Conor McGregor has a knack for getting under his opponents’ skin, but Eddie Alvarez isn’t taking the bait despite McGregor’s trash talk ahead of their showdown Saturday at UFC 205.
Maybe it’s because Alvarez is feeling nothing at all.
“He’s the least intimidating man I’ve ever met. The least,” Alvarez recently said of McGregor on the Fight Society podcast, according to MMAFighting.com. “I’ve never been face to face with a man and my heart rate has not gone up or something I felt inside emotionally, that has never happened to me until I was on stage at the press conference at Madison Square Garden, where I literally felt nothing. I felt the least threatened in my life.
” … I’d be lying to you and the whole public if I told you Conor McGregor was the most dangerous opponent I’ve ever come up against. … I’d be bold-faced lying to you. The opponent I had before him (Rafael dos Anjos) was much, much harder. He had many more dimensions and that’s just how I feel.”
McGregor already threatened to “retire” Alvarez this weekend at Madison Square Garden, which the UFC lightweight champion later scoffed at while labeling The Notorious “desperate.” Perhaps the pre-fight mind games won’t mean anything once they step into the octagon, but it’s apparent that Alvarez wants to avoid feeding into McGregor’s flamboyant shtick.
“Most of Conor’s talk — the majority of it — is self-talk,” Alvarez said, per MMAFighting.com. “It’s him trying to convince himself that he can do these things. I’m a fighter. No one’s going to do this stuff to me. No one has ever done it, no one ever will.”
Alvarez’s lightweight championship will be on the line Saturday when McGregor looks to become the first fighter in UFC history to hold belts in two weight classes simultaneously.
Thumbnail photo via Bob DeChiara/USA TODAY Sports Images
