Conor McGregor is Responsible For the Malignaggi Footage Not Being on Showtime

By now, you’ve probably watched Conor Mcgregor’s Schrödinger’s knockdown on Paul Malignaggi at least a hundred times. You’ve analyzed it, dissected it, maybe even seen it in slo-mo or frame-by-frame in GIF format. Ever since Dana White “leaked” the footage, the world has gone crazy. For some, it answered the questions they had, others weren’t so satisfied. Either way, people still want the full, unedited footage.

That will never happen, but fans and media alike expected some new glimpses of the infamous sparring session to end up on Showtime’s All Access special on Mayweather vs. McGregor. According to Dana White, Showtime rejected the footage and didn’t want it to air, but that turns out to be fake news. Stephen Espinoza, executive vice president and general manager of Showtime Sports, says it was actually Conor McGregor who decided the footage would not be shown.

“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.”

“Dana’s misinformed here because we were dealing directly with Conor’s team on this. 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”. – Stephen Espinoza via Sporting News.

Well, isn’t that a surprising plot twist? This recent development gives insight to just how hands on and protective Conor McGregor is over how he is presented. It also will lead people to think that the other parts of him sparring Paul Malignaggi, probably didn’t go as well as the short clips that Dana White released on Instagram. The irony of it all though, is it probably just fuels the fire for an eventual boxing match between Malignaggi and McGregor. No matter what, somehow McGregor always wins.

This article first appeared on BJPenn.com on 8/17/2017.