Conor McGregor to Floyd Mayweather: ‘Don’t Ever Bring Race Into My Success Again’

Conor McGregor tells Floyd Mayweather to leave his race out of the conversation when lecturing others on prejudice and bigotry.

“Floyd Mayweather, don’t ever bring race into my success again,” the UFC featherweight champion wrote on Instagram. “I am an Irishman. My people have been oppressed our entire existence. And still very much are. I understand the feeling of prejudice. It is a feeling that is deep in my blood.”

The response came in the context of a six-point post that did everything from apologize for posing with an Air Soft gun to thank various media outlets for heaping year-end accolades upon him. Point four addressed Floyd Mayweather’s recent remarks that racism persists in the fight game.

“They say [Conor McGregor] talk a lot of trash and people praise him for it,” Mayweather explained in an interview with FightHype.com earlier this week. “But when I did it, they say I’m cocky and arrogant. So biased! Like I said before, all I’m saying is this: I ain’t racist at all, but I’m telling you racism still exists.”

The competing oppression one-upsmanship from the multimillionaires stems in part from the broader rivalry between boxing and mixed-martial arts, a sport getting more attention than the sweet science but whose elite fighters get paid a tiny fraction of what those competing under the Marquess of Queensberry Rules receive.

McGregor predicted that he would soon make Floyd Mayweather money in a conversation with Breitbart Sports last year. “We will get to that stage—I certainly will, not everybody else, but I most certainly will,” he responded when Breitbart Sports asked why the year’s biggest MMA fight awarded its competitors less than ten percent of the prize money awarded to Mayweather and Pacquiao. Although Mayweather earned exponentially more than McGregor for beating Manny Pacquiao than McGregor did for beating Jose Aldo, King Conor proposes they fight and split the receipts 80/20 in his favor. He explained away the much bigger purse of Mayweather-Pacquiao than the biggest MMA fights by telling Breitbart Sports, “I love boxing but boxing has this fight. Not everyone is making that money. That is a special fight.”

The treatment of McGregor rubs not only the undefeated welterweight the wrong way but many within MMA as well. The lightweights like the attention McGregor brings to the division. Few likely appreciate that he gets to leapfrog over the field for a title shot in his first fight in the division. But like they understand, like Floyd Mayweather does, that talking trash means pocketing cash.

“I welcome it,” former UFC lightweight champion Anthony Pettis told Breitbart Sports on Friday about McGregor’s proposed foray into the lightweight division to fight champion Rafael Dos Anjos in March. “Hopefully, he stays and we see how good he really is.” But Pettis warned that the lightweight division is “not just based on talk. It’s based on performance.” Eddie Alvarez called Frankie Edgar the “elephant in the room,” calling McGregor’s move to lightweight as “convenient” in that it allows him to avoid a tougher fight against Edgar at featherweight. That said, Alvarez noted of McGregor moving up in weight: “Happy to see money coming in.”

Money Mayweather coming out and slamming McGregor as the beneficiary of a racial double-standard causes King Conor to warn: “Do not ever put me in a bracket like this again.”