Tim Welch says the O’Malley Pantoja sparring video is real, and it shows ‘Suga’ stopping the future flyweight champion with a body shot.
Alexandre Pantoja defends his flyweight title at UFC 301 this weekend against a tough and game Steve Erceg. But he’s spending a lot of the lead-up to the fight talking about Sean O’Malley and what happened when they sparred sometime back in 2015.
Pantoja has accused O’Malley of hiding sparring footage of the two training together because he smashed “Suga.” O’Malley has countered saying the footage shows him TKOing the future champion. He also admitting Pantoja tapped him later.
Now O’Malley’s coach Tim Welch is sharing his memory of the event.
“[He wasn’t] really in fight camp at all,” Welsh said on his YouTube channel (via MMA News). “Going to sparring to get a few rounds in and Henry [Cejudo] is like, ‘Hey, you want to spar this guy?’”
“So Sean says ‘Yeah, I’ll spar him.’ They spar one round, Sean comes out on a rip, puts him down. Puts him down in the first minute. Now mind you this is — I don’t even remember what year this is — I don’t even think Sean was a professional yet, he might have been a professional just breaking in. Sean comes out there, bounces around, young buck. Boom, hits him with a liver shot, puts him down.”
“Pantoja has to stop, he has to wave it off, go over to Henry, kneel down, call it off,” Welch said. “I mean there’s a video, never released video but he puts him down.”
At some point the circa-2015 video is going to have to come out. Will it be when Pantoja and O’Malley end up settling their beef in 2024 or 2025? They’ll have to keep winning to do that, Pantoja against Erceg on May 4th at UFC 301 and O’Malley against Merab Dvalishvili later this year.