Kavanagh: Someone’s living in a balloon, Sat we find out who
John Kavanagh: “One of us is living in a huge balloon. That would appear to be a fact. … Saturday night we found out who that person is.”
Conor McGregor’s longtime coach, SBGi founder John Kavanagh, appeared recently on Ariel Helwani’s The MMA Hour, and explained why they didn’t bring a boxing trainer into the camp for Floyd Mayweather. While Hall of Fame boxing referee Joe Cortez was brought in to supervise the sparring sessions to familiarize McGregor with the nuances of prizefighting rules, and top sparring partners like Paulie Malignaggi and Dashon Johnson were employed, the strategy and pad holding was the usual mix of John Kavanagh and Owen Roddy.
What a boxing coach is going to try and do is make him move like a boxer. That’s not what we’re trying to do, said Kavanagh, as transcribed by MMA Fighting. I’ve used this example before, but Freddy Roach is an absolutely old-school trainer. I’ve actually been reading quite a lot about boxing trainers recently, and he’s been one of these guys from a time gone past where he could do everything in the corner — he’s a cutman, he’s a trainer, he was a great fighter himself. But ultimately, his southpaw wasn’t able to really do much with Floyd.
What was really going to come of bringing in someone [like Roach], other than introducing confusion? So Owen Roddy has, I believe, come up with a really solid gameplan for this fight, an approach that has not been brought to Floyd before. As opposed to just trying to mimic what other boxers have already done, we’re trying to do something a bit different. … Paulie, for example, that was more of a fight than it was a spar. And we got to see some of our ideas work in that situation. None of us saw any benefit to bringing a voice that was just going to be not one that we’re used to.
Let’s look at the last fight, the Eddie Alvarez fight, and his trainer had a bit of back and forward. ‘My guy’s going to do this, your guy’s going to do that,’ and so on, but we both still expected it to be a fight, at the end day; whereas with this one, these guys don’t even think we are — I get messages that we’re lacing the gloves up wrong, so we literally can’t even lace up a pair of gloves.
It’s like they’re so caught up on some of the cultural or ritualistic aspects of boxing, as opposed to — a great example was, I just came across a video there with … Freddie Roach, who is obviously brilliant, fantastic in all aspects of what he’s done. But he was asked about the video of the Paulie spar, and there’s a left hand in that spar that — say whatever you want, everyone has their opinion on the knockdown — but there’s a straight left that lands, it’s a really cracking shot, head whips back. It’s big gloves on and the guy is wearing a head guard and you still see the head whip back. It was a really nice shot, and the guy says, ‘Is that good technique?’ [Roach] says, ‘No, that was bad technique.’
Now I don’t know how you describe good technique, but if the object of boxing is for your fist to hit the guy in the face, that was an effective technique. A fist hit his face very fast and very hard. Because of, I believe, decades of their vision wanting to see things done a certain way, [Roach] could — without being sarcastic — say that was poor technique. There may be other things you can criticize us on, but how anyone had a criticism for that straight left — I just had to scratch my head and think, ‘What are they seeing?’
Even, like you said, Mayweather had his workout day, and he’s kinda just tipping the bag, he talks to the crowd and then he tips the bag. I didn’t watch it all, but I watched some of it, and it’s just, I don’t know, are they seeing something incredible I’m not seeing? And then Conor gets in and he’s hitting the bag, and they’re completely dismissing that, but Mayweather’s little shots on the bag were mind-blowing? One of us is living in a huge balloon. That would appear to be a fact. One of us is seeing something, or not seeing something, maybe some sort of cognitive dissonance or some sort of blinding — as we have a solar eclipse today, maybe some sort of mental eclipse has crossed one of us. Saturday night we found out who that person is.
The fight’s tonight.
