Conor McGregor was just a teenager when he decided it was time to find a real MMA gym and get serious. He’d done a little boxing, and his pal Tom Egan knew some jiu-jitsu, but between them they were no more capable of cobbling together an actual fight team than they were of sprouting wings and flying to Paris.

They needed help. They started asking around.

“We’d heard of the UFC and we wanted to find who was the best coach in Ireland,” McGregor told MMAjunkie. “Who’s the guy to go to? Who’s the one leading the way? John Kavanagh was the name that kept popping up.”

On the other side of Dublin, Cathal Pendred had heard the same name. The only thing that stopped him from heading over to Kavanagh’s Straight Blast Gym, he said, was convenience. It was tough to get to, about as far away as it could be and still be in the city, and besides, how much better could the training really be?

“The gym I was training at was mostly amateurs, and I was pretty much always getting the better of all the other guys in the gym,” Pendred said. “Then I went over to SBG thinking, not that I’d be the best guy, but that I’d be pretty good.”

His first day there was a jiu-jitsu day. Fine by Pendred. He knew some jiu-jitsu, or at least he thought he did.

“I got my ass kicked,” he said. “I was getting tapped left, right and center.”

With his ego now firmly in check, he thought he’d ask Kavanagh for a roll, just to see what the leader of this squad could really do. He expected Kavanagh to be good, Pendred said. Then again, at 6-foot-2 and a little over 200 pounds at the time, Pendred also thought he’d be able to put his size and strength to work on the coach, who was “maybe 160 (pounds) at the time.”

“We did a five-minute jiu-jitsu round and he tapped me probably six or seven times,” Pendred said. “He immediately got my respect, and I’m pretty sure he knew what he was doing there.”

Looking back, Kavanagh would refer to these days as the beginning of the “perfect storm,” back when it seemed like every fresh-faced kid who wandered in off the Dublin streets was a martial arts fanatic bound for the UFC. And, sure enough, when the UFC returned to Ireland after a five-year absence to hold an event in Dublin in July, Kavanagh had four fighters on the card – McGregor, Pendred, Gunnar Nelson and Patrick Holohan, all of them victorious.

So how did this happen? How did the SBG crew go from what Kavanagh lovingly refers to as “the garage” to a genuine MMA powerhouse? According to Kavanagh, who began his career as a martial arts instructor when he he was just 18, things got serious about seven years ago. That’s when he looked around the mats one day and realized he had a group of fighters who were all at roughly the same point in their development, and with one common mindset.

“They were all kind of obsessive,” Kavanagh said. “That’s important, because it does take seven, eight, nine years to become good at something, no matter what you’re doing. The people who are too quick to quit, they never get there. The first year or two, you might compare it to a romance. You love it, you want to be in the gym all the time. But as time goes by, it becomes more of a chore, a job.”

The trick, Kavanagh said, is finding a way to keep that spark alive. For that, you need obsessive people, inquisitive people, the kind who never stop learning and sharing and growing. You also need to be that kind of person yourself, which Kavanagh is, according to McGregor, who went from just another eager kid to one of the nation’s breakout sports stars under Kavanagh’s tutelage.

“I used to go gym to gym to learn different things, and it was always, ‘No, don’t do it that way someone else taught you. Do it this way,'” McGregor said. “I kept hearing that. They’d say, ‘No, you’re standing wrong, you’re moving wrong, do it our way.’ But when I went with John, it wasn’t like that. He was more open to exploring, figuring out why to do it this way rather than that way, and realizing that there’s a time and a place for every way. Everything works if you can make it work.”

In order to be successful on the international stage, you need not just obsessive people, but also people who will stick around.

That’s been the tough part in Ireland, and not just for mixed martial arts gyms. As Peter O’Toole once put it, Ireland’s chief export is men. It’s not the place you stick around in to become successful. It’s the place you leave.

“A lovely land,” O’Toole told Gay Talese in a famous 1963 Esquire profile. “God, you can love it! But you can’t live in it.”

For a long time, that’s the mentality Pendred had. Ireland was his home, he explained, but he thought that the only way he’d ever make it as a pro fighter was by leaving.

“When I first started, that was almost my aim, to get to a certain point and move to the States,” Pendred said. “I thought that’s where you had to be to get the best training. When I was in college and fighting I used to take a loan out every summer and go to the States to train, (at the American Kickboxing Academy) in San Jose. It was a phenomenal facility and great people, but at a certain point I felt like I was better in Ireland, because here I actually get more personal attention from the coaches. I also felt like John’s coaching was better than anyone’s. It actually took me going over to the States to realize that.”

McGregor had heard similar refrains all his life in Ireland. To be anything or get anywhere in life, people told him, you had to get off the island.

“That’s the thing, is people here always think the answer is out there somewhere, but it’s not,” McGregor said. “It’s what’s going on in your head, and if you believe in your surroundings you can do it anywhere.”

Kavanagh, billed on the SBG website as Ireland’s first black belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu, as well as the “first person to really bring proper BJJ into Ireland,” agreed. They didn’t need to leave home to find success, he said. Not as long as they all stuck together and put in the work. Other fighters might have bigger gyms or come from bigger cities, but what does that count for in an MMA fight, really?

“At the end of the day, it’s two guys in a cage with a referee,” Kavanagh said. “You can let the illusion of a different place or a bigger fight get to you, but as long as gravity is acting in the usual manner, it’s still just two guys in a cage.”

That approach has served the SBG fighters well so far, but now a different challenge is on the horizon. With the success of fighters like McGregor and Nelson and Pendred, they’re no longer the little gym that could. Now they’re the guys everyone wants to knock off. In MMA institutions such as American Top Team, Jackson-Winkeljohn’s, AKA, and more, some of the most experienced coaches in the world are helping their fighters take aim at the Irish upstarts on the scene.

At the same time, Pendred pointed out, just because the MMA world as a whole wasn’t familiar with SBG Ireland before now, it doesn’t mean they just sprang fully formed from the ooze.

“Every fight of our careers has been a step up, and we’ve all taken that step together,” Pendred said. “We didn’t come out of nowhere. We won national titles, then European titles, and now we’re on the biggest stage.”

The spotlight might be on them, and with it increased pressure and bigger, tougher fights, but then, that was the goal all along, said McGregor. It’s not as if it happened by accident.

“It’s a beautiful thing,” McGregor said. “It’s what we’ve worked for, what the years of blood, sweat, and tears is for. Trust me, we’re here, and we’re going to warm it up now.”

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