John Kavanagh, head trainer of UFC superstar Conor McGregor, revealed that his fighter was very open to the idea of trading punches with former two division champion Paulie Malignaggi - but McGregor wanted to settle their dispute under MMA rules.
Last month, the MMA fighter made his professional debut as a boxer and was stopped in ten rounds by five division world champion Floyd Mayweather Jr. Malignaggi, as part of the Showtime broadcast team, was sitting ringside at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas.
Malignaggi, who retired from boxing earlier this year, was hired as a sparring partner by McGregor, to help the UFC fighter prepare for the scheduled battle with Mayweather.
The two of them had a bad falling out. Malignaggi became enraged after members of McGregor's team released images of their second sparring session on social media.
The images painted what Malignaggi claimed was a "dishonest" picture of the sparring session - as one image showed Malignaggi down on the mat from a claimed knockdown and other images showed him taking punishment.
Once the images came out, Malignaggi immediately quit McGregor's camp.
Then UFC President Dana White released hand-picked video clips from the sparring session. One clip showed a debatable knockdown of Malignaggi and the other had McGregor doing damage.
McGregor has claimed in several interviews that Malignaggi took a beating that was so severe, that everyone was worried about him because he was stumbling around even hours after the sparring session.
The two of them had a heated face to face confrontation last month at T-Mobile, while McGregor was ** his grand arrival for the fans and media.
After the Mayweather fight was over, Malignaggi claimed that McGregor had "no balls" and "quit" during the tenth round.
But it appears that Malignaggi's taunts struck a nerve with McGregor - who wanted to drag the 'Magic Man' over to the UFC's octagon.
“Conor wanted that,” Kavanagh told Mike Sheridan at the launch of the Original Penguin AW17 collection in Dublin on Wednesday night.
“He said to me, ‘Let’s get him in the Octagon’, and I said that there was no way that he would fight in MMA. You’ve got to be able to prove yourself in the arena. When Conor wanted a boxing license they could look at the Diaz 2 fight where there was more or less 25 minutes of boxing. Why would Paulie go to MMA? He’d never go to MMA.
Kavanagh explained that Malignaggi created his own falling out with their team, when he wouldn't stop doing interviews about McGregor's training camp - which led to members of Conor's team taking matters into their own hands by releasing the sparring images to social media.
“It wasn’t just general stuff explaining how he was part of the camp. He had to go back to New York to do some promotion for the Andre Ward fight, and straightaway he was disrespecting (McGregor’s) power. He was saying this and that, and I was thinking, ‘What are you doing, you have to come back here and spar Conor in seven days?,’” Kavanagh said.
“This guy is a former world champion, he should know that you should keep your mouth shut until the fight is over – then write a book, then do fifty interviews,” he said. That would have been no problem, we would have no issue with that. But you can’t go the next day and the day after that and the day after that, and start giving away ideas we have. That’s what threw me off, he wasn’t acting like a professional.”
2023-10-19 16:07:25
