Showtime President Says Dana White Is Lying About The Sparring Footage

It appears UFC President Dana White may not have been telling the truth about Showtime not wanting to use the sparring footage between UFC Lightweight Champion Conor McGregor and former boxing champion Paulie Malignaggi.

Earlier this week, White told the media that Showtime had been given all the sparring footage between McGregor and Malignaggi, but they didn’t want to use it because it made Malignaggi look bad. Malignaggi is an analyst for Showtime Sports.

Stephen Espinoza, the Executive Vice President and General Manager of Showtime Sports, says what White said isn’t true.

“Not true. We definitely did want it,” Espinoza responded on Twitter to an article on what White had said.

Espinoza did an interview with Sporting News and shared his side of the story.

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.”