NEW YORK – It’s MMA’s equivalent of the Zapruder film.
The clip of Conor McGregor knocking down former world boxing champion Paulie Malignaggi during a sparring session leading up to McGregor’s epic summer 2017 boxing spectacle against Floyd Mayweather was expertly leaked at just the right moment to help boost the boxing match’s mega-sales.
The problem with that, if you’re Malignaggi, is that hitting the mat against a boxing neophyte doesn’t make you look good, especially if you know, as Malignaggi insists, that the full sparring film would have told a very different story.
So as Malignaggi gets set to face McGregor’s buddy, Artem Lobov, in the main event of Bare Knuckle FC 6 on June 22, the touchy subject of the infamous sparring sessions is back, and it’s still clearly getting under Malignaggi’s skin.
“Because he’s such a (expletive), I’ll tell you something about Conor,” Malignaggi said during Monday’s BKFC 6 news conference. “He probably could have stopped me 12 rounds because I don’t have the air supply to go 12 rounds in certain circumstances, but he’s got no balls at all, so any time I was able to land a shot or two, he gave me my break, and he gave me a chance to re-oxygenate, so all I had to do is potshot him and hit him with shots here and there that let me pace myself for 12 rounds.”
Malignaggi says that true boxing fans know what their MMA counterparts might not: that the sparring match between McGregor and Malignaggi was far from the gym war it was portrayed.
“He says one thing, but his actions speak another thing, you know what I’m saying? When we talked about his sparring time, he said he couldn’t believe the shots I took. That’s 90 percent of the offense,” Malignaggi said. “He said ‘that wasn’t me, great job, great sparring session.’ That was one of the best sparring sessions he ever had. Everyone at the table said that was one of the best sparring sessions they ever saw. Look, that was one of the more simple sparring sessions of my life, OK? I’ve been in gym wars.”
“That was such, the fact that the MMA community thought that was a fun sparring session, I’m sure you guys have been in the gym for some of these war-like sparring sessions, where you should get charged at the door,” Malignaggi continued. “This is not one of them. The fact they keep talking about it and presenting it like it was, shows you the limitations of these guys, and how I know that (Lobov) has no idea what’s waiting for him next month.”
To hear from Malignaggi, check out the video above.
For more on the upcoming schedule, visit the MMA Rumors section of the site.
