Tag: Paulie Malignaggi

Quote: Conor McGregor Could Be Better Than Tony Ferguson On The Ground

With the MMA world awaiting UFC lightweight champion Conor McGregor’s UFC return, the general consensus is that the polarizing Irishman will face interim champion Tony Ferguson when he does set foot back in the cage. The initial thought was that the UFC would book McGregor’s foregone conclusion of a trilogy bout with Nate Diaz, but […]

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With the MMA world awaiting UFC lightweight champion Conor McGregor’s UFC return, the general consensus is that the polarizing Irishman will face interim champion Tony Ferguson when he does set foot back in the cage.

The initial thought was that the UFC would book McGregor’s foregone conclusion of a trilogy bout with Nate Diaz, but fan interest in terms of a meritocracy standpoint – at least in the minds of hardcore MMA fans – has seemingly shifted that focus to a bout with “El Cucuy.”

With much of the MMA world screaming for McGregor to finally defend one of his titles, even ‘The Notorious’ himself has admitted it’s time to “legitimize the rankings,” which suggests a bout with Ferguson is next up for the UFC’s biggest superstar. So with that match seemingly on the horizon, discussion about the fight’s outcome is beginning to surface in the fight world.

That was the case when McGregor’s training partner and Brazilian jiu-jitsu phenom Dillon Danis met up with Submission Radio (via Bloody Elbow) recently, where the outspoken grappler revealed his thoughts that McGregor would match or even surpass Ferguson on the ground despite the interim champion’s stellar reputation for finishing fights by submission:

“I don’t know what people judge that of off. I don’t know why they would say he has a superior advantage on the ground or stuff like that. People don’t even know what Conor’s Jiu Jitsu is like.

“So, with me training with Conor so much in his Jiu Jitsu, I feel like he’ll be fine on the ground or even better (than Ferguson).”

That may be a tough sell, but many are giving McGregor a clear edge on the feet – and justifiably so – as Ferguson has shown a penchant for sticking his chin high up in the air during his fights. With a solid chin, he takes a shot to land one or two of his own, but Danis said that’s path to certain demise against McGregor:

“I think Conor’s going to pick him apart on the feet, most likely knock him out early or he can probably do whatever he wants with him. Tony’s very sloppy. If you watch his fights, he gets hit a lot, and when you get hit against Conor you go out.”

As for whether or not the fight will happen, Danis believes it will, as Ferguson’s recent callout online has McGregor wanting to shut his mouth:

“I would think Tony Ferguson next because he won and Conor is gonna defend the belt and stuff like that. And me knowing Conor, Tony Ferguson is talking a lot of shit and I know Conor is gonna wanna shut him up. So I can see that happening.”

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Paulie Malignaggi Says He’ll Fight Conor McGregor & Artem Lobov In The Same Night

Although it’s thought that UFC lightweight champion Conor McGregor will finally defend his UFC title in his anticipated return, retired boxing champ Paulie Malignaggi isn’t letting go of his oft-discussed potential boxing match versus “The Notorious.” The match-up had a ton of heat heading into McGregor’s boxing ‘money fight’ this summer, as the controversy over a now-infamous […]

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Although it’s thought that UFC lightweight champion Conor McGregor will finally defend his UFC title in his anticipated return, retired boxing champ Paulie Malignaggi isn’t letting go of his oft-discussed potential boxing match versus “The Notorious.”

The match-up had a ton of heat heading into McGregor’s boxing ‘money fight’ this summer, as the controversy over a now-infamous sparring session where the UFC megastar supposedly dropped Malignaggi dominated MMA headlines mid-August. It understandably lead to talk of a potential boxing match with Malignaggi, but the momentum all but went away when McGregor was finished by Mayweather.

Tony Ferguson won the interim UFC lightweight title at UFC 216, and it became obvious McGregor simply had to compete in the Octagon, even as Malignaggi recently claimed his manager Al Heymon was in talks to book his coveted bout with McGregor. McGregor’s team has even seemed to have begun to tease a title unification bout with Ferguson, and the always-there trilogy bout with Nate Diaz is well, just that.

However, Malignaggi won’t let it go.

