Conor McGregor is taking a break from UFC, and he has a great reason to.
The featherweight and lightweight champion’s longtime girlfriend, Dee Devlin, is pregnant with the couple’s first child. UFC president Dana White told the Los Angeles Times this week that McGregor is taking time off for Devlin’s health.
“He won’t fight before May,” White said. “His girl gets super stressed out when he fights. He doesn’t want her having any of that stress while she’s pregnant. He’s good. He should take time off. He’s been fighting nonstop. Nothing wrong with him taking time off. It’s good for him and her and it’s good for the baby.”
UFC won’t have its biggest pay-per-view draw, who just beat Eddie Alvarez for the lightweight title in UFC 205, for the first three major fight events set for 2017: UFC 208, 209 and 210. But White isn’t too worried about that.
“We’ve done this for 16 years, with a lot of big stars who couldn’t fight or moved on — Chuck Liddell, Anderson Silva, Georges St-Pierre,” White told the Times. “There’s not a day in this office I don’t get the question, ‘What are we going to do about this guy?’ Every day I turn around, I’ve got a reporter saying we’ve peaked.
“If I listened to any of that … we probably would be done. But I can tell you, we’re just getting started.”
Thumbnail photo via Adam Hunger/USA TODAY Sports Images
