Conor McGregor and his coach, John Kavanagh share the best bond of fighter-coach relationships in the MMA world but there have been up and downs in their relationship in the past.
Kavanagh spoke with Ariel Helwani about the time he had a rift with his most decorated student, which created a gradual separation between the two after McGregor’s victory over Jose Aldo at UFC 194.
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Kavanagh, the coach of SBG Ireland was going through some tough times when his best pupil became a champion.
After winning the championship, McGregor started shifting his training schedule towards later in the night. Kavanagh, however, would start early in the morning. He would be at the Gym as early as 9 AM while McGregor would show up late in the night around 10 to 11 PM, according to Kavanagh.
"No tension," Kavanagh said, according to Mmafighting.com. "No bad feelings or anything like that. It's just like, ‘Oh, I guess that's how he's doing it now.' He's the champion of the world. He just beat who some say is the best ever in 13 seconds. What am I gonna say?"
But later, things changed after McGregor suffered his first UFC loss at the hands of Nate Diaz at UFC 196. After facing defeat, McGregor had a word with Kavanagh during a party and vowed to pull himself back on track.
The grand master of SBG Ireland had filled in as McGregor’s agent, coach as well as manager during his regular training up till his very first fight inside the UFC Octagon back in 2013, but now ‘The Notorious one’ has his own team to fill in all those roles. Kavanagh further added:
"Conor's life has obviously gotten pretty wild over the last couple of years,"
"Not that it was by design, but we did kind of drift a little bit. And we realised that and we spoke about it after the contest and we just kind of made a pact to go back to how it was when we went to Sweden for the first time."
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