Paulie Malignaggi: Conor McGregor’s ‘arrogance’ will cost him
Retired boxer Paulie Malignaggi is no longer part of Conor McGregor’s training camp so he’s certainly not holding back on details from his experience with the UFC lightweight champion.
While Malignaggi has refused to reveal any details about McGregor’s strategy when it comes to his upcoming fight with Floyd Mayweather, the former two-division champion isn’t holding his tongue on much else.
Malignaggi sparred with McGregor on two separate occasions — once for eight rounds and another for 12 rounds — before leaving his training camp last week.
According to Malignaggi, McGregor’s biggest issue going into the fight isn’t his relative naivety when it comes to boxing, but instead it’s his inability to listen to criticism about what he may be doing wrong.
“My problem with Conor is his arrogance,” Malignaggi said about McGregor when speaking to FOX 5 in New York. “His arrogance gets to a point where he can’t make progress, where he can’t learn. He just wants a bunch of yes men around him. He doesn’t want to be told he’s doing something wrong. He doesn’t want to be told he needs to make progress or he needs to change certain things.
“Whatever he’s doing, he wants to be told how great he’s doing.”
McGregor’s alleged arrogance aside, Malignaggi also took a shot at the Irishman for how much money he’s spending to fund the training camp to get ready for Mayweather, who is putting his 49-0 record on the line when they meet on Aug. 26.
Malignaggi was expected to be paid for his time spent in McGregor’s camp but he ultimately jumped ship before he could receive anything for the sparring sessions with the UFC champion.
Either way, Malignaggi makes it sounds like McGregor isn’t exactly breaking the bank to pay his sparring partners to get ready for Mayweather.
“My problem wasn’t just with the sparring but how he treats people, how he treats the other sparring partners. He’s a bit on the cheap side,” Malignaggi claimed. “You have $100 million fight, I think you could splurge a little bit more on training camp, especially with the way you treat sparring partners and living quarters and what not.
“I’ve never seen such a cheap guy in my life. In all my training camps, I was blown away, the treatment this guy gave everybody. He made sure he rented himself a Lamborghini in Vegas.”
As for Malignaggi, he says he didn’t ask for anything special to join McGregor’s camp but instead he just wanted to be treated like any other sparring partner helping him in the lead up to the fight.
Malignaggi says that experience alone let him know that McGregor isn’t exactly treating people helping him all that well.
“I asked for nothing, no special treatment,” Malignaggi said. “I wanted to be like the sparring partners. In a token 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 cause I left. I never tried to make things difficult for them but I assumed things would be at least under a moderate living conditions. A little bit on the cheap side.”
Judging by those comments, Malignaggi won’t be helping McGregor now or at any point in the future. He will encounter McGregor again in about three weeks as Malignaggi is part of the broadcast team that will call the fight with Mayweather for Showtime pay-per-view.
