Conor McGregor’s opening punch bloodied Donald Cerrone’s nose. He then floored Cerrone only 20 seconds into the bout with a perfectly placed kick to the head and mercilessly finished on the ground.
When he paraded around the ring with an Irish flag on his shoulders to celebrate, the mixed martial arts world knew McGregor was back.
The Irish former two-division champion came out of a three-year stretch of relative inactivity and outside-the-cage troubles with a welterweight performance in UFC246 on Saturday that echoed his greatest fights during his unparalleled rise.
Photo: AFP
“I feel really good and I came out of here unscathed,” McGregor said. “I’m in shape. We’ve got work to do to get back to where I was.”
After hurting Cerrone (36-14) with his first punch, McGregor (22-4) dropped him with a sublime kick to the jaw. McGregor pounced and forced referee Herb Dean to save Cerrone, delighting a sellout crowd of 19,040 at the T-Mobile Arena.
McGregor’s hand had not been raised in victory since November 2016, when he stopped lightweight Eddie Alvarez to become the first fighter in UFC history to hold two championship belts simultaneously. With his fame and fortune multiplying, McGregor fought only his boxing match with Floyd Mayweather Jr in 2017 and lost a one-sided UFC bout to lightweight champion Khabib Nurmagomedov in late 2018.
“I wasn’t committed,” McGregor said afterward while speaking to reporters with a bottle of his Proper Twelve whiskey on the table before him. “I just felt like I disrespected the people that believed in me and supported me. That’s what led me to re-center myself and get back to where I was at.”
After a year spent out of competition and in repeated trouble with the law, McGregor got back into training and vowed to return to elite form. This dramatic victory over Cerrone indicated that he is well on his way, and McGregor has vowed to fight multiple times this year.
Welterweight champion Kamaru Usman and veteran brawler Jorge Masvidal watched UFC246 from cageside. Either man could be McGregor’s next opponent, but UFC president Dana White is pushing for a rematch with Nurmagomedov, whose first scheduled fight of the year is against Tony Ferguson in April.
“Any one of these mouthy fools can get it,” McGregor yelled into the microphone. “Every single one of them can get it. It does not matter. I’m back and I’m ready.”
McGregor also wants to make up for his loss to Nurmagomedov, but he does not want to wait until the champion is ready to fight again in late summer. McGregor wants an earlier fight, and he predicted that the Nurmagomedov-Ferguson fight would be scrapped, as it already has four times during those fighters’ careers.
Cerrone is the winningest fighter in UFC history with 23 victories, a mark that reflects both his durability and commitment to an uncommonly busy schedule. Cerrone, who also holds the UFC record with 16 stoppage wins, had fought 11 times since McGregor’s win over Alvarez, and he was in the cage for the 15th time since he lost his only UFC title shot in December 2015.
However, Cerrone’s past two fights were stopped when he took too much damage and he could not block McGregor’s decisive kick or recover from the punishment on the ground.
“I’d never seen anything like that,” Cerrone said. “He busted my nose, it started bleeding, and he stepped back and head-kicked me. Oh, man. This happened this fast?”
In other fights, former bantamweight champion Holly Holm beat Raquel Pennington by unanimous decision in the penultimate bout.
The 38-year-old Holm (13-5) had lost five of her seven fights since she knocked out Ronda Rousey in November 2015.
On the undercard, 37-year-old flyweight Roxanne Modafferi pulled off one of the biggest upsets in recent UFC history with a one-sided decision victory over previously unbeaten 21-year-old Maycee Barber, the UFC’s top 125 pound (57kg) prospect.
Barber (8-1) injured her left knee during the bout, but Modafferi (24-16) was already dominating with the superior jujutsu she has been practicing for Barber’s entire life. Modafferi was the biggest betting underdog on the UFC246 card, facing 10-to-1 odds on some sports books.
Aleksei Oleinik, a 42-year-old heavyweight who made his pro debut in 1996, beat Maurice Greene by submission in the second round.
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