The retired boxer tried to pull out all the stops on Twitter this week in response to a Bloody Elbow article where McGregor’s longtime training partner Artem Lobov, who lost to Andre Fili at last weekend’s UFC Gdansk, was considering a move to boxing and was willing to fight Malignaggi.

In an effort to fight the famed Irishman, Malignaggi offered to fight both he and Lobov on the same night:

It may seem that it’s a last-ditch effort at getting a big fight no one really wants to watch, and Malignaggi continued to justify the outlandish prospect when someone asked him if he would fight McGregor and Lobov at the same time, referring back to the one-night tournaments of the early UFC where fighters would fight multiple times in a night:

There’s probably not an athletic commission that would sanction such a pair of match-ups on the same night, but hey, Malignaggi might as well pull out all the stops for one last push for a fight he’s not going to get.

For MMA’s sake, let’s hope he doesn’t, at least.

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McGregor vs. Malignaggi Will Be a Train Wreck That None of Us Can Turn Away From

Let’s say you’ve got a stray cat in your neighborhood.
You’ve seen the cat scrounging around your house and your neighbor’s house for food. You feel sorry for the cat and, one day, you decide to leave a little bowl of milk on the back porch. You watch …

Let’s say you’ve got a stray cat in your neighborhood.

You’ve seen the cat scrounging around your house and your neighbor’s house for food. You feel sorry for the cat and, one day, you decide to leave a little bowl of milk on the back porch. You watch dutifully from your kitchen window as the cat cautiously makes its way to the milk and laps it up.

The next day, you forget to put milk out, but the cat still comes around. You feed it again. The cat keeps coming back, every day, until you can’t get it to leave. You’re annoyed because you never wanted a cat in the first place.

Congratulations. You have adopted a cat.

 

Paulie Malignaggi is that cat. We let him around the house. We fed him. And now we’re tired of him, but he won’t leave.

Malignaggi, who perhaps became more famous as a short-term training partner of Conor McGregor than he ever did as a boxer, told Fight Hype on Monday night that over a potential McGregor boxing match:

“I know Al Haymon’s talking with Dana White. I know they’re speaking so if they want the fight, they’ll make it. You know, I don’t need to do all that because Al Haymon makes anything he wants happen, happen. The only way this doesn’t happen—once I spoke to Team Haymon and they told me they were on board to make this fight, I knew they only way it wouldn’t happen is if this guy doesn’t have absolutely any balls to make it.

“But this fight would pay him more, this fight would get him more exposure, this fight is a bigger fight than anything else he has. There’s no more [Floyd] Mayweather fight, this fight is the biggest fight there is. So once they told me that I said, ‘All right, the only way this doesn’t happen is if this guy has no balls—which wouldn’t surprise me because he has no balls—but what I’m saying is, the way they’re going to present it to him, it’s going to be presented in a way where he really shouldn’t turn it down.

“Even if it’s not the next fight, even if it’s an MMA fight in his next fight, there’s no way he should be walking away from this fight unless he has no balls.”

If this news surprises you one iota, you haven’t paid close attention to McGregor’s career arc. You really thought McGregor was itching to return to the UFC and defend his title against Tony Ferguson? Or that he cared one iota about his legacy in the UFC or about vanquishing the notion that he isn’t a real champion because a real champion defends his title?

Nah.

If it hasn’t become apparent by now, McGregor has historically cared about one thing: finding his way into the biggest money fight possible. He doesn’t care about defending his championships. He doesn’t care about the UFC. McGregor is a businessman at his core with a layer of a good fighter painted on top, and Malignaggi, like it or not, is the biggest money fight possible. That’s partially due to the beef between the two, but mostly it’s due to the fact that McGregor can make a whole lot more money in boxing than he can in mixed martial arts.

So, of course, this news just had to come out. It was a certainty. Even if the fight ultimately doesn’t come to fruition right now, it’s going to remain there, bubbling under the surface. A lot of that is because Malignaggi seized his moment after that whole training camp brouhaha, and he refused to let it die. Even while serving as a commentator for Showtime, Malignaggi was a pest, and he’s never really stopped doing his act. He knows a good thing when he sees one, especially when that good thing is the biggest payday of his career.

