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27th Aug 2017

What a shame that Paulie Malignaggi had to react this way to Conor McGregor’s defeat

It's come to this

Patrick McCarry

He is obviously angling for to be next on Conor McGregor’s fighting agenda.

Paulie Malignaggi was the third party in the biggest ever pay-per-view fight in boxing history. Not bad for a guy that retired from the sport back in March.

The Brooklyn native talked himself into a couple of sparring sessions with McGregor and a slew of headlines ahead of the bout. Now that the fight is in the history books and Floyd Mayweather is walking away from the game with a 50-0 record, Malignaggi is angling for the next shot at ‘The Notorious’.

It was a shame, though, to see him gloat so soon after the fight had concluded.

In his analysis for Showtime, who he works for as a boxing pundit, Malignaggi was measured in the immediate aftermath of Mayweather’s TKO win. He commented:

“Conor gives you a lot of unorthodox looks and it can be a little bit confusing, especially the first time you see him, but of course he is still a novice; he’s still a rookie. After a certain amount of looks that he gives you, he runs out of ideas. That’s kind of what happened tonight when the pressure was applied more and more. He ran out of ideas… he doesn’t have a back-up plan.” 

As soon as the Showtime broadcast cameras switched off, however, Malignaggi was on Twitter and aiming a not-so-subtle dig at McGregor.

For those of you that don’t remember – and there will be a good few of you out there – ‘The Great White Hype’ was a 1996 movie starring Samuel L. Jackson about an African American world champion that takes on a run-of-the-mill Caucasian. It’s about as funny as Malignaggi’s manicured eyebrows.

There were hundreds upon hundreds of scathing replies to that post but this had to be the best:

If that was the end of it one would probably forgive Malignaggi for doling out the humble pie that Mayweather served up.

But he was not done yet. ‘The Magician’ fired out a series of tweets that harked back to his claims he bossed the second sparring session the pair had.

For the love of God man, let it go.