Conor McGregor will play no part in the biggest pay-per-view in UFC history.
Speculation exploded into overdrive early on Tuesday evening when ‘The Notorious’ seemingly revealed that he had decided to retire from mixed martial arts via Twitter.
I have decided to retire young.
Thanks for the cheese.
Catch ya's later.— Conor McGregor (@TheNotoriousMMA) April 19, 2016
Given McGregor’s cryptic social media history, many believed he was simply trolling but the unexpected was confirmed late on Tuesday night as UFC president Dana White took to SportsCenter to explain that McGregor had been pulled from the July 9 card.
‘The Notorious’ was scheduled to travel to Las Vegas this week to attend a press conference to promote UFC 200 but, according to White, McGregor refused.
BREAKING NEWS: UFC pulls @TheNotoriousMMA from #UFC200. @danawhite on @SportsCenter now.
— UFC (@ufc) April 19, 2016
“Is Conor McGregor retiring? Only he can answer that question. I don’t know,” White said. “But Conor McGregor is not fighting at UFC 200.”
McGregor is currently in Iceland where he is training with his SBG teammates but it looks like there is no fight at the end of the road for the Irishman as White claimed that McGregor’s opponent, Nate Diaz, was still flying to Las Vegas this week but that the promotion would be looking for a new fight.
“He didn’t want to,” White said. “He’s in Iceland training and he felt leaving right now would hurt his training and getting ready for this fight. But every other fighter on the card was coming. I get accused of coddling Conor all the time, but at the end of the day I respect Conor.
“But it doesn’t make you exempt for showing up for the press conferences and all the promotional stuff that we have to do. We spend a lot of money with this stuff, and you have to do it, man.
“Obviously we still have a good relationship with Conor. I respect Conor as a fighter and I like him as a person. But you can’t decide to not show up for this things. You have to do them.”
It seems a rather petty reason to pull a star of McGregor’s magnitude from a pay-per-view so there is likely more at play here but this is all that we have to work with right now.
