Former two division world champion Paulie Malignaggi is back on the attack, with his intended target being UFC superstar Conor McGregor.
The two had a bad falling out when Malignaggi served as McGregor's sparring partner a few months ago, when the MMA fighter was preparing for his pro boxing debut against returning five division world champion Floyd Mayweather Jr.
The Mayweather fight took place at T-Mobile Arena back in August, with a fatigued McGregor getting stopped in the tenth round.
Malignaggi is still pretty sore that McGregor and his team members released images and video footage, portraying what they claimed was McGregor scoring a knockdown of Malignaggi during a sparring session.
The images caused Malignaggi to leave the camp, and now the retired boxer wants to settle things with McGregor in a boxing ring - while McGregor has been calling for Malignaggi to face him in the UFC.
Another problem, says Malignaggi, is McGregor has an entire team of cheerleaders around him who jump at his every word.
“I think he’s a good salesman,” Malignaggi said on CBS Sports Radio’s Reiter Than You. “I think anytime you are to be a good salesman, you have to take a little bit of truth and you have to know how to twist it in a way where the perception of it is always a lot better than it actually is. Anything he does, Conor understands this fact. It’s all about perception is reality.”
“He knows that wasn’t a knockdown. It was your everyday slip-slide pushdown. If you’re in a gym, where 100 sparring sessions a day happen, you’ll see that a handful of times a day. It’s your everyday slip-slide push, whatever you want to call it. That’s how it was reacted to inside the gym. Nobody reacted to it. We just continued and we got up and we just kept going, which is what you do in those moments. If somebody actually gets knocked down, you take a second, you give them a breather. That’s so rare. That never happens in a gym with big gloves and head gear. . . . For Conor, the con artist comes out for a person who understands the technique of punching. He doesn’t have any.”
“He’s worried about his image, and obviously we all worry about our image to a degree. Conor is big into the psychology of believing it and you’ll achieve it,” Malignaggi said. “You can tell (that by) the way he talks. There’s no way he’s this stupid. There’s no way he could have really thought he was going to punch Floyd’s head off the ground. But if he keeps talking it and all his minions around him keep cheering everything he says – I was in the gym with him. I was in the dressing room with him and I heard the things he said.”