A few days ago, former two division champion Paulie Malignaggi threw down a big challenge - by stating that he's ready to sign a contract for a "winner takes all" contest with UFC superstar Conor McGregor.
McGregor, a two division champion in the UFC, made his professional boxing debut this past Saturday night. The MMA fighter was stopped in ten rounds by five division world champion Floyd Mayweather Jr.
Malignaggi, as part of the Showtime broadcast team, was sitting ringside at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas.
In the weeks leading up to the Mayweather vs. McGregor encounter, there was a lot of animosity between the MMA fighter and Malignaggi.
Malignaggi, who retired from boxing earlier this year, was hired as a sparring partner by McGregor, to help the UFC star prepare for Mayweather. But Malignaggi quit after members of McGregor's team released images of their second sparring session on social media.
The images painted what Malignaggi claimed was a "dishonest" picture of the sparring session - as one image showed Malignaggi down on the mat from a claimed knockdown and other images showed him taking punishment.
Then UFC President Dana White released hand-picked video clips from the sparring session. One clip showed a debatable knockdown of Malignaggi and the other had McGregor doing damage.
Last Tuesday, the two of them had a face to face confrontation and traded some very heated words before getting separated.
Malignaggi doubts the fight would take place, because McGregor would be unable to manipulate the fight footage. The boxing veteran is confident that he'd make McGregor quit in their fight. He believes McGregor quit and stopped fighting when the going got tough against Mayweather.
"I'll tell you why Conor is concerned to fight me, because he knows what actually happened in the sparring session. You can't edit last Saturday's ass whipping. Imagine this, if you didn't watch that fight last Saturday night, you can take a couple of highlights from the first three rounds and make a 15 second clip out of it. You can make it look like Conor McGregor did good against Floyd Mayweather, but in reality he got his ass whooped," Malignaggi told Colin Cowherd.
"You can't edit the fight when everybody sees it. At day's end, he won't want to fight me because he knows what really happened in that sparring session and he can't edit the fight. He can say whatever he wants because our sparring session happened behind closed doors. But if it happened for everyone to see, he can't edit that and his image is going to take a major hit.
"I would make him quit just like Floyd made him quit. And you don't even have to be that good, you just have to take him to the point where he wants to quit, because he himself wants to quit when the going gets hard."
