In the past week, it seems as though the hype surrounding the released Conor McGregor and Paulie Malignaggi sparring footage has overshadowed the Irishman’s scheduled fight with Floyd Mayweather later this month (Sat. August 26, 2017).
Unfavorable photos of Malignaggi leaked from the sessions that prompted the former two-weight boxing champ to leave the McGregor camp. After Malignaggi heavily campaigned against the photos, UFC President Dana White released a few seconds of sparring footage that showed the Irish mixed martial arts (MMA) champ knock Malignaggi down, however, there is a great debate whether or not it was a knockdown or a shove.
UFC President Dana White claims that plenty of footage was provided to Showtime to use for their All Access program in the lead-up to the fight, however, they chose not to use in in order to not make Malignaggi (a Showtime Boxing analyst) look bad (quotes via MMA Fighting):
“Last thing I want to do is get into a beef with Showtime or any of that stuff, but we gave them a ton of the footage of the sparring and they denied it, because they didn’t want to make Paulie look bad,” White said. “They didn’t show any of it. They had a ton of the sparring footage and they wanted to use zero.”
Showtime Sports Executive Stephen Espinoza recently did an interview with Sporting News to respond to these claims, and stated that the UFC boss is simply ‘misinformed’:
“Dana’s misinformed here because we were dealing directly with Conor’s team on this,” Espinoza said. “We did not receive, as Dana said, a ton of footage. We received a few short clips. Roughly a minute total which were provided by the Conor camp. We reviewed them and were very interested in using them and including them in ‘All Access.’
“But it was a series of sort of spliced-together McGregor highlights, eight or nine seconds each. We didn’t want to use the whole thing. It was sort of repetitive. We were told if we didn’t use the whole segment as they edited it then we couldn’t use it at all. So in the end, Conor’s camp withheld permission for us to use it. Otherwise we definitely wanted to use it. There was no intent to protect Paulie. We just wanted to cut some of the clips because it was pretty redundant, repetitive stuff.”
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