There’s really no elegant lede for this one: A drug dealer got busted by police in Stanwall and tried to pass himself off as UFC fighter Conor McGregor.
Both times you probably read that sentence, you indeed read it right. Talk about a weird way to spend your Saturday.
Specifically it’s a weird thing for all of us to stumble upon on a Saturday. For Mark Nye, the man who allegedly tried to impersonate McGregor, this is nothing new. According to a mugshot and report passed along by an MMA blog, the bust happened back in February with sentencing happening this past week.
As the story goes, Nye was pulled over in Stanwall on February 11th and told officers his name was “Conor”. The plot continues to thicken from here as Nye also allegedly had hundreds of business cards with “McGregor Enterprise” written on the front and “Best drops in Surrey” on the back — which cuts out a ton of guesswork as to who he was pretending to be.
If this all sounds absolutely bizarre, it’s because it is. But Nye’s mugshot provides an ‘ah-ha’ moment which ties the whole weird impersonation thing together.
He’s a dead ringer for McGregor.
That’s pretty uncanny.
Let’s also be very clear: There is nothing that even remotely indicates that this person is related to McGregor. It’s a bonkers story, but nothing more than truly bizarre coincidence.
Nevertheless, the whole thing is really sort of a moot point. Nye is going away for at least two years for pleading guilty to possession with intent to supply class A drugs and driving while disqualified and without insurance.
It’s also something that doesn’t appear to have registered on McGregor’s radar. Who can blame him for not really caring, both based on the pure ridiculousness of the story but also with focus on his training for his upcoming fight against Dustin Poirier at UFC 264 in July.
