Paulie Malignaggi Trashes Conor McGregor For Treating Him Like Shit And Details Infamous Sparring Fight Between Them
Our old pal Paulie Malignaggi is still in the news talking about his not-so-favorable stint in Conor McGregor’s training camp for his upcoming fight against Floyd Mayweather. Malignaggi went on Ariel Helwani’s The MMA Hour and gave a pretty detailed account of what went down – without revealing any technique details of McGregor – of course. The video is an hour long but I’ve bolded the most interesting/important parts below, and I’ll be checking in to provide some commentary on what Paulie’s saying…
“I land in Vegas and they tell me, ‘you’re going 12 (rounds) tomorrow’,” Malignaggi told Ariel Helwani on the latest episode of The MMA Hour. “Now, for people who aren’t familiar with a training camp, no one is ever expected to do 12 straight (rounds). The fighter in camp does 12 straight, but when the fighter in camp does 12 straight, he alternates (sparring partners). By the time you get to the third (sparring partner), you’re tiring, you’re uncomfortable. And the (sparring partner) is fresh, he’s looking to beat the crap out of you, you know?”
Malignaggi admitted that he was very tired in their first eight-round sparring session and believes that McGregor thought he could easily get the better of him over a longer distance.
“In his mind, he was probably thinking, ‘Paulie had a rough time getting through eight (rounds), let’s set him up for 12 (rounds),” he said.
When the former two-time champion arrived at the gym the next day there was an audience there to watch the session, which made him feel like McGregor wanted to put on a show against him.
“I get to the gym the next day and he has all kinds of dignitaries there,” Malignaggi said. “He’s got Lorenzo Fertitta there, he’s got Dana White there, he’s got his agent there (Audie Attar), he’s got a couple of other people I don’t know there.
“Again, I was thinking to myself, this guy is going to try and stop me tonight. He’s banking on catching a guy that could barely go eight, and had a tough time doing the eight the first time. He’s brought in all these dignitaries because they can speak about how great he looks at my expense. I was angry, but I knew that I came ready this time.”
Phase one of Paulie’s rant is about being set up to look bad by Conor McGregor. He mentioned it on Twitter, and when seeing all of the details laid out like that, I do believe this. I think Paulie pissed McGregor off back in December when he talked a bunch of shit, and this was a little behind the scenes retaliation. It’s definitely in his competitive personality to do so. Phase two, however, gives us Conor nuthuggers 0.01% more confidence in him…
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As Malignaggi explained it, McGregor got the better of him over the first five rounds of the second sparring session.
“He hung tough the first five rounds,” the longtime boxer said. “He came out sharper, with more of a purpose. He hung tough for the first rounds, he even landed a couple of good shots, but I was starting to take over.
The retired boxer claimed that McGregor had improved from their first session, but so had he.
“Here’s the thing, people ask me did he get better from the first to the second time — he did,” Malignaggi said. “The thing is, this is still something new to him, so the increments at which he is growing at are still smaller. I’ve done this for 20 years of my life, so from one sparring session to another to another, the rate at which I progress is a lot faster because the muscle memory comes back. The reaction and timing starts to come back at a faster and faster rate.”
Alright, not bad, not bad. Our boy got the better of Paulie Malignaggi for five rounds. That’s all we need. Everyone knows that McGregor has that 1% chance in the first five or six rounds, then he’s done after that. Big props to Paulie for being honest and admitting that. Now that that’s out of the way though, he’ll suck his own dick for a while…
“From about six rounds on, he became very hittable,” the former champ said. “So much more hittable that I was putting more weight on my shots and sitting down more on my shots, and of course, the body shots started to affect him more and more. Of course, I’m talking the whole time, because the first time he made sure to talk the whole time. Now I’m talking more and more and I’m letting him know, ‘you can’t hang, these body shots feel good, right?’”
Malignaggi claimed that his frequent body attacks had a visible affect on the UFC’s lightweight champion.
“[McGregor] stopped talking because he wanted to save as much energy as he could,” he said. “He stopped throwing as many punches. He caught some nice ones for the first five rounds. The nice ones he caught were the whole time when I was talking. After seven, which was one of his worst rounds, he sits there and he tells me, ‘7-0 to me’.
