An Irish boxer has said Kendrick Lamar is welcome to spar with him anytime at his home gym.<\/p>\n
Aaron McKenna struck up an unlikely friendship with the famous US rapper in 2018 while the boxer spent time training in Los Angeles.<\/p>\n
At the time McKenna was a teenager who had only a handful of professional fights under his belt.<\/p>\n
Now, he is back at his hometown of Smithborough in County Monaghan, training at the family gym for his upcoming world title fight in Dublin in August.<\/p>\n
McKenna said sparring partners from the UK and US have been flying over and added that Lamar would always be welcome “with an open invitation anytime”.<\/p>\n
He and his brother Stephen, who is also a boxer, met Lamar while he was boxing at the same gym they were training at.<\/p>\n
The rap superstar had just finished his own training session when McKenna and his brother began eight rounds of technical sparring.<\/p>\n
“Me and Stephen looked at each other straight away,” McKenna recalled.<\/p>\n
The pair are competitive, he said, so having the rap superstar watch on only spurred them on. <\/p>\n
Lamar stayed for every round.<\/p>\n
McKenna, who was living in California at the time would go on to regularly cross paths with Lamar at the gym.<\/p>\n
“We got talking to him after and got on well with him,” he said.<\/p>\n
“Real nice fellow, down to earth, no arrogance or nothing.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"An Irish boxer has said Kendrick Lamar is welcome to spar with him anytime at his home gym.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":759934,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[447],"tags":[703,49,48,82],"class_list":["post-759933","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-boxing","tag-boxing","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/759933","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=759933"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/759933\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/759934"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=759933"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=759933"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=759933"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}