I had to laugh out loud for real when I read that McGregor had finally broken his long silence about the details about why he had to bow out of the big fight vs Michael Chandler at UFC 303. He has broken his tiny toe during a sparring session without using protective gear. I don't know what sort of protective gear you would possible wear to protect a baby toe from breaking when striking someone's elbow, but that is the claim that Conor made via Twitter, in the past day.
This brings about a couple of emotions in me when the news broke. For one thing, it was actually Chael Sonnen calling him out that kind of forced Conor's hand on breaking the silence and letting the public know what the deal was here so for that, I say thank you Chael! Your wide-open motor-mouth of sarcasm and insults put the world's most famous MMA fighter in a position where he was basically required to respond to the public after Chael made some pretty grand accusations about Conor not being truly injured or that there could be something more nefarious going on like the Irishman potentially failing anti-doping testing regulations.
Chael also made other outlandish (and purely speculative) suggestions that Conor withdrawing from UFC 303 would mean that Conor would be withdrawing from the sport as well. Something to understand here is that when Chael makes comments like this they are designed to get a rise out of people and are almost never based on actual research or insider information. He is a "shock jock" of sorts and well, in this situation his position accomplished exactly what the perhaps unintended result was: He got Conor or probably more likely, Conor's team combined with UFC handlers to respond to the public who really wants to know what the hell is going on.
Chael is the perfect person to initiate this sort of discussion because him and Conor have a lot in common as far as advancing their careers by way of having a big mouth with lots of charismatic and humorous statements. This "feature" of their personalities got both of them a lot of big fights that they possibly didn't deserve and they both utilize this aspect of themselves very well.
Conor responded almost exclusively because Sonnen's comments went viral and people started to suspect a ton of different thing about Conor including that he might be in trouble with the AADA.
You can tell that Conor was responding directly to Sonnen because McGregor specifically called him out in some hilarious Tweets stating "Chael shut your pie hole, hoe. You tap from ground and pound."
This is a great method of deflecting because I had forgotten that this happened and I am sure that Chael would like all of us to forget that happened as well. If Conor had posted some stills from Sonnen's recent rather-embarrassing boxing match with Anderson Silva, that would have been icing on the cake.
Conor took the Tweet further to address his "leaving of the sport" by stating that he has 2 fights left on his UFC contract and he has every intention of fulfilling that obligation but then went on to say "Chandler or not" which has to be disappointing to Michael Chandler, who was so close to getting the biggest payout of his career as well as a big push for him to be considered for championships again - an offer that I think is very unlikely for the man at this point.
Always being the gentleman, Michael Chandler responded with genuine well-wishing and statements that he hopes Conor gets back to 100% soon. This would have been a great opportunity for MC to push Conor's buttons by saying something brash towards him, but by being the "nice guy" he may have actually eliminated himself from the picture altogether. Only time will tell as far as this is concerned.
Conor, who is not a doctor but definitely has a lot of experience with recovering from injury, states that that he would be back to fight-ready status in a couple of weeks.
Now here is the part of this entire situation that still has me perplexed and also a bit suspicious about the entire explanation. If it always was a toe fracture all along, then why the immense secrecy surrounding it? When someone has an injury in a fight they will normally be really forthcoming about it but in Conor's situation his withdrawal from the 303 was shrouded in mystery. No one, even industry insiders could tell anyone anything about why McGregor was in one day, out the next when the Dublin press conference was cancelled. I would go as far as to say that McGregor might have intentionally damaged one of his toes after the fact as a way of covering the situation up to hide the real reasons for his withdrawal.
Is Conor telling the truth? Well, the Tweets were all spelled correctly so I am not even 100% that he is the one writing them, but at least we have some semblance of a real answer now. For that, I say "Thank you Chael!"
No matter what the truth is here, UFC 303 went from being perhaps the most-watched card of the year to being a second-rate event. I have almost no enthusiasm to even bother watching it now because when you take away the main pictures that were on the event poster, you kind of forget what the rest of the card was even about.