Conor McGregor was a child in Crumlin, sitting through lessons that were almost exclusively taught in Irish, long before he was insulting Floyd Mayweather or defeating José Aldo in thirteen seconds. His parents sent him to primary school at Gaelscoil Scoil Mológa and then Gaelcholáiste Coláiste de Hæde, where Irish was the language of instruction instead of English. Although it’s a simple detail to ignore, it reveals something about the family he came from—one that valued cultural identity enough to forgo the more traditional route most Dublin families took in favor of immersion schooling.
Even though it hardly ever appears next to the headlines about title fights and pay-per-view figures, that early education gave him conversational fluency in Irish, which he has carried into adulthood. He changed schools once more after the family moved to Lucan, where he attended Gaelcholáiste Coláiste Cois Life. It was there that he met future fighter Tom Egan, a friend who would later encourage him to pursue the sport that shaped his life.
In MMA circles, what transpired after high school is often recounted as a sort of folktale. Concerned about the viability of pursuing combat sports, McGregor’s parents encouraged him to pursue a career in trade. He thus enrolled as an apprentice in plumbing, a choice that many Irish working-class families would find reasonable. It was short-lived. He left the job after about a year to devote himself entirely to fighting because, by most accounts, including his own, he found the work tedious. That choice had a stubbornness that, in retrospect, seems almost foreseeable for the person he turned into.
His true education, if you will, had already begun years earlier at the Crumlin Boxing Club, where he enrolled at the age of twelve primarily to learn self-defense techniques. Early on, Coach Phillip Sutcliffe saw something in him, and the gym evolved from a pastime to a second school with its own curriculum of footwork, distance, and perseverance under duress. It ultimately brought him to Dublin’s Straight Blast Gym, where John Kavanagh would mold him into the fighter who would go on to headline the biggest cards in UFC history.
In interviews, McGregor has joked that he has a “master’s in unarmed combat” rather than a college degree, leaning into the contrast on multiple occasions. Yes, it’s a joke, but it’s also not totally false. There are two types of education: one that takes place in classrooms and the other that occurs through sparring, repetition, and being knocked down enough times to gain knowledge. It’s difficult to argue that the wager didn’t pay off professionally, regardless of one’s opinion of him as a public figure today. He opted for the second kind.
It poses a legitimate question for anyone following the larger sports scene: once someone discovers what they’re truly meant for, how much does formal education really matter? The majority of plumbing apprentices who quit their jobs don’t end up with two UFC belts at once, so McGregor’s journey isn’t exactly a model. However, his story does belong to a small, identifiable group of athletes whose actual education took place in gyms that most people never consider visiting, far from any classroom.
