Former boxing champ claims Conor McGregor was KO’d in sparring session

If Conor McGregor’s coach John Kavanagh is to believed, the Irish MMA star should be ready to fight – and beat – Floyd Mayweather any day now. On a late June episode of The MMA Hour, Kavanagh claimed McGregor would be ready for the undefeated pugilist in just three weeks’ time, far less than eight weeks he actually had left to prepare at the time.

“We have two more weeks in Ireland, then the guys will head to Las Vegas,” Kavanagh said  (h/t MMAMania). “We’ll then have six weeks in Vegas before the fight, but I watched the session today and said we would be ready in three weeks.”

Apparently, however, it’s not all sunshine and daisies inside the McGregor camp. According to former boxing champion Jessie Vargas, who spoke with Villainfy Media, McGregor has already been knocked out in his preparation for Mayweather – not a good sign if true.

“He got knocked out in sparring already, man!” Vargas said, via Darragh Murphy of Joe.co.uk. “The boxing world is small; it’s a small circle.”

Given that Coach Kavanagh has also suggested McGregor is doing “four times” more sparring than normal for this fight, the odds of an incident occurring in a sparring session would indeed seem to be higher than usual.

“Without going into too much detail – just to throw a number at you – we’re doing four times the amount of sparring for this camp than we would do for a regular MMA camp,” Kavanagh recently told TheMacLife (via Peter Carrol of MMAFighting.com).

“That’s a huge amount of extra rounds. Whatever other parts you get ready for a fight whether it’s boxing or MMA, without doubt the most important part of that is sparring. That’s the sport. So you can be doing movement drills and weight lifting and running and all of these different things that go with it but number one should be sparring, as long as it’s sensible.”

Do you believe this claim from Jessie Vargas that Conor McGregor was knocked out during his preparation for Floyd Mayweather?

This article first appeared on BJPenn.com on 7/17/2017.