“I remember walking back to my corner and yelling back at him, I said, ‘whatever school you went to they didn’t teach you how to count!’
“I was feeling so good that I start yelling at Dana White ringside. I started saying, This is the bitch you brought me here?’ I said, ‘24 hours ago I was on a flight’. Then I lied a bit, I said, ‘Last week I didn’t do anything’ — I did workout that week, but of course I wanted to pump myself up.
“I knew that Conor heard me across the ring. Dana didn’t acknowledge it with any kind of emotion, he didn’t say anything, but he was looking at me when I was saying it.”
This could all be true, I won’t deny that Conor probably gassed and Paulie took over. Conor’s VERY known to gas. Look at the second Nate Diaz fight (that he won). The ENTIRE build up to that fight was “If Conor trains cardio, he wins.” That was the biggest cardio fight of his life, and he still gassed in the third round. Conor’s cardio fading is the least of my concerns, and not my takeaway here. My takeaway is Conor apparently claiming he was up 7-0 after getting destroyed in the seventh round. I fucking LOVE that. Mind games city. I hope he says it to Floyd in the same manner on August 26th.
Now let’s talk about the pushdown/knockdown…
Malignaggi stated that he was pushed down in the eighth, ninth or tenth round — the moment that was caught in the infamous leaked photograph — and that the incident occurred during one of McGregor’s “worst moments”.
“The funny thing about the push down was this — it was during one of his worst moments,” Malignaggi said.
“He pushed me down on the floor to try and catch a break and the instant I went down I got back up. I remember when I was down I continued to trash talk. I said, ‘Buddy, you need a break?’ because Cortez had to wipe off my gloves. I started to take it to him right after that. I told him, ‘you don’t get no breaks here’, and I started to hit him with more body shots. I said, ‘take those, they don’t feel good’ and I could hear him whimper off the body shots, too.”
Malignaggi reported that McGregor rallied in the final two rounds and landed some good shots. When the sparring session had finished, he thought he had made peace with the UFC champion.
This section can be read one of two ways: you can take it as truth, or you can take it as a man who’s embarrassed a picture of him getting knocked down leaked. I’m leaning truth, and I’m saying that mostly because Malignaggi claims Conor rallied in the final two rounds. Why would he throw that in, otherwise? McGregor ain’t a boxer. Of course he got frustrated that he was getting his ass kicked and pushed Malignaggi down. Coming up next: Paulie is TRIGGERED?!?!
“After that sparring, I thought we had buried the hatchet,” he said.
It was when Malignaggi specifically asked McGregor about not posting pictures of their sparring sessions that he claims he knew that the MMA superstar was ‘a dickhead’.
“Then I said, ‘Conor, do me a favor, bro. No more of these crazy pictures,’” Malignaggi said. “The week before, when I was working at Broner/Garcia, the media was there for the fight week because that was a big fight in boxing. All everybody wanted to know about was these pictures.
“I am not one of the other sparring partners. Nobody knows who the other sparring partners are. Everyone knows who I am. When you put up a picture of me in sparring, the media rush comes to me and I have to answer questions that I don’t want to deal with. I have to try and make you look good. I want you to look good. I want to say things that make you look good. I want to promote you and help you out, but not at my expense.”
“He looks at me and he gives me this smirk, laughs at me and he starts walking away from me. He gives me his back, he’s walking away towards the showers and he’s like, ‘Ha ha, I don’t know Paulie. We got some good ones in those last two rounds. I don’t know about that.’
BOOM! We got a Fraud Scenes situation here. Paulie went to McGregor, after saying pictures and everything were okay, and said “You know those pictures where I look bad? Maybe don’t post those” and Conor hit him with the classic “YOU WOULDA THOUGHT HOMEBOY!”
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If you’re signing up for a Conor McGregor camp in the biggest superfight of all time, you have to know what to expect, plain and simple. Are McGregor/his team dickheads for the way they treated Paulie Malignaggi? Yeah, seems that way. Is this all Paulie’s fault? Yeah.
Is he exaggerating a lot of it to one day try to fight Conor on pay per view, something he’s been trying to do since December?
You tell me.