The boxing world is not used to what Conor McGregor is bringing to the table.
Almost every analyst who gives ‘The Notorious’ a sliver of a chance against the undefeated Floyd Mayweather has pointed to the absolute need for the Irishman to keep it as unorthodox as possible in the ring.
There is no chance that McGregor is going to outbox Mayweather, that much is clear, but if he comes at Mayweather at unusual angles and with an unconventional rhythm then maybe, just maybe, he could catch the uncatchable.
The boxing community sees McGregor as something of a clown figure who has talked his way into the most lucrative boxing match-up of all time but that won’t matter a jot to the supremely self-assured Irishman, who remains fully confident of a victory in spite of the oddsmakers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tva4Vay3uOM
Last Friday, one of McGregor’s warm-up routines caught the eye of the boxing world as the 29-year-old broke out his tried and trusted shoulder-loosening exercise at a workout for the media in Las Vegas.
To the untrained eye, it appeared that McGregor was just wildly flapping his arms about but he assures everybody that there is a method to the movement and none of the parody videos that have come out since, courtesy of Terence Crawford and David Haye, are going to stop ‘The Notorious’ from doing his thing.
https://twitter.com/AgainstTRopes/status/896902957102280704
“I’ve seen some videos but it is what it is,” McGregor said on a conference call on Wednesday.
“It’s light-hearted, I don’t take it personally. If anything I see stiffness in every single one of them.
“You must have the limbs free. Your shoulders must be disconnected. You must have the ability to disconnect your shoulder and reconnect it at the point of impact. That skill set is how you change a jab to a hook in the blink of an eye or a jab to an uppercut in the blink of an eye.
“It’s the same thing with hip flexors with kicks. If I throw a teep, a front kick, to your midsection and I’m tight in the hips and can’t free the legs like I can free my shoulders, like I showed with one of many training methods of how to free the shoulders, if I can do that with my hip flexors then I can change the point of impact from the belly and switch it up to the head in a millisecond.
“These are age old training methods. That shoulder training method that you saw was made very popular by the great Rickson Gracie, one of the pioneers of mixed martial arts. It’s a shoulder-loosening exercise. It gets the shoulders warmed up but you’ve got to do it correctly.
Everyone in the gym was doing their best Conor McGregor impression today, I think I won. Let's hope his fight v Mayweather is entertaining🙏🏾 pic.twitter.com/1uvFrYaviL
— David Haye (@davidhaye) August 15, 2017
“I saw David Haye hit pads with it but you can’t hit pads when the shoulder’s disconnected. You hit when the shoulder is disconnected and you’ll do serious damage to yourself. And David Haye is a man who has pulled out of contests with a sore baby toe so he must be careful with the way he hits pads.
“It is what it is. We will educate as we go forward. It’s a marathon and not a sprint.”
