Dillon Danis and Conor McGregor have become close friends in recent years.
Danis has been training alongside McGregor for three years now, after ‘The Notorious’ enlisted the help of the Marcelo Garcia black belt ahead of his rematch with Nate Diaz at UFC 202.
In return, McGregor has been helping Danis hone his striking as he takes his first steps into the world of mixed martial arts.
Danis made his MMA debut a year ago and submitted his first opponent early on in the first round of the Bellator 198 bout. With his second outing announced for Bellator 221 next month, Danis has revealed how hands-on McGregor is with his striking advice.
“I talk to him to almost every day,” Danis said on Ariel Helwani’s MMA Show, as transcribed by BJPenn.com. “I do boxing sparring, and I send him the footage and he’ll critique me with a long paragraph, saying you need to do this, do that.”
Just like his Irish friend, Danis is something of a polarising figure in MMA.
His brashness, confidence and trash talk mean that he is not universally liked by fight fans and McGregor also advises the controversial grappler on how to deal with backlash online.
“In the beginning, when I started getting all this stuff, I was like shit, this is crazy,” he said. “I used to get it a lot, cause I was kind of like the bad guy in jiu jitsu anyway, but it wasn’t to the level that it is now. [It was] 100, 200 comments compared to 1000, 7000 comments I get sometimes [now]. I talked to Conor in the beginning and he obviously gave me good advice.
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“It was a long time ago, but I think he was just like ‘these people don’t know you.’ He was like ‘if I looked at every comment… It’s just people that are bitter.’ He explained that to me. When you start getting up in the game, up in the world, a lot of bitter and jealous people want to hate on you and try to bring you down for anything you do.”
Danis was front and centre for the post-fight brawl at UFC 229 and it was he who was Khabib Nurmagomedov’s target when the undefeated Russian jumped out of the Octagon after submitting McGregor.
“He’s always there for me and I appreciate having him a lot,” Danis continued. “Especially the way I jumped into the game, 0-0, going right into it [with] a lot of hype, a lot of pressure. There’s no one better than having him. He’s dealt with it all. I’ve never seen anybody deal with pressure the way he does. It’s crazy. I’ve been with him the night before a fight and we’re hanging out, watching Netflix. It’s crazy. I’ve never seen anything like it. He’s a different kind of breed of human.”
