The Notorious

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Thirteen Seconds

Picture the loudest arena in combat sports, December 2015, and a man who had not lost a fight in a decade. José Aldo was, by common agreement, the greatest featherweight who had ever lived. He had ruled the division for ten years. He had broken wrestlers, dismantled strikers, and absorbed everything the sport could throw at him. Then the bell rang, the Irishman in front of him threw a single left hand, and thirteen seconds later Aldo was face down on the canvas. The whole reign, gone in less time than it takes to read this sentence.

How does that happen? How does a plumber's apprentice from a working-class corner of Dublin, a man who spent years collecting welfare cheques and bumming lifts to the gym, end up flattening the best fighter on the planet and then becoming the richest man in the sport?

That is the question Jack Slack sets out to answer in *Notorious*. And here is the first thing to understand about the book: it is not really a biography in the usual sense. Slack barely touches McGregor's love life or his childhood scrapes except where they explain something. What he gives you instead is a technical autopsy of every important fight McGregor ever had, wrapped inside the story of how one stubborn young man dragged an entire sport up the mountain behind him. It is part fight manual, part history lesson, part character study. By the end you do not just know what McGregor did. You understand, punch by punch, why it worked.