HAVING SEEN LIFE through Conor McGregor’s eyes for the past six weeks, Conor Wallace is now more determined than ever to achieve his own goals as a boxer.
Wallace has been in Las Vegas helping McGregor to prepare for next Saturday night’s rematch with Nate Diaz in the main event at UFC 202 at the T-Mobile Arena.
The 20-year-old amateur middleweight was drafted in by McGregor in June after the UFC featherweight champion asked Michael Conlan to recommend a tall southpaw who could mimic Diaz’s style. Conlan had the right man for the job.
“Being involved in this kind of environment has given me a greater hunger to succeed. It has made me work harder and want to get there even more,” said Wallace, who has played a key role for McGregor as he aims to exact revenge for his submission loss in March.
Over countless rounds of sparring, the Newry native has been tasked with ensuring that McGregor is ready for what he’ll encounter when he faces the only man to defeat him in the UFC again next weekend.
“We’ve managed to get some great rounds in,” Wallace said. “I’ve been trying to be as much like Nate as I can — I’m a tall southpaw with a long reach, like him. I’ve just tried to help Conor get better.
“I’d love to see Conor win and I think he will. I’ve had to put the pressure on him in sparring. There was no point in me holding back. I want him to do well, I want him to win.
“He got better and better at handling my style with each spar. He’s a very fast learner. Even after the first or second spar I could see how well he was adapting. You could tell that he was watching the footage of the spar in detail when he went home afterwards.”
Wallace’s association with the mixed martial arts superstar has increased his own profile, which has subsequently put him in the spotlight to an extent that he hadn’t anticipated. McGregor is inundated with messages on social media and that trickles down to his training partners too. The feedback isn’t always positive either.
“I’ve taken a lot on board, even in terms of the whole publicity side of things and people giving their opinions on social media,” said Wallace. “You can have a lot of good people but then there are also people who don’t even know you but want to put you down. You just have to learn to get over that and not worry about that kind of stuff.”
Wallace saw one of his colleagues on the Irish amateur boxing team fall victim to a social media backlash earlier this week. After crashing out of the Olympics, Paddy Barnes had to endure some bizarre criticism over his Twitter activity in the build-up to his defeat to Spaniard Samuel Carmona Heredia.
Wallace: “I wouldn’t really have been used to that sort of thing until I came out here. It’s unbelievable. Looking at the situation with Paddy, it’s bad enough that a man is beaten, but then kicking him when he’s down is just crazy. Paddy didn’t set out to lose. He worked very hard to make sure he didn’t, but someone had to lose. Unfortunately it was him.”
Recent days have also left Wallace wondering what might have been in terms of his own Olympic ambitions. Michael O’Reilly, who defeated him last December in the Irish Elite middleweight final, was due to face Wallace in a box-off in May.
The bout was cancelled on just 48 hours’ notice, however, and instead the High Performance coaching team selected O’Reilly to go forward and compete in June’s Olympic qualifiers in Baku, from which he emerged with a place in the Games in Rio guaranteed.
But O’Reilly’s participation at the Olympics ended before it could even begin. A day before the opening ceremony, it emerged that the Portlaoise boxer had been flagged for a doping violation and he was subsequently sent home on Tuesday evening.
Wallace sympathised with his compatriot and, having lost to him in December, there were no complaints about being overlooked as O’Reilly headed to Rio at his expense. But with the Olympics in full swing and Ireland shorn of a middleweight contender, it’s been frustrating for Wallace to watch on from the sidelines.
“A lot of people have been asking me if I’m annoyed about how it has turned out. Obviously I’m going to be annoyed because I came so close but it’s just unfortunate what happened,” he said.
“Some people will say it’s not unfortunate, that it was his own stupidity, but it could probably happen to anyone. It was very unlucky. But I’m very disappointed, to be honest, after coming so close.
“I was kind of angry at first because I dedicated myself to it so much. But he’s one of my team-mates at the end of the day so I’m not going to run him down. It’s just a very unfortunate situation.”
Instead, Wallace will have to wait for Tokyo 2020 for a chance to become an Olympian. He’ll return home next week and take a few days off before resuming his boxing career and preparations for the World University Championships in Thailand in October.
But having spent the last month-and-a-half in the company of fighters who earn their living in a cage instead of a ring, Wallace admits that there was a certain measure of curiosity about changing lanes. But the IABA [Irish Athletic Boxing Association] needn’t worry about losing another valuable asset.
“The boys here would be saying it to me and slagging, but I’m too far behind in the grappling and there’d be too much learning to catch up on,” Wallace insisted.
“I’m competing at a high level in boxing so I wouldn’t like to go down and start from the bottom if I was to make the switch. I’ve enjoyed watching the boys and it would give you a bit of a hunger for it, but I think I’ve left it too late, to be honest.
“I’ll just be sticking to boxing.”
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Drogheda have a soccer team?