Paulie Malignaggi Demands Fight With Conor McGregor
UFC lightweight champion Conor McGregor might already have his second boxing bout already lined up. As a result of sparring photos released online, McGregor and Paulie Malignaggi have gone from being training partners to rivals.
The former boxing champion has been going on rants about several issues that he had while sparring with McGregor to prepare him for his upcoming boxing match with boxing legend Floyd Mayweather including McGregor’s “mistreatment” of other sparring partners.
This has led to McGregor responding to Malignaggi’s claims by dismissing all of them as mere “concussion talk.” Despite trying to calm the storm, Malignaggi continues to go off on the UFC champion and believes that all of this will lead to a boxing showdown.
“When you don’t like somebody, you don’t spar them, you fight them,” Malignaggi said on Monday’s MMA Hour episode. “You either fight them, or you just never mentioned them at all.”
“This weirdo didn’t do either of those things. He constantly put 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.”
Malignaggi continues to demand that the 24-hour surveillance footage in the gym should be released instead of clips of his sparring sessions with McGregor being released online thanks to UFC president Dana White, who released them on Friday. Although Malignaggi did go on record by stating that McGregor got the better of him in some rounds, he feels he would be able to disprove that a knockdown happened.
“He’s got his left hand on my neck, and he’s throwing his little right hook inside, and I’m trying to pull up as hard as I can, in case he’s going to repeat the shot, in case he’s gonna do something else,” Malignaggi explained. “And he lets it go. So what happens? I go flying, and I fall.”
“It’s that same type of effect like when you’re playing tug-o-war as a kid, and you pull as hard as you can, and you let go, and the other person goes flying. It was that kind of effect at the instance of when I went to the canvas.”
The biggest fight of the year is set to go down on August 26th at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, Nevada. The bout will air on pay-per-view and is expected to be the most lucrative prize fight of all time.
