— Niall Kelly reports from Boston
BOSTON HAS ALWAYS had an Irish heart, but it’s beating a little bit faster this week.
Somewhere in the region of 2,000 fans are expected to touch down in the City of Champions before Sunday night, all sharing single-minded purpose. They’re not here for a holiday; they’re here for the latest phase of an invasion.
And everywhere you look, the face of their leader is staring back at you. From the side of buses, from taxi roof signs, from the bins on the street corners — you name it, it’s got a picture of Conor McGregor on it.
TD Garden, home of the legendary Boston Celtics basketball team, is expected to be close to its 18,500-capacity when McGregor steps into the Octagon to face Dennis Siver. The UFC estimated that 10% of their initial sales went to Irish fans. Given our habit of picking up tickets at the last minute, it’s likely that number will have swelled again by Sunday.
- ‘I can’t see it going beyond 2 minutes’ – John Kavanagh writes exclusively for The42 (that’s us now)
The latest reinforcements for the Fighting Irish touched in Logan International Airport on Thursday with Cathal Pendred’s family and friends among them. McGregor and Siver might have top billing as the main event but there is no less love for the three other Irish fighters on the card — Pendred, who was born in Boston before moving to Ireland, Tallaght native Paddy Holohan, and Antrim’s Norman Parke.
The super-slick promotional work in the weeks leading up to a fight is where the UFC really comes into its own. Mixed martial arts is a sport which has been waging an image war since its inception and, for all its remaining flaws, its biggest promotion only seems to have turned the tide in recent years.
Even with some stellar cards to finish 2014 and kick-off 2015, the UFC has been hyping this one for weeks. In a very short space of time, McGregor has become their golden goose — a colourful, fast-talking, sharp-dressing, explosive fighter who knows exactly how to walk the tightrope between athlete and entertainer.
They desperately needed a character to inject a bit of life into the featherweight division and beyond. “The Notorious” has answered their prayers.
The decision to put this card on a Sunday night instead of in a more usual Saturday slot was down to a few factors, but one of which was surely the hope of exposing McGregor to a wider US audience than the die-hards willing to shell out for pay-per-view events or the Fight Pass subscription platform.
On Sunday night in Foxborough, about half-an-hour from downtown Boston, Tom Brady and the New England Patriots host the Indianapolis Colts in the AFC Championship game, the penultimate step on the road to the Super Bowl.
That game, which kicks-off at 6.30pm local time (11.30 Irish), is live and exclusive on CBS. Barring overtime it should finish as the UFC main card is starting on Fox Sports 1 at 10pm, priming it for a crossover audience with their finger on the remote.
As per usual, the time difference will inconvenience Irish fight fans – McGregor is due to make his way to the Octagon around 4.15am in the early hours of Monday. It will either be a very early morning, or a late late night.
The promotional push has continued on into this week. The UFC have produced a special series of Embedded, their access-all-areas look at fight week which is usually reserved for pay-per-view events. As McGregor would quickly tell you, no doubt, he commands that sort of attention anyway. The first two 10-minute episodes were released on Wednesday and Thursday and focus almost exclusively on him, with Siver making only the briefest of cameos.
A trip out to Bristol, the home of ESPN, on Tuesday for an appearance on SportsCenter was followed on Wednesday by the announcement of what is understood to be an incredibly lucrative merchandise deal with Reebok. It was there that UFC president Dana White described him as “the most marketable fighter of all time.”
With a six-part documentary series starting on RTÉ later this month, and his first book set to follow in the autumn, we might have already reached peak McGregor.
That’s before we even get to his seemingly inevitable title shot against featherweight champ Jose Aldo and the extravaganza that would surely follow should Croke Park or the Aviva Stadium rather than Las Vegas be chosen as the venue.
But it is Siver first, while Aldo — who is in town for Sunday’s fight — dangles there in front of him, enticing but not yet a distraction. When he spoke to The42 last week, coach John Kavanagh insisted that the glitter of the gold has taken nothing away from their preparations for this fight. If anything, McGregor is sharper than he has ever seen him.
The Fighting Irish have come to expect no less from their man.
