Vegas the perfect stage for Conor McGregor’s ultimate challenge
But don’t dwell too long on the decision. Because it doesn’t really matter which particular variety of ‘news’ you happen to find yourself trapped in front of. The news is the same — bad. Destruction. Damnation. Doom. A dash of weather if you’re lucky.
Vegas, though, does things differently. That is, of course, in keeping with the place — the world capital of WTF. It’s not that it’s immune to bad news. Any city of two million plus people in this, a country that with each passing week seems to be closer to tearing itself apart at the seams, couldn’t be that lucky.
It’s just that the City of Sin is much better at at least making it seem that everything isn’t quite so bad. The US and particularly those vying to ascend to its whitest house next year, are engaged in a race to the bottom on so many fronts. But they appear particularly keen to bring the country back in on itself. Close off the borders. Put up the wall.
Las Vegas, of all places, offers a welcome break from that brand of lunacy. Retraction and isolation be damned, here in the desert, expansion is always the hottest topic. For business, for sport, most of all for the business of sport, it’s the only topic.
Last week, the University of Nevada wrapped up its biggest land deal since the 1960s, snapping up 42 acres right behind the MGM Grand Garden Arena for somewhere north of $52m. The idea is for a new American football stadium to rise out of the sand, in prime territory, just a block and a half from the Strip. UNLV bigwigs are for now eyeing something around the 60,000, but here, bigger is always better.
This comes in spite of the fact that on the opposite side of the MGM, in the parking lot of the New York New York casino, the shimmering Las Vegas Arena has yet to even open its doors. Hometown heroes “The Killers” will cut the ribbon on that venue in April but this week ice hockey’s powers that be, the NHL board of governors, are also meeting to decide whether it will become a permanent home to the city’s first major professional sports team with the NHL ready to grow by two teams. Major League Soccer’s breathless spread has again brought the beautiful game into fresh focus too, a second bid at seducing the MLS being weighed up.
Further up the Strip, the sprawling Resorts World Las Vegas takes shape. A $4bn mega project by Malaysian gaming giants Genting, it’s the first new casino in the city since the property market crash.
Upward, outward, onward. It is not happenstance then that Las Vegas suits Conor McGregor.
On Saturday night, at the very epicentre of all this expansion, the Dubliner steps back into the octagon at the Grand Garden Arena. It will be McGregor’s 21st fight as a professional mixed martial artist. It will just be his third here in Nevada, but his third in the past four. And it is how exponentially things have changed in that time that makes this place and that guy feel like the perfect fit.
McGregor first pitched up here in September of last year. That sounds almost recent. But to recall that it was just his second fight outside of Europe and his first on a pay per view card frames the 15 frenzied months since then in a context that’s difficult to quite fathom.
The McGregor of that night and the one who strode on to the Strip this time around aren’t particularly different from one another. There’s a little more ink, a bit more bling, but he’s still the same as he seemingly ever was — prowling, pulsating, pugnacious.
It’s the world around him, the stratosphere he finds himself operating in that has changed utterly. Horizons have shifted up, out and on, beyond most precedents in his sport and the wider sphere of combat.
Take the past few days — darling of the late night talk circuit, full profile treatment across the pages of The Wall Street Journal, unavoidable across the US sports networks, utter omnipresence. Notoriety, if you like.
His new digs, the latest incarnation of the Mac Mansion that McGregor tweeted to the world yesterday, look to be a significant step up too. The Ultimate Fighting Championship never tires of telling us it’s the fastest growing sport in the world but there is space for argument there. (Incidentally, the organisation themselves are also getting in on the wave of upsizing, having broken ground on a sprawling new HQ last week). But where there is less room to manoeuvre is the observation that McGregor is a sportsman whose star is in the most startling, hurtling of ascents. You could almost say unstoppable. Almost.
On Saturday, at UFC 194 on the third of three-straight nights of major cards, McGregor’s journey of expansion has him headed in the direction of what shapes to be a major road block. Since he came into the UFC, Jose Aldo Jr has had plenty come his way and none have passed. The Brazilian, for many the sport’s pound-for-pound perfectionist, is undefeated for a decade.
The fight — the biggest the UFC has known for some time — has already been scratched once. But for both men, the itch is still gnawing at them.
Fourteen months of build-up will do that to you. The meeting of these two featherweight champions — a totemic one in Aldo, a token one (for now) in McGregor — shapes for both to be a milestone night, one way or the other.
It’s a meeting that will also herald another Irish invasion of the desert, unseasonably warm with rare December temperatures in the mid 20s. The green hordes have already begun to drift in and soak it up.
For the money men of the desert, in a year when they’re on course to shatter their existing record of 41 million annual visitors, the Irish influx is just more good news. Las Vegas likes it that way. The damnation and doom, that can wait.
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