Showtime executive Stephen Espinoza says UFC Lightweight Champion Conor McGregor wouldn’t allow them to use all the sparring footage of him against former boxing champion Paulie Malignaggi.
Earlier this week, UFC President Dana White said they gave the sparring footage to Showtime, but they didn’t want to use it because it would make Malignaggi look bad. Malignaggi is an analyst for Showtime Sports.
In a recent interview, Espinoza said White is mistaken and they weren’t giving all the sparring footage between McGregor and Malignaggi.
“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.”
