McGregor Hires Former Boxing Champ Paulie Malignaggi To Help Spar

Conor McGregor easily won the four city promotional tour against Floyd Mayweather as thousands of fans showed up and supported McGregor. Mayweather also quickly realized that he was facing a completely different opponent who was the king of thrash talk and mind games.

However the match on August 26th takes place within a boxing ring where Mayweather has an undefeated 49-0 record.

McGregor’s camp knows this and is leaving no stones unturned in helping Conor McGregor prepare for the biggest fight of his career. McGregor’s head coach for MMA fights is John Kavanagh but since this is purely boxing, Kavanagh is taking a back seat and letting the boxing experts get involved to prepare McGregor for the ‘money fight’.

Paulie ‘Magic Man’ Malignaggi has been roped into the Conor camp to help with sparring and maybe even strategy if that’s what McGregor wants. Malignaggi is a two time boxing champion who retired this year and now works as a boxing analyst for Showtime – the network that will broadcast the Mayweather vs. McGregor pay-per-view.

SHOWTIME Sports

Malignaggi is a pretty busy with his Showtime duties and also with him running and managing training camps for boxers. He is used to making the decisions for his training camps that he is involved with but for McGregor’s training camp, he will not be taking the lead role.

In an interview with the MMA hour, Malignaggi said

I wouldn’t say I’m going there to train McGregor. I might give a couple of technical tidbits, maybe, maybe not, but I definitely wouldn’t call myself a trainer. I think his team has that foundation down pat. They’re going to be doing the training; they’re going to be in charge of all that. I’ll be going there to spar. But you know, if I see anything, and we’re on good terms and stuff, I’ll share my views on things

During the four city promotional tour, there were a few exchanges between McGregor and Malignaggi. The ‘Notorious’ Conor McGregor called Paulie Malignaggi out for talking thrash about him during his Showtime commentary and confirmed that Malignaggi was being flown to Vegas to help with preparation. McGregor said that Malignaggi would have to answer for what he has been saying and left it at that.

Malignaggi has played down the exchange stating that once he joined a camp, he was a team player. That being said, there are rumors that Malignaggi might come out of retirement and challenge McGregor to a fight should he win against Mayweather.