Conor McGregor opens up about how Joao Carvalho’s death affected him

Conor McGregor was in serious hot water last month when he retired, un-retired, dropped out of scheduled fights and then renegotiated terms and agreed to fight again.

It was all very confusing. The tweet in which McGregor announced his retirement prematurely garnered over 170,000 retweets. The haze, confusion, and general dismay overshadowed a much more serious event the month previous – the death of MMA talent Joao Carvalho. Carvalho died at Dublin’s Beaumont hospital on April 11, roughly 48 hours after losing a fight to McGregor’s teammate Charlie Ward Ireland’s National Boxing Stadium. McGregor was cage side on the night the fight occurred. The media storm around the death is something that greatly affected McGregor. In an interview with ESPN he spoke about the aftermath. “I had fucking journalists knocking down my mother’s door, you know what I mean?” he said. “That’s not what I signed up to do — have people knocking on my mother’s door, talking about a kid dying. It’s not nice to see a kid die like that. It does something to you. And there’s been show after show canceled in Ireland since that. It’s fucked up to be a part of it, and I didn’t want to bring it back up and put it more on a public scale”. McGregor continued to suggest Carvalho’s death contributed to his reluctance to continue with UFC. “After all that, I did not want to be put in front of a camera and made to dance. I just wasn’t feeling it” he said.