A volcano waiting to erupt.
Ever since Paulie Malignaggi departed the Conor McGregor camp almost three weeks ago, the former two-weight world boxing champion has been on the smear trail.
The bad blood boiled over into fight week in Las Vegas, when the 36-year-old confronted Conor McGregor at the grand arrival of the two men involved in this Saturday’s main event.
It came as quite a shock then, that the most biased and partisan man that could possibly pass judgement on the fight, in Malignaggi, was retained as part of Showtime’s coverage of the pay-per-view event.
McGregor fans were outraged on Thursday when footage, filmed by FightHype, emerged showing Malignaggi in Mayweather’s gym with the pair joking Malignaggi had been sent into McGregor’s camp to as a spy, and repeatedly exclaiming “suckers.”
The Irish were in flying form at the weigh-in at the T-Mobile arena in Las Vegas on Friday night, and with some of them in close proximity to the Showtime booth in which Malignaggi was based, they made their beef known.
#PaulieMalignaggi goes after #Irish fans who were mocking him at #MayweatherMcGregor weigh-ins pic.twitter.com/gwl6qsjFyP
— MyMMANews (@MyMMANews) August 26, 2017
Brendan Schaub, who was seated beside Malignaggi in the above video, was speaking on the Big Brown Breakdown (Episode 39) podcast in the build-up to the fight, and he revealed Malignaggi’s reaction to the Irish fans.
“They’re getting ready to do that broadcast and that entire arena is Conor McGregor fans. So Paulie’s trying to do his commentating and these Irish guys are like ‘Fuck you! Fucking snake! Fuck you! Fucking rat! You weasel!’ And he’s just trying to ignore it, ignore it.”
“They’re like, ‘You fucking rat!’ And then Paulie goes, ‘Fuck this!’ Takes the thing out and goes, ‘What did you fucking say?’ to the big dude and the guy goes, ”Fuck you! What are you going to do?’ He goes (laughs), ‘I’ll beat you up worse than Conor did! (laughs) Get the fuck over you little weasel!'”
You prod a bear, you’ll always get a reaction.
