Former two-time boxing world champion Paulie Malignaggi’s war of words against former sparring partner Conor McGregor continues to escalate
Just last week, Malignaggi surprised many by announcing that he had exited the UFC lightweight champion’s training camp for his bout with Floyd Mayweather Jr.
The Brooklyn-native left Camp McGregor following, what he refers to, as a “set up” and cited photos released from a sparring session which appears to favor McGregor to substantiate his point. According to Malignaggi, one particular photo posted to Twitter by the Irishman’ team which showed the retired boxer on his back was not what it seemed. Malignaggi claimed that he was “pushed down” onto the canvas rather than dropped and hit out at McGregor for “duping” others into believing that he had scored a knockdown.
Malignaggi recently spoke with Fox 5’s Sports Xtra, tearing into McGregor for his treatment of those who are helping him prepare for the Mayweather bout. According to the New Yorker, McGregor has problems which extend farther than his abilities inside the ropes:
“My problems isn’t just with the sparring. My problem is the way he treats people, the way he treats the other sparring partners,” Malignaggi said. “He’s on the bit on the cheap side. You have a hundred million dollar fight, you can splurge a little bit more on training camp, especially the way you treat the sparring partners and the living quarters and what not.”
Malignaggi insisted that he had no excessive demands, yet was still shocked at just how the other sparring partners were treated by McGregor:
“I asked for nothing, no special treatment. I wanted to be like the sparring partners. In a bit of good faith, I wanted to go over there and stay with the sparring partners. I didn’t negotiate my price. Whatever first price they gave me, I accepted that as far as payment was concerned — which I never got paid by the way.
“I never tried to make things difficult for them, but I assumed things would be on moderate living conditions. They really weren’t,” he explained. “A little on the cheap side, like I said.
“I put it like this, I’ve never been part of a 100 million dollar fight, but I’ve been part of multiple fights where there’s been million dollar purses in there. So once you’ve been part of 7 and 8 figure purses — 9 figures in this case — you understand how to treat this training camp and how to properly budget it without being too cheap, but without overspending. There’s people involved, and there’s a team involved, and you need to take care of them too.”
Malignaggi also brought up some of the irony with how they were being treated, and the image McGregor is trying to maintain in public.
“And I’ve never seen such a cheap guy in my life, in all my training camps. I was blown away with this guy, with the treatment he’s given everybody,” he said. “But he made sure he rented himself a Lamborghini in Vegas, which was like ‘what is it about? You don’t respect anybody else? I mean these are the people helping you. Is it about status with you?’ I don’t understand what it was.”
