While he didn’t get paid for the two sparring sessions he had with Conor McGregor before quitting the Irishman’s camp, Paulie Malignaggi has managed to cash in a lot of attention from bashing the UFC champ. McGregor is in Las Vegas preparing to box Floyd Mayweather on August 26th and two division champion Malignaggi was flown in from New York as a sparring partner. But things between the two quickly got ‘out of control’ and Paulie left after photos from their session were released showing Conor getting the better of him.
The bad blood stems from an earlier callout from Malignaggi and subsequent comments he made as a commentator for Showtime’s Mayweather vs. McGregor World Tour.
“I thought me and Conor would be pretty cool once the fight didn’t happen and I was coming to help him spar, but obviously he took it personally,” Malignaggi said on Fox 5’s Sports Xtra show. “He’s a bit of a weird guy in that way. My problem wasn’t just with the sparring, my problem was with how he treats people, how he treats other sparring partners. He’s a bit on the cheap side. You have a hundred million dollar fight, I think you could splurge a little more on the training camp. Especially the way you treat the sparring partners and their living quarters and whatnot.”
Ghostie pic.twitter.com/ViSNzrWV0J
— Conor McGregor News (@ConormcGregor5) August 3, 2017
“I’ll put it like this to people. I haven’t been a part of a 100 million dollar fight. But I’ve been part of multiple fights where there have been million dollar purses. … There’s people involved, a team involved, and you’ve got to take care of them too. And I’ve never seen such a cheap guy in my life. In all my training camps, I was blown away by the treatment this guy gave everybody. But he rents himself a Lamborghini. He made sure he rented himself a Lamborghini in Vegas. So what is it, bro, you don’t respect anybody else but yourself? It’s about status with you?”
“My problem with Conor is his arrogance,” Malignaggi said earlier.“His arrogance is to the point where he can’t progress. He can’t learn. He just wants a bunch of yes men around him. He doesn’t want to be told that he’s doing something wrong. He doesn’t want to be told that he needs to make progress, so that he needs to change certain things. Whatever he’s doing, he just wants to be told how great he’s doing.”
Well then isn’t McGregor lucky that Malignaggi plans on continuing to lay into him on everything he’s doing wrong. Not only has Paulie promised to dish more on a podcast soon, he’s a part of the official Showtime broadcast team for the Mayweather vs. McGregor fight itself. What a strange spectacle of a fight this continues to be.
