It seems that Paulie Malignaggi still has a lot left to say on former sparring partner Conor McGregor following his loss to Floyd Mayweather last month
It appears that the Irishman’s coaching team are not safe from the “Magic Man” and his acerbic tongue either.
The Malignaggi vs. McGregor subplot entertained and intrigued fans prior to the money-spinning bout between “Money” and “The Notorious” last month in Las Vegas. The former two-time world champion left McGregor’s training camp following a bust-up with the UFC lightweight champion over leaked images pertaining to a ‘knockdown’ which angered the Brooklyn native.
Malignaggi’s latest assertions touched upon McGregor’s preparation for the bout and his refusal to draft a boxing coach into his camp, preferring to stick with MMA striking coach Owen Roddy and SBG Ireland patriarch, John Kavanagh:
“I feel like everything I said about this fight, before this fight, was exactly the way it played out,” Malignaggi said on an edition of his ‘From Brooklyn to the World’ podcast released last week. “Even in the corner.”
“I was assuming they were yes-men, just because I remember there was rounds where he got his ass kicked in sparring and then he’d look at me like he was doing good or he’d make a comment. And I remember thinking to myself, ‘Is this guy retarded? Does he know he’s getting the shit beat out of him right now?’
“So, I remember thinking there must be something they were telling him in the corner, where they are just cheerleading him on. There is no way – in some of these rounds when he’s getting his ass kicked – that he’s actually thinking he’s doing good. There’s just no way. That’s why I told people that he’s just got a bunch of cheerleaders.
Malignaggi was clearly unimpressed with McGregor’s corner throughout the fight and expanded on his opinion that the Dubliner’s coaches were complete;y out of their depth come fight night:
“If my guy comes back to a corner after a bad round, like if it’s a really bad especially, I’m going to be like, ‘Yo, we gotta do this, this and this – we gotta change it up.’ So I made the assumption that there were a bunch of cheerleaders in the corner and I said it in the media and what not.
“I gotta be honest, bro, they were even worse than I thought. They were literally worse than I thought. I mean, at the end of the first round – he had a good first round – and [somebody in McGregor’s corner] said, ‘It’s going to get easier from here.’ Are you fucking shitting me? It’s going to get easier from here? It’s going to get easier from here? You got Mount Everest in front of you, bro. It’s going to get harder and harder. That’s how it is when you fight Floyd Mayweather.”
And then at the end, they went from all the cheerleading to then having nothing to do but say, ‘Yeah, just hold, just hit him and hold,’” Malignaggi said of McGregor’s cornermen. “Bro, you can’t go from one extreme to the other. You can’t do that. You have to guide your guy through it correctly. What are you doing? What’s going on? They looked so confused.”
“It’s crazy, man. I was more dumbfounded than I expected to be when I saw the quotes from that corner. It was brutality at it’s finest.”
