Back in late June, about a week after his fight with Floyd Mayweather was officially announced, Conor McGregor trolled the undefeated boxer by showing off a gigantic mural that was painted on the wall in his gym in Dublin, Ireland. The mural featured McGregor punching Mayweather in the face and quickly took the internet by storm.
In the days that followed, several details about the mural came out. A Dublin-based art collective called Subset released a statement to Yahoo! Sports and revealed that they were behind the painting. They also let loose that it was McGregor’s coach John Kavanagh who asked them to put it together, and described the process in an interview with Versus.
Additionally, this video of McGregor seeing the mural for the first time surfaced. He looked blown away by the art and was clearly surprised by it when he walked into his gym.
But in an excellent new ESPN the Magazine cover story on McGregor by Wright Thompson, Kavanagh told the whole story behind the painting and revealed why he decided to have it painted on the wall at the gym when McGregor first started training for his fight with Mayweather.
According to Kavanagh, he first learned that McGregor and Mayweather were going to fight at about the same time that the rest of us did. McGregor texted him on June 14 and told him the fight was on, only a short time before he took to social media to let the rest of us in on the news.
And when he did, Kavanagh quickly realized that despite the fact that McGregor would be preparing to fight one of the best boxers of all time, he hadn’t gotten around to putting together a boxing gym where he could train yet. So Kavanagh sprung into action and created a gym in just four days.
To do it, Kavanagh called the owner of his MMA gym and asked to borrow an abandoned car dealership located nearby. Then, he cleaned it up, hung a sheet to create some separation between the dealership’s showroom and the repair bays in the back, and got the water and electricity up and running. He also had a boxing ring shipped from England to Ireland by boat. Finally, he decided that he was going to hire Subset to paint the mural of McGregor punching Mayweather to complete the space.
Thompson reports that Subset knocked it out in just one session, paint fumes be damned:
The artists laughed the first time they saw the space, wondering what Floyd's gym must look like, making jokes about Rocky training in the snow. The mural got painted freehand in one 12-hour burst, the fumes leaving the painters bent. Kavanagh wants that image to work in Conor's mind.
While speaking with ESPN the Mag, Kavanagh also talked about what happened when he showed McGregor the painting for the first time. You can see his reaction in the clip above, but Kavanagh said the big reveal didn’t go as planned at first. It seems McGregor thought the guys from Subset were in his gym to jump him when he first walked on. And one of the Subset members, who spoke with ESPN the Mag, said that that led to an awkward first encounter with McGregor. The member said he had never met anyone like McGregor before.
"I’d never been in someone’s company before who was purely male energy," the Subset member, who was not identified by name, said. "There was no female energy. And not in a macho way. He wasn’t fronting up. He’s running off this raw, food chain, evolution, strongest-survive energy. He’s cold. That’s what he’s like. He was open, a gentleman, but he’s cold at the base of it."
Thompson’s entire piece in ESPN the Mag provides an interesting look into how McGregor got to where he’s at today. We all know McGregor hails from Ireland and endured a lot before finally landing in the UFC. But Thompson takes a look at everything from McGregor’s past ties to local gangs in Dublin to his disdain for the upper class in Ireland to provide some context for why McGregor is the way he is now. You can check out the whole story here.
