Conor McGregor’s former sparring partner Paulie Malignaggi has seen enough.
After the leaked photos from the sparring session where Malignaggi is on the canvas, and especially after the video released shortly after – there is now officially bad blood between the two.
Malignaggi was recently interviewed on The MMA Hour show and he explained how these things work in boxing. Either you duke it out or never speak of it again. Make no mistake about it; the New Yorker wants a fight.
“He constantly puts me in the press with these edited videos, edited pictures, and whatnot. Now, it’s picked up a ton of momentum. So yeah. So now the bad blood is there. Now, we’ve gotta fight,” said Malignaggi.
According to the boxer, the video released by Dana White was done because McGregor didn’t impress during his recent open workout.
“It became like a running joke in boxing. They had to kind of cover it up in some way, shape or form. So nice job. Nice edit — it was a nice, Hollywood edit. I thought it was adorable, I thought it was cute. But at the end of the day, every day you start to see holes in this little story,” commented the American.
After the incident with Malignaggi, there aren’t that many sparring partners lining up to train with McGregor at the moment.
“How are you gonna prepare to fight Floyd Mayweather without your sparring? He doesn’t want to look like the running joke of boxing, but he’s making himself the running joke of boxing without even trying. If he stopped trying so hard and being ‘The Little Engine That Could’ and just trained and did his thing, none of this soap opera would even be up. Have you heard anything from Floyd Mayweather’s camp?”
Then he brought the topic of McGregor’s much talked about power. After previously giving credit to the Irishman, Malignaggi had a different tune this time around. And he even proposed a date for the fight between him and ‘The Notorious’.
“He’s been given this false sense of security like he’s some kind of crazy puncher that people really believes everything he hits breaks down,” Malignaggi said. … “You better learn to punch if you’re gonna be a puncher. This isn’t mixed martial arts anymore,’ he said.
Malignaggi is ready to fight McGregor on March 17th, which is St. Patrick’s Day, but only on one condition.
“Right now, I’m focused on how he looks against Mayweather. If he looks like dog sh*t against Mayweather, I don’t think anybody is gonna want to see him box again,” he summarised.