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27th Oct 2017

You can almost hear Paulie Malignaggi’s response to Dana White’s comments already

He knew exactly what he was doing

Ben Kiely

Paulie Malignaggi won’t like what Dana White’s been saying about his sparring sessions with Conor McGregor.

We all know the story by now. Conor McGregor drafted in Paulie Malignaggi as a sparring partner to ‘have a knock’ and ‘answer to what he’s been saying.’

Malignaggi rage quit the camp after claiming that someone on the team leaked photos that gave a false representation of what happened inside the ring. After some shit-talking from the former two-weight world boxing champion, a few seconds of the sparring footage was released which painted ‘the Notorious’ in a very positive light.

The retired pugilist has called for the full, unedited footage to be shown to the world and there is a genuine fear among MMA fans that their beef could produce a freakshow boxing fight at some stage.

Malignaggi has maintained that he didn’t perform as badly as the brief clips of the sparring footage suggested. Dana White, on the other hand, said it was a one-way beatdown in favour of the UFC superstar. He doubled down on that claim during a recent appearance on Real Quick with Mike Swick.

“Let me ask you a question, why did Paulie Malignaggi get up and walk out of camp after two sparring sessions? Because it was the right thing to do. Because he was going to get hurt. Because he was going to take damage that would affect him for the rest of his life that he didn’t need to fucking take. It’s not like they were paying him big money or he had a fucking fight coming up himself. Paulie Malignaggi got up and left camp and he should have left camp because Conor was going to fucking hurt him badly.”

I guess there’s only one way to definitively prove it and put this beef to bed forever – release the full tape.