The Ultimate Fighting Championship’s featherweight division may be one of the most stacked weight classes in all of mixed martial arts, and it suffered a major logjam when undisputed champion Conor McGregor stepped away to conquer lightweight gold. After Conor became the first two-weight class champion in UFC history, he alluded to a bit of a break from fighting to which UFC responded swiftly by crowning Jose Aldo the champion, and Max Holloway the interim champion.
Apparently, all of this was done without so much of a phone call to McGregor. While Conor has admitted in the past that he had talked to UFC about possibly giving up a championship, he claims he wasn’t informed of all the changes going down:
“Before I even got the belt, they wanted to strip me. That’s what I’m saying, before I even won the belt, it was like, ‘you’ve got to give up this one.’ It’s like, just let me go and get the thing first. Let me go make the history. Let me go do what’s never been done before. And there seemed to be a problem with that, for whatever reason. I don’t know what the problem was, but again, a lack of communication.”
“All they had to do was ask. If they had actually came to me and said, ‘Conor, I know you’re prepared to have a baby, I know you’re chilling. If you want to fight for this featherweight belt in March,’ just a nice time, I would’ve went in and would’ve slapped Holloway or this guy he’s fighting, or Aldo, or whoever they wanted. No problem. All they had to do was ask. Instead, they created an interim belt. They gave back the unified belt to a guy I KO’d in 13 seconds. A guy I dominated is now the interim title (holder).”
