Conor McGregor will fight again one day, and Michael Chandler will be waiting for him.
Saturday's UFC 303 event was originally scheduled to be headlined by a welterweight bout between McGregor and Chandler, the culmination of a long rivalry that has included numerous criticisms on social media and in interviews, as well as a stint as the opponent's coach. Ultimate Fighter 31However, the booking for June 29 was eventually scrapped in disappointing fashion after McGregor first missed a press conference in Dublin and then withdrew from the bout with a toe injury.
McGregor's return from a three-year hiatus remains up in the air at the moment, with no confirmation that the fight with Chandler will take place.
Chandler won't be discouraged by anything McGregor has to say on the matter.
“I didn't really think much about it,” Chandler said during a backstage tirade at UFC 303 in Las Vegas, “but he tried to steal my catchphrase. I see what he did with 'See you at the top,' so I'm not too worried about it. Conor is… at this point, as I've said publicly, I don't forgive him. For a while, yeah, of course he'll want to fight somebody other than Michael Chandler and with what I bring to the Octagon.”
“I can't see how he wouldn't come back to UFC and fight me. So if I pivot and someone else comes up and there's a big fight that I can pivot and take, whenever he's ready to come back, his path back to UFC will be a straight line through Nashville, Tennessee, Michael Chandler and that's it.”
The severity of McGregor's injury has come under scrutiny given his reputation of rarely withdrawing from a fight throughout his 16-year career. When McGregor revealed the injury was in his pinky toe, he received little sympathy, especially given his harsh criticism of other injured fighters in the past.
Chandler refused to criticize McGregor and his broken pinkie, instead reflecting on how McGregor's withdrawal will affect his own reputation.
“It gives me a bit of confidence,” Chandler said. “If Conor was fighting a lot of other guys, he probably would have fought to the end. But a guy like me doesn't want to fight with any kind of injury. I'll be going into my next fight, I don't know when that will be, with some bruises and bumps. Obviously, he was fighting with a limp, so he said, 'I can fight, but I'm not going to fight that guy.' You just have to figure it out as you go.”
Chandler has also been out of action for a while, most recently losing by submission to Dustin Poirier at UFC 291 in November 2022. Although Chandler has not earned fight money, he claims he is doing well financially due to his business interests outside of UFC.
Other names that have been mentioned as possible opponents for Chandler include past opponent Charles Oliveira and current BMF champion Max Holloway, but no official offers have been made yet. Chandler is confident that a fight with McGregor will eventually happen, and if it does happen, it will undoubtedly be the happiest moment of his career.
“At the very beginning of this process, a fight of that magnitude with that kind of crowd, that's what we aspire to as mixed martial artists,” Chandler said. “We get into this sport to be the best and compete on the biggest stage, the biggest platform, under the brightest lights, and this checked all the boxes.”
“Especially with the storyline, the intrigue, the waiting behind the scenes, the build-up, the maturation of this whole thing, I think it would be very satisfying to make good on my promise to myself that, whenever our next date is, I'm going to show up and knock him out. It was going to be round two, but he's lit a fire in me so it's probably going to be round one.”
