Working with ‘The Notorious’ proved eye-opening episode
HE has been inside the head of MMA fighter Conor McGregor and lived to tell the tale. There are not too many who can who say that. Yet, sports psychologist David Mullins can.
When asked about his time working with ‘The Notorious’, the Ballymacward native describes the mercurial McGregor as “a very sound lad”. Indeed, Mullins paints a very different portrait of the loud, foul-mouthed Dubliner than the vast majority of us are familiar with.
“I always got on very well with him. He is a good team-mate. He helps lads that he doesn’t have to or need to help, but he wants to,” says Mullins. “Obviously, there are bad sides (to him) as well that we have all seen in the press but I found him to be a good lad and to be the most committed athlete I have ever seen or worked with in anything. Miles ahead of others.
“I have worked with lots of other UFC fighters in the US, the UK and Sweden, along with baseball and basketball players, and Conor was miles ahead of them in the way he works and takes responsibility (for his training). So, athlete-wise, he should be seen as a role model but, sometimes, it is hard to separate the front pages from the back pages, as they say.”
Mullins relays all this as he is running a loop around his homeplace in Ballymacward, which he returned to from Canada in January 2018. For the previous five years, he worked with a plethora of UFC fighters – not just from Ireland and Canada, but from California and New Mexico as well – and he even had his own weekly segment on Canada’s Fight Network TV channel.
“Yeah, I was on the Fight Network in Canada. They had a show over there, just on the psychology of fighting and all the mental preparation that goes into getting ready and performing on the night,” says Mullins of the shows, some of which can be found on YouTube.
A son of John and Geralyn Mullins, and the eldest of six children, he is a former pupil of Ballymacward National School and St. Cuan’s College, Castleblakney. He studied Business & Marketing at GMIT before doing a number of Open University courses to secure enough credits to undertake a Sports & Exercise Psychology Masters in Waterford IT in 2008/’09.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
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