John Kavanagh says Conor McGregor would not walk out at UFC 329 until his runners arrived

McGregor's coach said he saw nothing different in him before the Max Holloway fight, and that McGregor told him he felt "supremely confident" going in.

Conor McGregor refused to walk out for his UFC 329 fight with Max Holloway until someone had fetched a particular pair of runners from the house, his coach John Kavanagh has said.

Kavanagh told The Ariel Helwani Show that the team had left the runners McGregor wanted to wear to the cage back at the house, and McGregor insisted someone go and bring them to the venue. "It was all like last minute and they're shouting at us that we're supposed to walk, but he was like telling everybody, no, calm down, I'm not going until I get my runners," Kavanagh said. McGregor got his runners and walked out in them.

Kavanagh told the story when Helwani asked about McGregor's body language before the fight, his first in five years, and said a similar thing happened with his Floyd Mayweather fight, when the team forgot McGregor's mouthpiece. "I certainly didn't see anything different than usual," he said. "You'd have to ask him." He added that in private conversations since, McGregor "has only told me that he felt supremely confident going in."

The fight ended inside 69 seconds when McGregor injured his knee, and he has since had ACL reconstruction surgery.

Kavanagh said the camp ran for about nine months, six of them intense. "Hindsight's great and we can look back now and say maybe that wasn't the best opening move but for 6 months it had worked great," he said, explaining that McGregor always pictures how a fight will start and lets the rest of his skills take over from there.

In the back after the fight, Kavanagh said, McGregor was "right away" asking about surgery options and recovery time. Kavanagh pointed out that McGregor tore the ACL in his right knee in his first fight with Holloway and in his left knee in the second. "So maybe we just have to stay away from Holloway. It's bad for our knees," he joked.

Kavanagh said he stayed at McGregor's house that night and that the sound of the children laughing and joking the next morning helped keep McGregor's mind busy. His advice to his own fighters after a big win or a big loss, he said, is to get back to work the next day: "Don't celebrate too hard and don't commiserate too long."

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