Maybe Conor is not such a bad guy afterall

There are a lot of personas in sports. I am a big time MMA fan but am also a big time WWE fan. Although there are some truly awful people in WWE a lot of the time the guys who play the heels or "baddies" are actually really nice people in real life. Consider "HHH" for example, he has spent almost all of his career as a "bad guy" as does his real life wife "Stephanie McMahaon." But as it turns out these two donate a tremendous amount of time and energy to children's charities and at least from the public persona where they break character, seem like some truly genuinely awesome people. I suppose being billionaires makes this generosity a lot easier to pull off but still, the sentiment is there.

Conor McGregor was the first MMA fighter that I can think of that tried to rope in this bad guy persona in order to advance his career

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This includes taunting his opponents, treating people as lessors in interview session such as when he said "Who the fuck is this guy?" when referring to then featherweight contender Jeremy Stephens where the crowd erupted in laughter... well, everyone except Stephens that is.

Then there was the arrest in NYC

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Even if you are a minor watcher of UFC you probably know about the time that Conor was arrested for attacking a bus that contained other UFC fighters and he actually injured one of the occupants when the broken glass started flying. I do not know what the result of these charges were, but I do know that McGregor pleaded guilty (it was all on tape.)

Of course there was the time he punched and old man in a pub when he refused to take a shot of Conor's whisky. It must have been a light punch because the old man kind of shrugged it off.

Now let's fast forward to last weekend when Conor lost pretty badly to Dustin Poirier. He made very little in the way of excuses after the loss and simply pointed out the fact that he had a dead leg from not checking kicks early in the fight. This is not an excuse (and I hate it when fighters make dumbass excuses after a loss) it was just a fact. Anyone who was watching the fight could see that this is the case.

A moment of rarity in the McGregor world came when Conor turned over the promised $500,000 donation to a charity after the fight that he was almost certainly thinking he was going to win over Poirer.

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When Poirer's wife Jolie went to Conor's locker room immediately after the fight, Conor was very.... well, un-Conor-ish. He was gracious, he was kind, and he spoke in a manner that showed he had no hard feelings. This is a side of Conor that maybe the rest of us don't really know. The man had just lost a fight that very well could spell the beginning of the end of his career and he was still very happy to hand over a large portion of his purse from the fight to a charity that is actually Poirier's own charity. The Good Fight is the name of the charity and they focus on helping the needs of underserved communities, and mostly the children of said communities.

Now to be fair, Conor was paid $5 million just to turn up for the fight and even though he won (convincingly) Poirier was paid a mere $1 million. It isn't a lot of money to Conor but it really wasn't about that for me. The main thing was that Conor is probably a decent person who uses his "Notorious" personality in order to get to where he is today. If it wasn't for that attitude, would people have watched him as much as they did? I think we can all agree that we would not have. I'm just happy to see that behind that scowl, behind the taunts, behind the assault and battery charges, there's a decent human being in there.