It may have been the single greatest use of social media in history. MMA fighter and UFC superstar Conor McGregor sent out a cryptic tweet Tuesday afternoon announcing, in not so many words, that he was done fighting for a living.
The Internet, of course, reacted in a sane and coherent manner.
Except, it didn't. In minutes, there were retweets and quickly patched together stories followed by breathless reports of the end of McGregor's professional career coming, so we all thought, many years too soon.
Only none of it was true.
In a Facebook post Thursday morning, the shrewd, savvy McGregor revealed that he had pulled a fast one on the sporting world. He's not done fighting. He's not retiring from the world of mixed martial arts.
However, the original tweet wasn't just for fun. It was a message to the UFC and presumably its president, Dana White.
"I am just trying to do my job and fight here," McGregor wrote. "I am paid to fight. I am not yet paid to promote. I have become lost in the game of promotion and forgot about the art of fighting. There comes a time when you need to stop handing out flyers and get back to the damn shop."
McGregor, estimating that he went on "50 world tours," which included "200 press conferences, 1 million interviews," and "2 million photo shoots" ahead of his most recent bout, a loss to Nate Diaz, made it clear that the reason for his tweet was...promotion.
He wanted to get done with one tweet what had taken those "50 world tours" last time around.
With UFC 200 looming and McGregor coming off a loss, the notoriously brash fighter seems intent on getting back to basics and the perma-hungry approach that allowed him to vault up the ranks at UFC in the first place.
However, when he asked White and the UFC to let him focus solely on his training and avoid the media wringer this time around, he was apparently denied.
"I will always play the game and play it better than anybody, but just for this one, where I am coming off a loss, I asked for some leeway where I can just train and focus. I did not shut down all media requests. I simply wanted a slight adjustment.
"But it was denied."
And so McGregor, ever the forward-thinker, did the best thing he could think of - he drew the eyes of millions of MMA fans with a single, well-worded tweet.
It's hard to see what the future holds for both sides here. McGregor made it clear that he's "NOT RETIRED," and is still "ready to go" for UFC 200. White, though, has said that McGregor's "window is pretty much closed," and that McGregor's fight against Diaz will no longer headline UFC 200.
For MMA fans, the hope is that the issue gets resolved. But White surely doesn't want to cave and set a precedent that effects future negotiations with other fighters, and McGregor clearly believes that he lost against Diaz at UFC 196 because he was asked to do too much promotion.
