Sweating it out in Vegas at the end of social distancing: Recollections of the last time Conor McGregor fought in the UFC

Let me tell you a story about the last time Conor McGregor fought in the UFC. I was there, and it was weird, and there were many things about it I’ll never forget.

It was the summer of 2021, which is easy to remember because it was the first summer after the world had begun shrugging off the suffocating pressure of the COVID-19 pandemic.

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The summer of 2020 had been the summer of social distancing and hand sanitizer and sweating into face masks. The summer of 2021 was the first one after the vaccines had come out, when a lot of us felt newly bulletproof and very ready to stop worrying that we’d be the one to kill someone’s grandmother by bringing coronavirus from the dive bar to a birthday party.

The mood in Las Vegas reflected this ecstatic relief, which is a nice way of saying that it felt like half of America had gone there to freak out in the sun. Vegas in the summer is always slammed, but this was something else. Anywhere you went on the Vegas strip that week, you were adrift in a sea of drunk, sunburned humanity letting loose with wild abandon.

It was hard to tell how much of that was driven by the fact that it was a Conor McGregor fight week. He was big back then. Maybe not as big as he’d been in 2017, when he boxed Floyd Mayweather. But still big enough that anyone within earshot of the zeitgeist had heard his name and seen someone do a version of his swaggering walk.

It was also a big weekend in Vegas just generally. There was a Garth Brooks concert at Allegiant Stadium that same Saturday. Justin Bieber was slated to perform three times in 24 hours. Dave Chappelle and Joe Rogan were doing a dual comedy show the night before UFC 264. I remember the sports writer Arash Markazi calling it “the unofficial grand reopening of Las Vegas,” and it definitely felt that way any time I left my hotel room to get something to eat.

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But people had forgotten how to act. That was part of the mood in the air. I’d been covering fights in Vegas long enough to have witnessed all manner of bad behavior. (My favorite was the drunk girl holding her shoes and trying to buy cigarettes from a coffee cart at six in the morning until the barista, fed up with explaining that he only sold coffee, locked eyes with me and asked whether I had any ideas here.)

Something felt different now, though. Like even the reasonable people were popping their lids and blowing off the steam that had been building since the previous spring.

I remember meeting a whole crew of middle-aged women in matching T-shirts that read “The Drunk Friend.” (Get it? They were all the drunk friend!) The one who was nearest to sober told me they were a far-flung friend group who met up in Vegas every summer but had missed the previous year due to COVID.

“And we’re making up for it this year!” her much drunker friend shrieked directly into my ear.

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I remember I could feel her Michelob UItra breath on my face then. In fact, I remember being a lot more conscious of other people in general, and they seemed like an imposition. Their sweaty arms kept bumping up against mine in crowded casinos and it occurred to me that, while I hadn’t been great with big crowds before the pandemic, maybe I had actually gotten worse.

The mood at the pre-fight festivities was also different. The second time McGregor and Poirier had fought, about six months earlier in Abu Dhabi, the vibe was all warm and cozy and even gentlemanly. McGregor had pledged to give half a million dollars to Poirier’s charity. Poirier had praised his grace and generosity and overall impact on the sport.

Then Poirier knocked McGregor out in the second round and circled back a few months later to tell the public that, oh by the way, McGregor never did write that check to his charity. That’s about when things got ugly.

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McGregor showed up to a pre-fight press conference on fight week and grabbed the bottles of hot sauce Poirier had put on display, spiking them to the floor one by one. McGregor called Poirier a hillbilly. Poirier countered that he’d “put you on airplane mode in front of the whole world” the last time they fought. The temperature in the room, just like on the pavement outside, kept climbing.

But what really felt different was when the music hit for the first fight of the night inside T-Mobile Arena. If you’ve been to a live UFC event, you know how it goes. It’s still technically afternoon outside. There are a lot of empty, expensive seats at cageside, but less so the higher up you get. Then that first fighter’s music drops, louder than you’d ever thought possible, and it’s like the sound is shaking you by the shoulders, telling you: It’s happening, finally! It’s really happening!

The responding cheer from the crowd, most of whom did not buy tickets to see Zhalgas Zhumagulov vs. Jerome Rivera but were now thrilled to see them in the curtain-jerker anyway, felt like a reflexive reaction. It was joy and relief and pent up anxiety, all released at once.

This was just the fourth UFC event in front of a real crowd in a full arena in over a year. The “Fight Island” era had ended. The empty warehouse vibe of the Apex had shifted from fun novelty to dreary bore. At last, here was that old feeling, a packed house in the middle of a scorching Vegas summer, all tuned up on Proper Twelve and Coke cocktails that cost $22 apiece, elated to revel in a night of unarmed combat together.

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But then, you probably remember how it ended. After a steady and satisfying build to the main event (the prelims featured future UFC champs Ilia Topuria and Dricus du Plessis, plus we got to see Greg Hardy flattened by Tai Tuivasa), the night ended with a gruesome twist.

One spirited round. Most of it in Poirier’s favor. McGregor ended it on his back when the horn sounded, but when he went to get up and walk to his corner, well, it just wasn’t happening. At first, none of us in the building knew what this meant. He seemed conscious and aware enough. He hadn’t been beaten up that badly in the first frame.

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Then they showed the replay. We watched McGregor’s ankle roll over and his lower leg bend past the point of normal human bone plasticity. Groans filled the air. McGregor himself watched the big screen from a sitting position, leaning up against the chainlink fence.

The look on his face was something we hadn’t seen much from him in either victory or defeat. The man was in shock. He was rattled and worried but also agonized and enraged. He stayed that way as they loaded him on the stretcher and wheeled him out of sight. None of us could have known then how long it would be before we’d ever see him back in a (sanctioned, sober) fighting posture again.