Search icon

MMA

20th Apr 2019

Paulie Malignaggi reveals grim plan to lure Conor McGregor into fight

This is still a thing

Darragh Murphy

In case you hadn’t heard, Paulie Malignaggi is eager to fight Conor McGregor.

Malignaggi has essentially not stopped talking about McGregor since the spat that followed their sparring sessions in 2017.

McGregor’s selective social media posts about his time in the ring with Malignaggi in preparation for his boxing debut against Floyd Mayweather did not sit well with ‘The Magic Man.’

Malignaggi insists that McGregor’s photos and short videos of the sessions do not properly reflect what took place and the pair clashed in Las Vegas when ‘The Notorious’ arrived for his bout with Mayweather.

Malignaggi now believes he has forged the perfect path to exact revenge against McGregor because after recently signing with Bare Knuckle FC, Malignaggi has secured a fight with McGregor’s long-time training partner and close friend Artem Lobov, whose debut with the bare-knuckle boxing promotion was absolutely brutal.

With Malignaggi and Lobov set to clash without gloves on June 22 in New Hampshire, the former has revealed his plan to lure McGregor into a score-settling fight.

“Once I put his boy in a coma, he’s gonna want to fight me,” Malignaggi told Helen Yee. “If he’s any kind of man, he would. So once I do that in June, he will want to fight me, but the conversation doesn’t even get initiated unless 12 rounds of sparring, unedited, the way it actually happens, comes out. If it doesn’t, then Conor doesn’t even start the conversation.”

The feud between Malignaggi and both McGregor and Lobov has taken many twists and turns over the past two years.

We saw McGregor and Malignaggi almost come to blows in Las Vegas, we saw Malignaggi bizarrely claim that McGregor has sexual feelings for him and we saw Malignaggi slap Lobov when they came face-to-face for a promotional event for Bare Knuckle FC.

“What really made me smile is that after I smacked the shit out of his boy Artem a couple weeks ago, Conor was so mad that he just started putting out a bunch of pictures – most of the pictures, the shots weren’t even landing cleanly,” Malignaggi said.

“This pussy wishes he had a full video that he could release right now. If he has a full video of kicking my ass, right now is the moment he would release it, but he couldn’t and it must eat him inside that he doesn’t have that. It must eat him inside that the way I beat on him and talked to him that day, to this day he can’t get over it.

“What’s gonna eat him inside more is when I put his boy in the hospital and he’s gonna be able to do nothing about it. That’s gonna be even more satisfying.”