The good news from all of this is that if you loved the buildup to Mayweather vs. McGregor, well, this will be pretty much the same thing, except a whole lot more annoying. Malignaggi just has a way of getting under everyone’s skin, and I’m already dreading any official interactions between the two men. I have no desire to see the fight, but even more than that, I have no desire to hear either man talk to each other. Nothing good can come from it.

But I’ll still watch. I can sit here and tell you I won’t, but the truth of the matter is that I’m a sucker for wild, out-of-control fight buildup, even when I can only handle both parties in small doses. McGregor has proved to be at his best in small doses, and Malignaggi is best in no doses at all.

And yet, I know I’ll lap it all up. I imagine a lot of you are the same way.

And that’s OK. There’s nothing to be ashamed of, I don’t think. It’s something of a guilty pleasure, in a way, because maybe you’d rather be watching anything else instead of McGregor vs. Malignaggi, and yet you can’t avert your eyes, and you can’t avoid parting with your hard-earned money to see it.

And since eyeballs and money are McGregor’s sole ambition, well, maybe we should’ve seen this coming all along.

Read more MMA news on BleacherReport.com

Paulie Malignaggi’s Team Reaches Out To UFC For Conor McGregor Fight

We are almost two months removed from the superfight between UFC lightweight champion Conor McGregor and boxing legend Floyd Mayweather Jr. in Las Vegas, Nevada at the T-Mobile arena. Former boxing champion Paulie Malignaggi is still calling out the UFC champion through social media. The bad blood between Malignaggi and McGregor has been well documented. […]

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We are almost two months removed from the superfight between UFC lightweight champion Conor McGregor and boxing legend Floyd Mayweather Jr. in Las Vegas, Nevada at the T-Mobile arena.

Former boxing champion Paulie Malignaggi is still calling out the UFC champion through social media. The bad blood between Malignaggi and McGregor has been well documented. Malignaggi was brought in as a sparring partner to help McGregor prepare for Mayweather.

As a result of this, Malignaggi was upset with some of the images and videos of posted on McGregor’s social media accounts from their sparring sessions in which ‘Magic Man’ felt he was depicted in a bad light due to the fact that one of the pictures showed McGregor standing over him on the canvas. Since then, the former boxing champion has been campaigning for a grudge match

This past Friday, Malignaggi noted on social media that his adviser, Al Haymon, had reached out to UFC president Dana White to try and begin formal negotiations for the bout.

McGregor ultimately lost to Mayweather in the tenth round by TKO after being hit by a series of punches against the ropes. Although he lost the fight, the UFC champion surpassed many expectations in his boxing debut.

It appears that McGregor will not be fighting in a boxing ring for his next bout, but instead, he will end up fighting newly-crowned UFC interim champ Tony Ferguson in a title unification bout.

UFC officials have yet to make the bout official, but the expectation is that McGregor and Ferguson to square off in late-December or the new year.

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Tony Ferguson Calls Out Conor McGregor With Expletive-Filled Tirade

It wasn’t without a ton of adversity, but Tony Ferguson finally won the interim UFC lightweight championship by submitting rising young contender Kevin Lee with a third-round triangle choke in the main event of tonight’s (Sat., October 7, 2017) UFC 216 from the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, Nevada. After the much bigger Lee was repeatedly […]

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It wasn’t without a ton of adversity, but Tony Ferguson finally won the interim UFC lightweight championship by submitting rising young contender Kevin Lee with a third-round triangle choke in the main event of tonight’s (Sat., October 7, 2017) UFC 216 from the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, Nevada.

After the much bigger Lee was repeatedly able to use his smothering wrestling to ground Ferguson in the early rounds, ‘The Motown Phenom’ began to tire just a little after a brutal and draining weight cut, and that gave ‘El Cucuy’ a window of opportunity to capitalize with his ultra-dangerous bottom game on the mat.

