Jose Aldo and Conor McGregor are all buddy-buddy now.
Of course, it wasn’t always like that between the UFC superstars. In McGregor’s monstrous climb to the top of the featherweight division, he’d make an iconic rival of the longtime defending champion.
‘The Notorious’ would do it all to get inside the head of Aldo, from jumping out of a cage to face him to a historic world tour that saw him trash ‘The King of Rio’ on every possible occasion. McGregor’s mind games eventually paid off when he upset an angry Aldo in just 13 seconds to take his featherweight title.
‘Red Panty Night’
But, Aldo and McGregor’s interactions didn’t stop there. After Aldo bounced back at UFC 200 with a win over Frankie Edgar, the Brazilian confirmed that his former foe had placed a pair of red panties on the door of his hotel room.
“Yeah, just good light hearted fun,” Aldo said at the UFC 283 post-fight presser. “We were at Red Rocks [Casino] owned by Lorenzo [Fertitta] in Las Vegas and we were window to window. It was the night I beat Frankie Edgar, so he just sent it out as a light-hearted joke, I didn’t think anything about it. But maybe I could get my missus to wear it or something.”
Aldo Says He Formed A Friendship With McGregor
Many years after that ‘red panty night’, Aldo revealed at long last he’s a friend of McGregor’s and that he no longer wants to rematch his former foe.
“Maybe back in the day it would have been an awesome event, but not today,” Aldo answered, when asked about the missed rubber match with McGregor. “I do have a lot of respect for him, we’re friends. We even follow each other on Instagram, we exchange dialog on there.”
“Sometimes fans come up to me and say ‘Do you still feel like beating McGregor’ or something, and I say ‘How can I have animosity? That’s the guy that gave me the most money.’ I have nothing but respect and we have a friendship now.”
While Aldo wouldn’t go into exact detail about his DMs with McGregor, it seems like the longtime rivals keep it wholesome nowadays.
“It’s a secret,” Aldo joked about his messages with McGregor. “It’s usually good stuff. He’s just coming out of a big injury so we just exchange stuff about that. He’s had a massive impact on the sport, it’s usually just good stuff that we talk about.”
