Paulie Malignaggi continues to go off on UFC lightweight champion Conor McGregor. Of course, the final straw that was broken saw Malignaggi leave training camp after photos of their sparring sessions were made public. The photos made it look like Malignaggi was knocked down, but he says there are other things outside the ring that led to that decision.
Malignaggi has come out and stated that he felt like he was being “set up” in sparring. However, the former two-division champion has now revealed a bit more of what he didn’t like from the experience.
“My problems isn’t just with the sparring. My problem is the way he treats people, the way he treats the other sparring partners,” Malignaggi said on Fox 5’s Sports Xtra (transcript courtesy of Bloody Elbow). “He’s on the bit on the cheap side. You have a hundred million dollar fight, you can splurge a little bit more on training camp, especially the way you treat the sparring partners and the living quarters and what not.”
Malignaggi claims that he never asked for anything extra, but he was floored by the way that the sparring partners were being treated, especially considering how lucrative the fight is.
“I asked for nothing, no special treatment. I wanted to be like the sparring partners,” he said. “In a bit 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. I never tried to make things difficult for them, but I assumed things would be on a moderate living conditions. They really weren’t,” he explained. “A little on the cheap side, like I said.
“I put it like this, I’ve never been part of a 100 million dollar fight, but I’ve been part of multiple fights where there’s been million dollar purses in there. So once you’ve been part of 7 and 8 figure purses — 9 figures in this case — you understand how to treat this training camp and how to properly budget it without being too cheap, but without overspending. There’s people involved, and there’s a team involved, and you need to take care of them too.”
Malignaggi also shined some light on how the irony with how they were being treated, and the image McGregor is trying to maintain in public. According to the former boxing champion, McGregor is a cheap human being.
“And I’ve never seen such a cheap guy in my life, in all my training camps. I was blown away with this guy, with the treatment he’s given everybody,” he said. “But he made sure he rented himself a Lamborghini in Vegas, which was like ‘what is it about? You don’t respect anybody else? I mean these are the people helping you. Is it about status with you?’ I don’t understand what it was.”
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