‘He was just trying to run away’: Conor McGregor’s teammate Dillon Danis lifts lid on UFC 229 brawl with Khabib Nurmagomedov
The UFC 229 main event between Khabib Nurmagomedov and Conor McGregor is as infamous for what happened after the fight as what happened during it, as Dillon Danis gives his side of the altercation with the UFC champion.
The rivalry between the two fighters spilled over to outside the cage following the Russian’s fourth-round submission victory in October 2018, when Nurmagomedov leapt from the cage to confront members of McGregor’s entourage.
The fracas also caused members of the Russian fighter’s team to enter the cage where they came to blows with McGregor, landing several sanctions on those responsible courtesy of the Nevada State Athletic Commission.
And one man who found himself squarely in Nurmagomedov’s crosshairs that night, Dillon Danis, has spoken of exactly what went down during their confrontation after the fight.
“No, he didn’t connect,” Danis told MMA media personality ‘The Schmo’.
“You know what’s funny, when he jumped over the thing, and he had his feet and his arms up, so like, he didn’t really know what he was going to hit me with. So I was like, am I going to get kicked right now or punched?
“I kind of just blocked then I hit him with a right hand, and then I remember him coming forward, and I was uppercutting him, and then he was just trying to run away, and I was trying to grab his head.”
Danis, a world class grappler who recently transitioned to mixed martial arts, has been associated with McGregor since joining the Dubliner’s camp ahead of his UFC 202 rematch with Nate Diaz in August 2016. Since then, he has become a fully-fledged member of SBG Ireland and has registered two first-round submission wins in his pair of professional bouts to date.
And perhaps it was Danis’ experience in combat sports which helped him cope with what he called the ‘mayhem’ which followed McGregor’s defeat.
“It was just a whole mayhem and then everybody was getting punched, and cops were going all over the place, and … he didn’t touch me at all,” Danis continued.
“I remember hitting him with a good amount of shots, and then I just remember him trying to pull away and run away from me, and I was trying to cup his head and uppercut him. But it was mayhem. Everything happened so fast.“
Danis is once again a key member of McGregor’s list of sparring partners ahead of next weekend’s crunch showdown with Donald Cerrone and has helped the Dubliner prepare for ‘Cowboy’, a fighter who counts 17 submission victories on his career ledger.
His third MMA bout comes later this month, when Danis takes on Kegan Gennrich on the Bellator 228 main card on January 25.
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