The definitive win put Ferguson’s win streak at an unprecedented 10 straight, and he understandably called out UFC lightweight champion Conor McGregor in his post-fight interview with commentator Joe Rogan:

Ferguson was expectedly unhappy with McGregor’s inactivity as champion after he took the entire year off from MMA to fight Floyd Mayweather in the boxing ring. So he voiced his opinion on the subject with a blunt and to-the-point callout:

“Where you at, McNuggets, you fuckin’ piece of shit? I’m gonna kick your ass. You better fuckin’ come and defend that belt. Defend or vacate, motherfucker!”

Ferguson is certainly doing his part to get his massive fight with McGregor.

Many hardcore fans believe McGregor should finally defend a UFC belt, which he has not done since winning the featherweight title from Jose Aldo in December 2015 and the lightweight title from Eddie Alvarez at UFC 205 last November.

The bout with Ferguson is a clear booking, but in today’s ‘money fight’-focused UFC landscape, McGregor’s oft-discussed trilogy bout with Nate Diaz could easily surpass Ferguson chance to unify the titles.

Which fight do you think should take place first?

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Disgraced: The 10 Worst Champions In UFC History

This weekend’s (Sat., October 7, 2017) UFC 216 from the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, Nevada, features yet another interim title fight when Tony Ferguson takes on Kevin Lee for the second-place strap in the feature bout. And it’s not even the first time that the promotion has tried to make a placeholder title for […]

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This weekend’s (Sat., October 7, 2017) UFC 216 from the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, Nevada, features yet another interim title fight when Tony Ferguson takes on Kevin Lee for the second-place strap in the feature bout.

And it’s not even the first time that the promotion has tried to make a placeholder title for the lightweight division that Conor McGregor has kept in limbo, as the promotion attempted to book Ferguson vs. Khabib Nurmagomedov back at March’s UFC 209 only to see it fall apart when ‘The Eagle’ couldn’t make weight. Add that to the interim light heavyweight, middleweight, and featherweight belts that have been essentially manufactured in the last year-and-a-half, and you can easily surmise why the UFC is having one of their worst years ever in terms of pay-per-view (PPV) sales in 2017.

But it’s not just the UFC’s fault; no, champions holding out for ‘money fights’ and just outright picking and choosing their match-ups has lead to an era where it’s just hard for new UFC owners WME-IMG to build any momentum, and the days when champions defended their belts successfully – and often – in order to build the necessary rapport to become big stars seem to be absent from the sport right now (other than Demetrious Johnson, and we’ve seen how that has worked out). Champions aren’t what they used to be, and whether it’s bad luck or MMA simply evolving to create more parity, a true superstar is tough to come by right now.

What’s apparently not, however, is a fly-by-night champ who fails to live up to the hype and circumstance that carrying the gold brings. While it seems easy to find such fighters throughout the last few years of MMA, there have also been some truly bad champs in the older days of the UFC as well. These fighters from the present or past had enough to get to the mountaintop, so they are or were elite, but they just didn’t deliver when they got there.

Check out our 10 worst champions in UFC history:

Holly Holm:

A decorated multi-time world boxing champion, Holm came to the octagon amidst a ton of fanfare in 2015. After two incredibly lackluster decision wins over Raquel Pennington and Marion Reneau, Holm went on to shock the world when she kicked Ronda Rousey into oblivion at November 2015’s UFC 193 from Australia.

The MMA world was suddenly her oyster, but instead of holding out for a rematch with Rousey that legitimately could have been the biggest fight in UFC history, ‘The Preacher’s Daughter’ decided to make her first title defense against Miesha Tate at UFC 196 the following March. After a tentative, safe four rounds in a fight she was probably winning, Holm was choked unconscious in the fifth round after Tate took her down.

From there, Holm went on to lose a one-sided decision to recent title contender Valentina Shevchenko in her next fight, but she still got a title shot nevertheless when she met Germaine de Randamie for the featherweight title in one of the worst fights of the year at February’s UFC 208. She lost via controversial decision, but has since rebounded by knocking out an overrated and ineffective Bethe Correia this June.

She never made any title defenses and has lost three of her last four fights, but Holm us rumored to be facing Cris Cyborg for the featherweight belt in her next bout. Welcome to today’s UFC, ladies and gentlemen.

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