Paulie Malignaggi has expressed bad intentions regarding his opponent Artem Lobov as they are set to meet for a bare-knuckle boxing match in June.
The two fighters have been feuding over social media and in interviews for months, and it all stems from Malignaggi's stint as Conor McGregor's sparring partner when the Irishman was preparing to fight Floyd Mayweather in August 2017.
Lobov is a longtime friend and teammate of McGregor, and it is Malignaggi's intention to beat Lobov up so bad that Conor will want to fight him next.
Malignaggi, a former two-division boxing world champion is certain of a victory when he faces the Russian in New Hampshire, with a venue yet to be decided, but his desperate to badly hurt his opponent:
"It’s not about winning and losing here, because it’s not even a question that I’m gonna win the fight. It’s about how bad I can hurt this guy. For me, if I don’t hurt him to a degree that there’s something permanent there, it’s not a win for me," Malignaggi said when speaking to Luke Thomas on The MMA Hour.
Malignaggi's plan is to anger 'The Notorious' into fighting him next, as he feels he was unfairly made to look stupid when McGregor released footage of the two sparring in 2017; that showed Conor getting the upper hand, which Paulie has always said is not what really happened.
“Once I put his boy in a coma, he’s gonna want to fight me,” Malignaggi continued. “If he’s any kind of man, he would.
"So once I do that in June, he will want to fight me, but the conversation doesn’t even get initiated unless 12 rounds of sparring, unedited, the way it actually happens, comes out.
"If it doesn’t, then Conor doesn’t even start the conversation.”
Malignaggi also went on to compare the differences between MMA and Boxing when it comes to head trauma, where boxers statistically suffer more permanent brain injuries, and continued to threaten his future opponent.
“I’m telling you right now, if they don’t pull him out of this fight in the correct way, he’s going to get hurt. He’s going to get permanently hurt."
The threats are just something that go hand in hand with combat sport, but we will see if whether the fight actually lives up to expectation on June 22.