Former two-weight world champion Paulie Malignaggi was hired to help prepare UFC lightweight champion Conor McGregor for the boxing match with Floyd Mayweather on August 26. The pair sparred twice, before the boxer quit the camp, upset that McGregor posted an image on Instagram of Malignaggi on the canvas.
Malignaggi claimed he was simply shoved, but then UFC president Dana White showed video which contradicted Malignaggi’s account. The boxer himself conceded as much.
“Honestly he disguises it better than I thought or it the angle of the vid,” he tweeted.
The McGregor camp brought in veteran boxing referee Joe Cortez to officiate sparring sessions and get Notorious used to boxing rules. However, Cortez has signed a nondisclosure agreement, and thus cannot comment on what he saw.
However, Marc Raimondi for MMA Fighting reached out to California State Athletic Commission (CSAC) boxing referee and judge Tom Taylor for an informed opinion. Here is the video in real time.
I can’t tell you how I would have scored it live, Taylor said. I may have called it a knockdown, because the last thing to land was a short right hand to the side of Paulie’s head. That could still constitute a knockdown. It’s a judgment call and I think it could go either way. I wouldn’t argue it either way if a referee said it was a knockdown or no knockdown.
The referee said his first impression was that it was pretty clearly a knockdown, but after watching the video in slow motion, his opinion changed.
https://twitter.com/DeanMathganham/status/896344292993753089
Live, it looked like a knockdown, Taylor said. The first time I looked at the video — that quick six, seven seconds — it looked like a knockdown. But when you slow it down, you can see how he has him held down behind his neck, behind his head. Paulie pulls up and [McGregor] lets go, [Malignaggi’s] momentum is taking him. And then there’s that short little right hand that lands.
So it would definitely be a judgment call right then and there. But looking at this video, I would say no knockdown.
If you listen to his voice, [Cortez] goes, ‘Whoa, whoa!’ To me, that means he was gonna call it a no knockdown, in my opinion. ‘Whoa, whoa’ as a referee means, ‘Oh, whoa, whoa, I see something that wasn’t right.’ Holding a guy’s head down: ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa, stop.’ Something like that and Paulie is already down. To me, it looked like Joe was going to call that a no knockdown.
��When [McGregor] does let go and Paulie pulls his head up, he does land a short, little right hand, which could constitute a knockdown. It’s all going to be on the judgment of the referee and the angle he has. It could be called either way. But now looking at it, I would have called that probably a no knockdown. He’s pulling down his head. Paulie is pulling up, his momentum is what put him down.
What is clear is that Malignaggi’s narrative is false. The image of the knockdown that McGregor posted was not an attempt to make a slip appear to be a knockdown. There was hard sparring, Malignaggi ended up on his back, from and exchange that in real time appears to be a knockdown, and the king of social media in combat sports put up a pic of it.
Then Malignaggi was like …
Escaping Mcgregor camp like… pic.twitter.com/Pux7L1JyEQ
— Chase Sherman (@ChaseShermanUFC) August 13, 2017
