Conor McGregor: Just Kidding, I'm Not Retiring

He's known for bruising fights, but the whiplash caused by Conor McGregor's career announcements this week might ultimately be rougher to follow.

In the last 48 hours, the UFC featherweight champion has traded barbs with UFC president Dana White, kinda-sorta announced his retirement , and today, decided to come out of the retirement he was never really in to begin with, using the occasion to call out White and the UFC.

"I am just trying to do my job and fight here," McGregor wrote in a Facebook post Thursday morning, explaining he would not retire after all. "I am paid to fight. I am not yet paid to promote. I have become lost in the game of promotion and forgot about the art of fighting.

"There comes a time when you need to stop handing out flyers and get back to the damn shop."

At issue is the amount of time the UFC expects McGregor to spend promoting the mixed martial arts company, which McGregor sees as unpaid work that -- per his argument Thursday -- keeps him from the actual sport and the training needed to succeed at such a high level.

McGregor lost a fight in March of this year to underdog Nate Diaz, a loss he apparently blames on the UFC's promotion schedule.

"50 world tours, 200 press conferences, 1 million interviews, 2 million photo shoots, and at the end of it all I'm left looking down the barrel of a lens, staring defeat in the face, thinking of nothing but my incorrect fight preparation. And the many distractions that led to this," he wrote Thursday. He continued:

I'm doing what I need for me now.
It is time to be selfish with my training again. It is the only way.
I feel the $400 million I have generated for the company in my last three events, all inside 8 months, is enough to get me this slight leeway.

 He concluded, in all caps, "I AM NOT RETIRED."