Conor McGregor becomes a verb

Ben Rothwell appeared recently on Ariel Helwani’s The MMA Hour, and attributed part of his devastating win over Alistair Overeem at UFC Fight Night 50 to ‘Reem’s pre-fight trash talk. During the course of the conversation, Rothwell coined a new verb, to mcgregor.

“I always say, hey, it’s probably best to be quiet when you’re fighting me,” said Rothwell, as transcribed by Shaun Al-Shatti for MMAFighting. “Because the second you start going to the media, if you’re going to try to McGregor me, so to speak, it’s better for me because I make it personal. And when I make it personal, I fight my best.”

“I just went into my training camp with a chip on my shoulder. Like, really dude? That’s what I was thinking in my head. I knew what I was going to do, and it just kept building up, watching the media hang all over him, take me out of it.

“Right up until the week of the fight, more stuff was getting hit all over the media with talking him up and how he’s going to fight. He was already calling out other guys, stuff like that, and I’m just like… really? You’ve got me in front of you and you’re going to call out other people? Alright, we’re going to see how this is going to work out for you.”

Overeem recently said he thought he would beat Rothwell nine out of ten times, a remark that left Ben baffled.

“He posts that, and I didn’t even have to say a word because it seemed like all the forums and media took care of it for me,” said Rothwell. “The general consensus was that this guy had brain damage. I think he’s getting hit in the head too many times to make that comment.

“If I was his coach or I was his teammate, I’d be like: ‘Dude, shut up. Stay out of media. You’re going into a fight that you cannot lose against a guy who could beat you, and you’re talking trash about a guy who just beat you. This makes no sense.’ Him talking trash on me right now while he’s going into a fight against Stefan Struve is only going to hurt him. I don’t know what he’s trying to do, because every time he talks all trash against Travis Browne and Bigfoot Silva, it has not turned out well for him. And he’s doing it again.”

Mcgregor (verb)

mik•greg•er

word origin: Ireland

Archaic. to behave with insolent triumph; exult contemptuously (usually followed by on, upon, or over).

“It is often that a person’s mouth broke his nose, but there he called the round and then mcgregored over him, he did.”