During his recent appearance on “The MMA Hour” with Ariel Helwani at MMAFighting.com, UFC Bantamweight Champion Dominick Cruz spoke about Conor McGregor’s ongoing battle with UFC management following his first-ever Octagon loss to Nate Diaz back in March.
“You can’t really side with anybody,” said Cruz. “I put myself in Conor’s shoes, I’ve lost a fight before. And when you lose a fight, it kind of puts you back to the drawing board. You hear that all the time, ‘I’m going to go back to the drawing board, I’m going to do this, I’m going to do that.’ When you lose a fight, you’ve got to change something. He realizes he’s human now after that loss. He realizes he can lose. He hit Nate (Diaz) with everything and the kitchen sink in that first round and Nate did not back up for one second. That’s a different type of fight.”
Cruz continued, “We have never seen anybody stand up to Conor McGregor’s antics in the pre-fight,” Cruz said. “Every single person he’s faced prior to Nate Diaz was broken mentally, I mean shattered mentally, before they even stepped in the cage. You can’t break Nate. He does not care. He fights for a different purpose and he’s a real OG, for lack of a better term. The guy doesn’t care. Nate, you’re not going to break him, you’re not going to get him out of the fight. You know when you’re fighting him, you’re going to be in it from the beginning until the end. You have to push the button on him, and then you realize he’s got a heck of a chin too. So, I get where Conor is at. He wants to put his head down, train, focus, be the best Conor he can be because of that last loss. It can shake you when you loss like that, and his mind is focused on being the best him he can be. So I understand that.”
Having said all that, Cruz, who as a longtime FS1 analyst is no stranger to the television and promotional side of the industry, spoke about how he would gladly trade places with McGregor for McGregor’s level of money.
“When you look at what the UFC wants, they want you to do the media,” Cruz said. “Conor is a failure of his own success. He’s so good at this media that they’re going to ask him to do a ton. But I’ll be honest, if the UFC said, ‘hey Dominick, we’re going to pay you 100 times what you’re getting paid now and you’re going to make Conor McGregor money,’ I’ll go live with Ariel Helwani for my entire camp, eat everything you eat, do every radio interview you do, go out there and be ready to fight.
“So it’s like, it’s kind of a mixed thing. He’s getting paid a lot of money to do this stuff, a lot of money, and people want to see it. He’s in high demand. So, because he’s in high demand, that makes him a failure of his own success, if you get what I’m saying.”
Cruz defends his UFC Bantamweight title in a rubber match against his biggest career rival, Urijah Faber, in the co-main event of UFC 199: Rockhold vs. Bisping 2 on Saturday, June 4, 2016 at The Forum in Inglewood, California. Make sure to join us here at MMANews.com on 6/4 for the best UFC 199 live results coverage on the web!
