundational martial art for the UFC, you have to be prepared to get routinely and humiliatingly beaten up and defeated for years before it starts to click. (I’m not saying this is the case for everyone, there are some born naturals who walk into the school ready to go, but I’m also not the only one who spent years—years—getting submitted before they could return the favor.) Not to mention the intimacy of brazilian jiu jitsu, where one of the primary philosophies is to use your entire body against your opponent’s entire body. You hug the other person tight to keep them from moving. You sit on them. You wrap your legs around them. Sweat everywhere. Even just describing it reminds me of what an odd hobby it is, and yet I do love it, which brings me back to the whole mindset (not psychosis) thing*.

And yet: as someone who has the special mindset required to spend 15 years getting bi-annual MRI’s and the occasional surgery in exchange for casually practicing an intensely aggressive and physically intimate sport that I truly do enjoy, even I have trouble fully conceptualizing the extra-specialized, next-level “mindset” of the person who willingly enters the UFC octagon. Personally, in my training, I’ve never been overly concerned about, say, the structural integrity of my SKULL, or, you know, missing a flying knee to the ribs because I slipped in a pool of my own blood. One must imagine that if the casual martial arts hobbyist is a little deranged, then a professional MMA fighter must be more twisted than Jared Leto’s The Joker!

And yet, what it takes to do this thing, what kind of person you must be, is exactly what is missing from Conor McGregor: Notorious, a documentary about world-renowned mixed martial artist Connor McGregor, which just came out on Netflix. You get to see tons of candid footage of him wearing bespoke suits and flying on private jets and trash-talking his opponents and kissing his girlfriend and meeting Arnold Scwharzenegger and jogging shirtless in the desert before entering the octagon and using his body to destroy other people’s bodies, but what you don’t get to see is WHY.

Conor McGregor has made a stunning rise to the top of the UFC. In just a few short years, he’s gone from a virtually unknown, wild-eyed upstart in Ireland to a world-famous championship fighter, and the only fighter in UFC history to have concurrently held championship belts in two separate weight classes. Last year, he famously earned 100 million dollars just for losing a fight to Floyd Mayweather Jr.** in the second highest-grossing Pay Per View event in history (second only to Mayweather’s fight against Manny Pacquiao in 2015). McGregor is a charismatic and dynamic figure both in and out of the ring. At one point while we were watching the documentary, my wife said she could imagine Tom Hardy playing McGregor in a biopic, but that actually she could just as easily imagine McGregor playing himself in an 8 Mile type situation. He’s a natural performer. He’s compelling and funny and unpredictable. He’s fun to watch. He’s got the boastful, self-aggrandizement of a Kanye West without all of the artistic demons. But again, that raises the question: where ARE those demons? Because you know the dude has to have them!

The documentary cobbles together a few minutes of footage from McGregor’s last year as an amateur fighter, when he and his girlfriend were broke and living with his mother in Ireland. He was training in makeshift gyms, dreaming of a shot as a professional fighter. That could be interesting: this hard-scrabble, down on his luck kid being hounded by the Irish Debt Bureau, who sees fighting as a way out of poverty, but within the first 10 minutes of the documentary we have already moved on to McGregor buying Range Rovers and picking pocket watches to accompany his waistcoats. For the rest of the film, he’s a man at the top of his game who just keeps climbing. At one point, after winning the featherweight championship belt with a world-famous knockout that happens 10 seconds into the first round against José Aldo, the title holder and a world champion who had been undefeated in 10 years with a 25-1 record, McGregor makes the seemingly insane decision to go up two weight classes to fight Nate Diaz, and he loses. It’s interesting to watch McGregor fidget after the loss, completely incapable of handling the sting of it, but again the documentary quickly cuts away from this very human moment to him confidently and cockily training for the rematch, which he impressively but somewhat anticlimactically wins by decision. (I would have said SPOILER ALERT but these were all nationally broadcast fights that happened two to three years ago.)

This is a guy with an insane career, and I’m not saying every sports story has to be an underdog story to be compelling, but when Conor McGregor turns to the camera and talks about how no one understands how much work has gone into his ascent, how much sacrifice, he’s absolutely right, because the documentary doesn’t  give you any meaningful sense of those things. The work of living in palatial Las Vegas mansions? The sacrifice of picking out which porkpie hat to wear in which photoshoot? I’m being slightly disingenuous: he’s clearly an incredible athlete with an insane work ethic, and the movie does show how he tears an ACL a few months before the title fight with Aldo and refuses to stop training or postpone despite having an unstable leg (leg stability theoretically being quite important when your job is jumping and kicking and spinning with your legs) and just training through it and doing power squats and being an unrelenting monster. (Ultimately it’s Aldo who postpones the fight for a broken rib.) But he’s so naturally gifted and talented in his sport, and the documentary relishes so deeply in his wealth and success, that the whole thing starts to feel like an episode of Entourage if Vincent Chase was an MMA fighter***. Entourage, of course, being a show notoriously devoid of stakes, where our hero, Vincent Chase, constantly breezes through the merest suggestion of failure or disappointment. Just when you think maybe Vince isn’t going to get that movie role he wanted, we discover that not only is Vince getting the role, Vince is getting paid more than any other actor in the history of showbiz! Did Vince earn it? Sure. I guess. I mean, as much as a make believe movie star can earn anything. Conor McGregor also certainly earned it. But that’s the problem when someone makes something hard look easy: it just looks easy.

