Conor McGregor must ‘look inside himself’, says Mike Tyson as boxing legend offers troubled UFC star advice
- Former heavyweight champion tells Irishman to ask himself ‘what happened?’ as controversies outside the cage mount
- ‘We don’t know how to handle this stuff. We got millions of dollars. We never had this’
As his controversies outside the cage continue to mount, Conor McGregor has been offered some words of advice by former heavyweight boxing champion Mike Tyson.
The Irishman appeared in court last week charged with assault for punching an elderly patron of a Dublin pub in April, and will return to enter a plea next month.
The former featherweight and lightweight UFC champion has not fought since a submission defeat by Khabib Nurmagomedov last October, and Tyson – himself no stranger to the struggles of fame – has suggested some lifestyle changes.
“Conor has to look inside himself and [ask], ‘What happened? Why am I the way I am?’, and how do I stop this from continuing to be. I think he’s an awesome guy,” he told Ariel Helwani’s MMA Show.
“We don’t know how to handle this stuff. We got millions of dollars. We never had this. Our families never had this. We’ve never been around this life.
“All of a sudden you start fighting, doing something you love to do, and you do it easily and all of a sudden they give you a lot of money for doing it.”
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“But you have no restraints, you have no control,” Tyson said. “You give it away, you buy people gifts that don’t deserve gifts. You just don’t know what to do with it, you feel you don’t deserve it. You say. ‘I’m a nobody, I don’t deserve this. I just like to fight. I’d do this for nothing’.”
While McGregor has made tens of millions of dollars from fighting, Tyson said most MMA fighters should be making more money.
“The MMA guys are as big as the fighters [boxers] are,” he said. “There’s no doubt. But why aren’t the they making the money that the [boxers] are? How come more people are watching MMA than watching boxing, and boxers are making three times or five times more money than MMA guys? Why is that?”
