McGregor One Win Away From Boxing Title Shot

“This is not a rookie entering the sport.”

Former Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) two-division champion Conor McGregor is just 0-1 as a professional boxer, having been shut down by pound-for-pound great Floyd Mayweather in their crossover fight back in summer 2017.

But “Notorious” is still just one victory away from a title shot.

That’s according to WBC President Mauricio Sulaiman, which shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to fans who are intimately familiar with prize fighting. Boxing has always maintained a sword-in-the-stone approach to matchmaking.

“I would say, he needs to face and defeat a ranked fighter, then he would be eligible to be ranked and to compete for a title,” Sulaiman told Sun Sport. “We have plenty of examples of Muay Thai fighters, who turn professional in international boxing, and they are eligible to fight for the title. This is not a rookie entering the sport; he has a long history of combat sports, so it’s a different scenario of what it used to be in the past.”

McGregor is rumored to be fighting boxing legend Manny Pacquiao at some point later this year, and if we’re to believe these comments from last fall, Dustin Poirier was handpicked to help “Notorious” prepare for a southpaw like “Pac Man.”

The Irishman fights Poirier at UFC 257 on Jan. 23 in Abu Dhabi.

A loss for McGregor could prove catastrophic to his plans to box the aging Filipino. It would also eliminate the whiskey mogul from the UFC title chase, where multiple lightweight contenders are gunning for the 155-pound strap currently held by Khabib Nurmagomedov.