Judging by his latest comments, Conor McGregor appears to be still smarting over what he believes was a premature stoppage in his boxing superfight with Floyd Mayweather back in August.
Referee Robert Byrd had stepped in to wave off the fight in the tenth round as Mayweather really started to let his hands go, repeatedly putting ‘The Notorious’ on the back foot with punches to the head, but the Irish superstar insists he wasn’t badly hurt.
“I thought it was an early stoppage,” McGregor told Caroline Pearce at a Q&A in Glasgow. “How the f**k can you stop a fight if there were no knockdowns or nothing previous?” he asked.
“The round before that I almost had him dropped. I hurt him to the body in the round before. How the f**k can you stop it like that at the first sign of a wobble? You’ve got to let these fights go on.”
In hindsight, McGregor thinks Byrd was never going to give him a fair crack of the whip.
“When we came face to face and we were doing the rules thing, he was only staring at me. I’m looking at him staring at me and I could see in my peripheral vision that he was looking at me and not looking at Floyd.
“I was going to say, ‘He’s fighting as well, mate. Give him the f**king rules. I don’t know, what was going on there?
“Every time we tied he literally wrestled me off him. It is what it is, I knew I wasn’t going to get a fair shake out there.”
The fact that the ref’s wife is adalaide Byrd, who hit the headlines herself after being just about the only person in the building who though Canelo Alvarez beat GGG in another massive boxing match last month, has only made McGregor more suspicious.
“The referee was a weird one now the more I look back on it. Especially after Adalaide Bird had that thing with the Canelo and GGG fight, that was her.
“Adalaide and Robert Byrd are husband and wife, that’s a bit weird, that’s when I started looking back on the fight.
“Why did he not give (Mayweather) instruction? Why was he staring at me? He had a vendetta against me straight off the bat. Early exchanges in the tie up, instead of just separating he would reach around and pull me away.
“That takes energy away from me. I started getting – not paranoid – but I just started analyzing the whole thing a bit deeper. I felt like I got the short end of the stick here.”
