Lex Fridman<\/a> that McGregor was his most difficult challenge from a mental standpoint.<\/p>\n\u201cOne hundred percent,\u201d Nurmagomedov said. \u201cBecause fighting\u2019s all psychology, you know? It\u2019s a mental game. Mentally speaking, that was my toughest fight. At that point, yeah. But a tougher fight came later.\u201d<\/p>\n
That tougher fight was Nurmagomedov\u2019s October 2020 retirement bout against Justin Gaethje. Nurmagomedov\u2019s father and lifelong coach Abdulmanap died earlier that year, shaking up \u201cThe Eagle\u201d and putting his career in perspective. He would go on to defeat Gaethje and subsequently announce his retirement from MMA with a spotless 29-0 record.<\/p>\n
Like the McGregor fight, it was the internal struggle that was most important to overcome.<\/p>\n
\u201cFirst and foremost, it was because I had lost my father,\u201d Nurmagomedov said of the Gaethje fight. \u201cIt was hard to pull myself together. Everything piled up at once. My father was gone. And training without my father, without the person I was doing all of this for, the person I wanted to become champion for, first and foremost, to prove to him that I could become the best.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd then the training camp itself, physically I was not in the best shape. I had injury after injury after injury, but mentally speaking I stayed completely sharp.\u201d<\/p>\n
Regarding what made the McGregor fight so challenging, Nurmagomedov pointed to the deeply personal attacks that McGregor frequently lobbed in his direction. At the same time, he acknowledges that McGregor\u2019s powder keg-persona was key to selling their fight.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe way he talked, what he stirred up, the lines he crossed, touching on family, religion, and then somehow on one side you had Conor, this really interesting champion who knew how to hype himself up,\u201d Nurmagomedov said. \u201cOn the other side, you had this undefeated somebody from nowhere, from the mountains. You know it is.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt all somehow, all of it just kind of happened naturally. And it wasn\u2019t staged. It was real. We had a real rivalry, unlike the way a lot of people now just hype up interest in a fight. But people feel that energy. It doesn\u2019t go anywhere. People can tell what\u2019s real and what\u2019s fake and because of that we went beyond our own sport. That\u2019s what made this fight so massive.\u201d<\/p>\n
Asked if there will ever be a bigger UFC fight, Nurmagomedov put the question in perspective by bringing up the most famous bouts from boxing and what has allowed them to stand the test of time.<\/p>\n
\u201cLet\u2019s look at the history here,\u201d Nurmagomedov said. \u201cI mean, our sport is still very young, say 35 years old, starting from the \u201890s, put it this way. Take, for example, the sport most similar to MMA, which is, let\u2019s say boxing. How old is boxing? A hundred and fifty years? Like, when you think boxing, what pops into your head? \u2018Thrilla in Manila?\u2019 Mike Tyson had big fights, but Mike Tyson never had that signature rival like Muhammad Ali had in Joe Frazier. [Evander] Holyfield-Tyson is no Ali-Frazier. \u2026 People called it the greatest rivalry and it still is. In the 20th century, there was nothing that could compare.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn the 21st century, the only thing you could compare it to, purely based on the numbers, is [Manny] Pacquiao vs. Mayweather. Yes, there was public interest, but there wasn\u2019t the energy that there was with Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier.\u201d<\/p>\n
While Nurmagomedov puts the likes of Ali on a pedestal, he can also see how his heated feud with McGregor captured the imaginations of fight fans in a similar way.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was the exact same thing when I fought Conor,\u201d Nurmagomedov said. \u201cThat fight went beyond our sport. It impacted every sport because athletes of all kinds of different sports, everyone who loves to compete, it didn\u2019t matter if it was football, basketball, soccer, or boxing, everyone was following this. And honestly, will there be a fight like that? Well, it\u2019s hard for me to say, but I think it\u2019ll happen. It\u2019ll happen for sure. There will always be champions. There will always be rivalries. But when it\u2019ll happen, that\u2019s just a matter of time.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Khabib Nurmagomedov\u2019s settle the score with Conor McGregor UFC 229, but he admits his dominant win didn\u2019t come…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":853088,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[570],"tags":[64,63,786,1347,785,85,787,1396],"class_list":["post-853087","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mma","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-fighting","tag-latest-news","tag-mma","tag-sports","tag-ufc","tag-ufc-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/853087","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=853087"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/853087\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/853088"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=853087"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=853087"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=853087"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}