He’s book won’t sell 100 copies.
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It’s the Christmas market, lads will get it from Santy whether they want it or not
Yep. Expect a few Twitter outbursts in the next week or two to push sales…
I reckon it was a decent interview
The angry hard right are the people who followed McGregor? And then voted for Peter Casey?? He hasn’t got a breeze. Trying to shoehorn McGregor into the trump/erdogan/bbolsanaro super baddy genre? Hasnt got a breeze.
I only watched the first five mins, but his points were reasonable and well put.
You think it was a decent interview but you watched less than a quarter of it?
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Well read mate 
What points did he make in the first 5 mins that you thought were reasonable? That McGregor changed with fame? Massive insight there.
That was one alright.
Did he change with fame or was he always a biteen of a bollix who suddenly earned lots of money ?
He’s like a prophet or something
Steady on.
Fotf Ewan unhappy with scathing Phoenix review of his McGregor book.
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THERE IS no question that the Conor McGregor story is a classic of the sports genre: a man who once looked like he was on the path to sporting immortality has become a grotesque caricature of vulgarity and debasement, destroyed by his own success.
So far there have only been hagiographical treatments of that story, such as his own documentary, Notorious. Though McGregor’s career is not yet over and he will fight again soon, that initial arc of his life lends itself to the grand, cinematic, Raging Bull treatment.
Sports hack Ewan MacKenna has all the material to hand to craft such a story, and yet his book is a turgid pub-bore rant that has less insight into McGregor and more insight into MacKenna’s dull-as-ditchwater views on celebrity, social media and the degradation of culture. As he puts it, McGregor is “the ultimate representation of a sorry society we created”.
The problems with the book are almost too many to list. For starters, it’s astonishingly badly written for an award-winning journalist. The book is filled with clichés. He even finds room for the hoary old ‘inches’ speech that Al Pacino gives in the Any Given Sunday. (Goldhawk is willing to give him a pass on the many typos.)
Then there’s the decision to dedicate a full chapter to publishing a redacted version of a New York Times story from earlier this year, the point of which is never quite clear. Readers interested in the coverage of McGregor by the NYT can obviously simply use Google.
The talent that presumably won MacKenna so many awards does occasionally peep through, particularly when he’s sketching a scene he’s personally observed, but for the most part it’s a struggle to read. Then there’s the scribbler’s many, many digressions into the pernicious interaction between vulgar pop culture and social media and the many ways it spills out into boorish and ugly mob behaviour.
MacKenna is a student of the American school of sports journalism, using a single game or season or club as the symbol of a particular cultural zeitgeist. It’s easy to imagine how the rise of McGregor and MMA might be an alluring way to address the perceived collapse in basic civility and courtesy.
There’s no doubt that social media has become an ugly and unpleasant place, but is that the barometer of a great global coarsening?
There’s barely anything but the most superficial examination of McGregor himself and MacKenna commits the age-old writer’s error of talking about how hard he worked in failing to get the quotes. All he’s left with is a survey of the stuff we already know about McGregor.
A good editor would’ve whipped out three-quarters of the experts and told MacKenna to turn the book into a chronological, reported journey through Las Vegas during a McGregor fight (sections of which are quite entertaining), peppered with some social commentary. But, like MacKenna’s social media output (and not without some irony, given his major thesis), these days he seems best suited to hammering a point home like he’s mining for coal.
The best thing about Chaos is a Friend of Mine is the intro written by American journalist Wright Thompson, who deftly charts a course between the young and innocent McGregor he met in 2013, the gravestone of Sonny Liston, the memorial site of Dan Donnelly’s greatest fights and the fates of the 50 men who fought Muhammad Ali.
The reader could be forgiven for wishing that they’d been able to read that book instead of this one.
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Oooft
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Was watching g his interview on YouTube there . Looks sharp . He’ll beat cowboy alright .
He’s been humbled by Khabib.
Looks to be pretty focused again though I’ll give him that.
Will he win the weekend ??