Conor McGregor
To be fair to Conor McGregor, his loss to Floyd Mayweather Jr doesn’t really qualify as being a brutal knockout, but it was certainly a humbling experience for the MMA superstar, who up until that point had never been stopped by strikes in his career.
If you are going to take a loss like that though, it may as well come against the best, and McGregor taking on one of the greatest boxers of all time in his professional boxing debut certainly fits the bill.
McGregor actually acquitted himself admirably in the early stages of the contest, managing to connect cleanly against the defensive mastermind and winning several rounds.
However, he burned through a lot of energy in the first third of the fight and began to slow down, while Mayweather was conserving his own energy and began to gradually turn up the heat and uncharacteristically took the fight to the Irishman.
Mayweather admitted later that he and his team had expected to finish McGregor earlier, but in the end ‘The Notorious’ managed to survive until the 10th round, when repeated hard punches to the head began to take the fight out of him and eventually led to the referee saving him from further punishment as ‘Money’ began to tee off for the TKO stoppage.
