On Friday, UFC president Dana White released some short clips of the sparring sessions between Paulie Malignaggi and Conor McGregor. One of the snippets showed Malignaggi falling to the canvas, supposedly to back up the previous photos of him being knocked down.
The clips, as expected, were a hot topic for many online debates, with observers giving their respective opinions on the situation. Speaking from a fighter’s perspective, UFC Hall-of-Famer Randy Couture also gave his take on the matter, where he essentially echoed Malignaggi’s call to release the entire footage.
“It’s a manipulation. Where are the other rounds? Show me all of them,” Couture said on Skip and Shannon: Undisputed.
“I’m sure there are other disputed moments, but Paulie didn’t have a guy there filming the whole thing. So those aren’t gonna be released.”
Couture added that it was “not normal” to have a camera crew around when a fighter does sparring sessions. But what was more questionable for him was how McGregor only had Malignaggi for a specific time period, as opposed to the entire camp.
“Malignaggi was treating it like sparring. Sparring is different than fighting. McGregor was acting like he was in the main event on fight night,” Couture said. “That wasn’t what it was.
“Sparring is over the course of weeks and months going into a fight. So that fact that this was a one-time event is questionable to me. I brought guys in for camp that replicate my opponent, give me that look, and they stayed for the entire camp.
“They’re part of the camp. They know why they’re there,” Couture continued. “They are there to help me prepare, to get ready to solve the problem – that guy that’s across the ring from me. This has a lot of questions in my mind.”
Conor McGregor and Floyd Mayweather Jr. will square up at the center of the ring on August 26th at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas.
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