We are so accustomed by movies and television and popular culture in general to believe that someone like Conor McGregor must have been created when muggers shot his parents in front of his young eyes in the alleyway behind the opera house. But his mother appears in the documentary, hugging him and loving him and supporting him. His father makes a brief cameo, gushing about how cool his son’s house is. His sister is there, too. McGregor and his girlfriend, Dee, have been together for eight years and have a son together. All of the obvious tropes of abuse and abandonment and isolation and fury don’t seem to be the case here. He actually seems joyful behind the scenes. This is fun for him. Which adds to his devilish, rakish charm. He talks about loving the life he gets to live, and being grateful for it. But so when Conor McGregor at one point says, “I’m hungry and I don’t give a fuck who gets in my way,” a statement he makes at the height of his career, I totally believe him, and I have no idea why he’s like that.

CONOR! PLEASE! I WANT TO UNDERSTAND YOU!!!!!

For his part, Conor McGregor is concise and crystal clear on what drives him: money. He says multiple times that he is doing this for money. He wears as much of his money and drives as much of his money as he can at all times. He talks about wanting to leave behind a fortune for his children and his grandchildren, to have his family set for life. He talks about wanting to build a compound, to own multiple houses and land, to build a physical empire. And let’s not forget that he’s from Ireland, a place that has historically known a thing or two about poverty. It’s a country with, well, let’s call it a specific “mindset” about masculinity, and Conor McGregor was born a poor kid, who grew up to be a poor man, measuring 5’9″ and 155 pounds. If Conor McGregor was a poor, scrawny Irish kid who got picked on a lot, he’s neither poor nor getting picked on any more, that is for sure.

So, is that the whole story? He just wants to be rich, and is willing to do something insanely dangerous and brutal to get there? Maybe! There is a long history of people using violent sports as a path out of poverty, and besides, who am I to armchair psychologize Conor fucking McGregor? But if I may, as an unqualified armchair psychologist, I would like to revise my earlier statement, because I don’t think Conor McGregor is like Jared Leto’s The Joker at all. He doesn’t seem twisted in that way. He’s too jovial and clear-headed. He specifically seems to prove that you don’t have to be “psychotic” to do what he does, simply determined, and very very very very good at fighting. That being said, it’s undeniable that entering the octagon requires a specific mindset. So maybe McGregor is more like Heath Ledger’s The Joker. Some men just want to watch the world burn.

If nothing else, one thing is for sure: Conor McGregor is a man who deserves to have a documentary made about him. I just wish he’d gotten a better one. Hopefully there will be a rematch. Get it? Fighting.

*I would be remiss if I simply listed the discomforts and dangers of Brazilian jiu jitsu without also pointing out the many benefits that you get in return: self-confidence, physical fitness, the ability to defend one’s self, etc. It is a truly holistic sport, requiring the full use of your mind as well as your body. I have found that grappling is the fastest and best way into a clear presence of mind that I rarely achieve with meditation. It’s hard to even think about your Amex bill, much less worry about it, when you’re trying to catch your opponent in an inverted arm bar from closed guard, or whatever.+

+ I would also be remiss if I didn’t point out that contrary to popular stereotypes, not everyone who practices martial arts is a rage-filled too-tight Tap Out compression shirt wearing sociopath. I genuinely like most of the people I have trained with over the years, many of whom I consider friends, who have come from all different walks of life, and who have plenty of cool interests (philosophy, art, etc) outside of violent sports. I recognize that I’m already undercutting the main thrust of this essay, which as the writer I am completely within my rights to do!

**OK, “just for losing” is a bit facetious, I’m merely pointing out that he made an insane amount of money just for stepping in that ring. But it is worth mentioning that his loss was on points, and he’s an MMA fighter, not a boxer, and the guy managed to last 10 rounds in the ring with one of the best boxers of all time, a fight McGregor was widely expected to lose in much more dramatic and physically damaging fashion. Even in a loss, the fight itself is a testament to his athletic ability, and his willingness to take on insane challenges. Basically, the whole thing is nuts.

***As someone who has seen every episode of Entourage, and went to the movie opening weekend, I would like to qualify my criticism of comparing Conor McGregor: Notorious to that show by pointing out that despite the many problems of the television show, much like the many problems in this documentary, it is very “watchable.”++

++ Or maybe that show isn’t watchable at all? I mean, it certainly is about as misogynistic and homophobic as you could possibly get. Then again: I’m not wholly convinced that the personal politics of Irish self-proclaimed “bad boy” MMA fighter Conor McGregor are all that progressive either, so for the sake of getting through this article, let’s just set politics aside. Or not. I have kind of painted myself into a corner here.

Gabe Delahaye is a writer and performer living in Los Angeles, California.

Watch Conor McGregor: Notorious on Netflix