For a few minutes, Chad Mendes shocked the world Saturday night.
Mendes, a last-minute replacement for UFC featherweight champion Jose Aldo, more than held his own against Conor McGregor at UFC 189 before ultimately giving way in a technical knockout and losing the interim featherweight belt in the second round.
McGregor, the current face of UFC, came out firing. The moment the fight began at MGM Grand Garden Arena, the Irishman pounced at Mendes, launching punches like rockets blasting off from Las Vegas to Mars.
Mendes was slow, if not steady, and strategically made his moves. But with every Mendes strike landed, McGregor — eventually bloodied by a gash over his right eye — raised his arms and laughed in a cocky display of “Come at me, bro” showmanship.
“You’ve gotta give it to him: The guy didn’t stop talking (trash) the entire time,” Mendes told reporters with a chuckle. “I was hitting him with everything I had, and he just kept talking. I landed a giant elbow on his face, and he just said ‘Is that all you’ve got?’ ”
If the taunting wore on Mendes, it didn’t show. He proceeded to take down McGregor twice in the first round, pinning McGregor’s fists and landing a few blows of his own in the process. There was no bite to McGregor’s incessant bark.
To the uninformed observer, McGregor appeared to be in trouble. The second round only doubled down on that notion, when McGregor quickly was taken down for a third time. McGregor’s face looked genuinely scared at certain points, and watching him squirm like an over-matched high school freshman in his first wrestling meet only did more to justify that notion.
With the clock winding down in the second round, McGregor was defeated … until he wasn’t. The Irishman finally freed himself, almost too easily, as Mendes risked going for a submission. In that moment, everything changed.
McGregor leapt into the air not with a burst of energy but with the tidal wave of momentum he’d convinced himself he’d just swung. Mendes retreated, intelligently, trying to run off the clock. But this was a caged fight, and there weren’t any hiding places McGregor’s lengthy reach couldn’t find.
One shot, then two. A barage of punches. How had the clock not expired?
Then the final blow: a left hook, square to Mendes’ face, deflating whatever hope he had left. Within a blink, McGregor had mounted his opponent, tossing superfluous blows at an already-unconscious Mendes.
“Sometimes your mind is willing, but your body’s not,” a grateful Mendes told reporters after the fight. “This was just such an amazing opportunity for me, and, you know, I took this fight on two weeks’ notice.”
If there ever was a graceful loser, it was Mendes, who didn’t quite seem to take the fight as a loss.
“I felt like I was winning the fight,” he explained. “I felt like I won the first and the second and was controlling the fight, but I just kind of gassed out there at the end. … I was just felt flat-footed and couldn’t move my feet. He took advantage.”
McGregor agreed.
“I feel like a concrete block,” he said. “I don’t feel anything they hit me with. So I kept saying nope, nope, nope when he hit me, preserving energy and being efficient. When I saw an opportunity, I struck. He was searching for his gas tank, and I was stabbing him in his gas tank.
“I felt the fight went exactly as I said it would, as they normally do.”
McGregor deserves credit: He backs up the guarantees he makes. But for those 10 minutes, everyone believed Mendes was the one in control.
“I’m not going to sit here and talk trash about Conor. He won the fight,” Mendes said. “But I felt like I controlled the fight. There was nothing he could do when I was on top.
“There’s not a whole lot I can say about it other than Conor was a better man tonight and I absolutely would love to get back in there with a full camp of training.”
After Saturday’s performance, that wish just might come true.
Thumbnail photo via Joe Camporeale/USA TODAY Sports Images
