Paulie Malignaggi says Conor McGregor is being ‘laughed at’ by the boxing community

In the lead-up to his bellwether fight with Floyd Mayweather Jr. this Saturday, the training videos coming out of Conor McGregor’s camp have been unorthodox, to say the least. A clip of his floppy-armed warm-up inspired an Instagram challenge where actual boxers lined up to mock him. A clip of him hitting a sparring bag at an open workout made it look as though the two-division UFC champion was stuck underwater.

The videos may be all an elaborate ploy to get Mayweather and fight fans to drop their guard, but one boxer says all it’s doing is tarnishing the young Irishman’s name.

”That’s the situation with McGregor in boxing; he is being laughed at and it is only getting worse as each video of a public workout or him shadow boxing is released,” former IBF and WBA champion Paulie Malignaggi told Sky Sports. “McGregor gets angry because boxing has not accepted him, but would an MMA fighter accept a boxer walking into their sport claiming that they are the best when he’s never done it in his life?”

Malignaggi knows the McGregor camp from the inside-out. He was a much-hyped sparring partner for the brash MMA star. McGregor and UFC President Dana White even released a video of McGregor knocking the veteran boxer down in the ring.

Malignaggi, enjoying a high tide of publicity, rarely reached even in his days as a champion, had plenty to say about the clip and his one-time training partner.

”It’s been a wild ride the last couple of weeks and every time I think I’m no longer part of the storm, another photo or video comes out. Part of me thinks that he has done this on purpose; maybe he wants to figure out a new opponent after the Mayweather fight if he wants to stay in this sport.

”They want you to believe this was a knockdown and people can choose to be deceived, but then they can only be mad at themselves when they realize the truth.

”Nothing landed in that exchange. You can think something landed, but it is clearly not the case; a passing graze is not enough to get a knockdown. The added footage of punches landed were edited in from the previous round, and I always told people that he had a good couple of rounds before.”

Malignaggi, of course, has plenty to prove with these statements. He’s got an ax to grind after the McGregor video, edited or not, diminished his value as a boxer. If Mayweather-McGregor winds up being the financial windfall it’s predicted to be, his trash talk could also set up a money fight down the line — just like McGregor’s gift of gab did for Saturday’s fight.

Malignaggi doesn’t speak for the boxing world as a whole, but there’s no doubt McGregor’s training videos aren’t standard prefight fare. Are his noodle arms and controversial knockdowns enough to suggest he’s making a joke of himself in the run-up to his boxing debut? Or are his hype videos just a tactic to defy expectations for a fleeting bit of media that ultimately won’t matter when the bell rings in Las Vegas?