‘The Magician’ has shredded Conor McGregor’s selection of sparring partners.
Floyd Mayweather Jr. may be off at the roller disco and off on horseback with his family and friends so Paulie Malignaggi has admirably stepped up to the fight promotion plate.
For a man that was supposed to have agreed to a Non Disclosure Agreement, the Brooklyn native has told the world anything and everything they would like to know about his time in the McGregor camp. Malignaggi sparred with the UFC lightweight champion twice before storming out of camp after the release of unflattering pictures.
McGregor says he was against the release of such snaps – Malignaggi eating a hard left and tumbling to the canvas – and asked for them to be taken down but, he added, social media is social media.
Having torn into “cheap”, “scumbag”, “d**khead” McGregor last week, Malignaggi has now taken a run at his sparring partners and UFC president Dana White.
The former welterweight boxing champion had kind words for Dashon Johnson [a sparring partner of Manny Pacquaio] but says he has not been used much. He labelled Tyrone’s Tiernan Bradley as ‘a bum amateur’ and then turned on Artem Lobov, a long-time sparring partner of McGregor.
Malignaggi told The MMA Hour:
“He’s using a no-name amateur and a couple of MMA guys. One of them, Artem, I thought was like a punching bag. I thought you might as well use a punching bag instead of hitting him. I didn’t think there was enough quality for him, especially now that I left.”
Andre Berto and Steve Forbes, two established boxing stars, have now turned down invitations to spar with McGregor and Malignaggi feels it was due to the release of sparring footage. Later in his interview with Ariel Helwani, Malignaggi was disparaging about Lobov again. He declared:
“I mean I’m not going to speak on Artem’s MMA skills as I don’t know them. But in the boxing ring he was a punching bag. What does that guy do for you? What does he do for you?”
As for White, Malignaggi likened him to a portly character that is the logo for a popular brand of American cookies – the Pillsbury Doughboy.
The Showtime pundit remarked that he wanted to poke White in the stomach ‘and make him giggle’.
