Conor McGregor says he’s not sure if he earned the respect of the boxing community with his performance against Floyd Mayweather, but he won more rounds against him than anyone has against him. “I thought I was hitting him clean,” he told FS1 in the post-fight show. “I thought he was catching some snapback shots. I was catching with a jab clean and his head was snapping back many times.”
He said he blew energy taking Mayweather’s back. He said he joked with afterward him that he’d have taken him out when he had his back so many times. “I enjoyed it, though,” he said. “I enjoyed it very much. The whole bit of it was completely different. … I don’t think I lost a fight, I lost a match. I thought his composure was very impressive. I didn’t think his speed or power, I thought the early rounds I had him. I held him in the fourth. I thought I picked him apart.
“Maybe you give him one of the first fourth. Then he took over the fifth, sixth, seventh. I won the eighth. He won the ninth and then the tenth. There’s always a patch in my fights where I go through this fatigue stage but I come through it. It’s not damage I’m feeling. I wasn’t wobbled or rocked. Even the final stoppage, one of them snapped the head back and three more after that, the three were glancing. I would have liked to have gotten to the corner.
“Even in training, in the build up, I had those eight, nine, ten were kind of iffy rounds, but then when I saw the finish line and I saw the 11, 12, I came back. I only need six minutes, and I could push it again. I feel if I could have gotten through the tenth round, I could have gotten my composure again. But what can you do? I don’t think he had the speed advantage. He picked his shots and bounced most of my shots off of him. That’s what experience will get you, that’s what 50 pro fights will get you.”
Regarding his gameplay, he said he wanted to get to 12 rounds. “I’ve never done that before,” he said. “I didn’t get to the 11th, 12th… If we get past the tenth round, then he has to deal with his energy. So that’s why I was a bit upset with it being stopped. Let me go down. He’s not powerful puncher. He’s composed, but he’s not powerful. So it shouldn’t have been stopped.”
He demonstrated how close he felt he came to landing a deciding blow early in the fight. “Just a millisecond earlier, it would have hit him and it would have been all he wrote,” he said. “I could see a little bit of panic in his face early on, but he absolved them and stayed in it.”
He sounded excited about continuing in boxing, but he said he’s not sure what’s next. “I have no clue,” he said. “Who else wants it? Who’s next? I don’t give a bullocks. I’ve got multiple world titles in the UFC. Boxing wants me, they want me back here. I have to figure out where I went wrong. At range, no one can beat me, nobody can touch me. It’s when he changed up put his hands on his ears and his forehead on his chest. I tried to peel the glove a few times, I got him a few times. But he’s composed. I’m going to get better at that… He had to do that because he was getting picked off. I’m going to get better at that and then come back. That’s it.”
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