LOS ANGELES — If the fight business is like a video game, then Tony Ferguson believes Conor McGregor relied on the cheat codes for a little help in getting to the top.
Both McGregor and Ferguson hold currently versions of the UFC lightweight championship. But McGregor is the bigger star by orders of magnitude, and Ferguson, who defends his belt against Khabib Nurmagomedov in the main event of UFC 223 on April 7, was given a much more difficult path to the top than McGregor.
Ferguson believes McGregor used his mouth to get his biggest opportunities, which he compared to a gamer using a Game Genie, a contraption that was a primitive hacking device first used on the original Nintendo Entertainment System in the early 1990s.