McGregor Explains How Miserable Plumbing Gig Led to MMA Career

Conor McGregor is one step away from fulfilling his dream of becoming UFC Featherweight Champion. Jose Aldo will be defending his championship against McGregor at UFC 189 in July and, even though the champion is injured, the fight is still set to take place.

It wasn’t always glitz and glamour for McGregor, though. When he was fresh out of high school, he landed a plumbing gig that sounded absolutely miserable. Luckily for us, the job was so bad it inspired him to chase his dreams of becoming an MMA fighter. McGregor spoke with MMA Digest about the incident:

When I was seventeen years of age when I finished school, my mother got me a trade as an apprentice plumber. I was up by five o’clock in the morning. I used to have to walk a half an hour to get to the motorway. I stand on the corner of the motorway and I waited for some hillbilly to come by and pick me up. I’d have to sit in his car and sit in traffic for about two hours just to get to the building site. I get to the building site and it’s cold, dark, wet and I’m sent to do this and sent to do that. It was a rough time. I did not like the life. Plumbing did not interest me. Working on site did not interest me. One day I said, ‘F*** it,’ and I quit. I walked home and I said to my father, ‘There’s not a hope in hell you’re going to get me back to that building site.’ And he said, ‘We’ll see about that,’ and we proceeded to fight each other until, eventually, I lost… but I won if that makes sense. He might have whooped my ass, but I still didn’t go back to that building site.”

“I didn’t just leave with no other option. I left and said, ‘I’m going to pursue this dream of fighting for the UFC. Of course at that time, no Irish man had ever fought a moon inside the octagon before, so there was not a story or career I could point to an Irish man and say, ‘Look at this guy. This is the career HE made for himself,’ because there was no other person before me.”

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