The latest rumor in boxing circles is one that isn't anything new in the MMA world — "Conor McGregor knocked out in training."
Sounds familiar.
Similar, incorrect rumors emerged before McGregor's fights last year with Nate Diaz and Eddie Alvarez. Yet boxer Jessie Vargas says that the Irishman went out training for his August superfight with Floyd Mayweather.
"He got knocked out in sparring already, man!" Vargas said “The boxing world is small; it's a small circle. I heard they tried Brandon Rios but he knocked out Conor, so they had to push him away.”
Vargas, despite claiming that boxing was a small circle, went back and forth on whether or not it was actually Rios who 'knocked out' McGregor.
“I just got tired of it, but I’m looking forward to seeing Floyd get the victory by knockout. Conor is going to get knocked out. Floyd always lives up to the hype, I have no doubt about that, Floyd will get the victory. I actually wanna put some money on it, you know, Conor has like 1% chance of winning," said Vargas.
Virtually everyone Fightful.com spoke to with knowledge of the two camps denied the rumors. Also, Rios himself would go on to say that not only did the situation not go down, he barely knows who McGregor is.
"No man. Vargas is f–king about," Rios said to Elie Seckbach's ES News. "I never met that motherf-cker. I know nothing about him, I've never met that motherf–ker but I'd like to spar him. The worlds gone crazy. I've been getting text messages, calls and sh-t like that. The phone's been blowing up. I don't even know who he is."
Other unusual rumors of late have included theories that Floyd Mayweather and Conor McGregor arrived to their press tour dates on the same jet, which are also untrue.
