It’s been nearly four years since Conor McGregor has competed in the UFC, and the world is starting to wake up to the reality that his days in the octagon are likely done.
McGregor is currently more focused on populist politics than fighting. He even says he turned down an offer from boxing power broker Turki Alalshikh to fight on a May card in Alcatraz because the offer was … too low? If the Saudi offer is too low for his taste, what does he think of the UFC’s payscale?
In the same interview he discussed the Alcatraz offer, he said something else that caught UFC Hall of Famer Chael Sonnen’s ear.
“He simply said ‘Greatness is not rushed,’” Sonnen recalled on ESPN’s Good Guy / Bad Guy show. “He made this statement four days ago and I remember going for the first time ever, ‘That’s not true!’ If you do not have an urgency, if you do not have an ‘I need this and I gotta do it now,’ something inside you that’s burning and driving, you can actually kick the can and live with that, you’ve got the option to compete but you choose not to?”
“Greatness is rushed. Everything in sports, everything you gotta do has gotta be done right now, and that used to be his mindset. He put that simple sentence out and I saw it and said it is a wrap.”
It’s probably for the best, because Sonnen doesn’t see today’s McGregor faring too well against top fighters who are still fully engaged in the sport of MMA.
“He’s got a beating standing in front of him,” Sonnen said. “We can go 155, we can go 170, we can make up a weight class. There’s not an athlete under contract with the UFC that he can beat. I don’t even mean that to be a jerk. When they bring him back, they put him in a main event. All of a sudden you’re asking him to do five rounds. We’ve got a guy who can’t breathe for a full round.”
“This is just a reality, there’s nothing to come back for,” Chael concluded. “There’s no reason to come back. There’s an a– whipping waiting for you.”
This story originally appeared on MMA Mania
