On Monday night, UFC president Dana White and his promotion’s lightweight champion Conor McGregor announced that they’d struck a deal on the sharing of their side of a fight purse generated by a boxing bout with Floyd Mayweather. Normally, that would be the easy part of any negotiation—after all, McGregor is under contract with the UFC—but the stakes involved and the co-promotion ensured it was not easy.
The match promises to be one of the richest in combat sports history, and confident in that knowledge and his role in such a mega-event, McGregor played hardball with the UFC, sidelining himself for several months with the understanding that the UFC needed his services as a cash-generator.