LAS VEGAS – UFC CEO Dana White remains heavily unimpressed with Showtime’s production of its boxing events.
This past Saturday at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, undisputed 168-pound champion Canelo Alvarez (60-2-2, 39 KOs) dominated Jermell Charlo for a one-sided decision win.
Although White has a lot of respect for Alvarez, he didn’t hold back when bashing Showtime’s production of his fight, which he called “embarrassing,” as he continues a war of words with executive Stephen Espinoza.
“You know what I think of Showtime as a company: There’s no secret,” White told reporters, including MMA Junkie, at Tuesday’s DWCS 65 post-fight news conference. “Again, I could go on for days about their production on Saturday. They tried to do it better, I noticed. Showtime, I noticed you tried to do it better, but you guys suck.”
White compared Showtime’s production to Tuesday’s Dana White’s Contender Series 65 event at the UFC Apex, lauding his team for their effective use of replay.
“Let me give you an example,” White said. “This is how good our production is. Did you see (Anthony) Pettis there tonight? So the kid (Gadzhiyasulov) that threw the Pettis kicks off the fence, there was three seconds left in the round, right? Three seconds left in the round. I picked up my big red phone and I called the truck, I said, ‘Put those Pettis kicks in the package.’ No problem. Hung up the phone, three seconds left in the round, they put them in there and they showed Pettis. Now, if any of you were home watching that fight that night on Showtime, they were trying to do more replays.
“Their replays were so bad, there was a set of replays where, in both replays, nobody landed a f*cking punch. So, then you’ve got the commentators trying to talk about what’s going on and they were terrible replays. When you know production – they’re a f*cking major network. They’re supposed to be anyway, Showtime, Viacom, whatever. That’s the product that you’re putting on when you know what you’re looking for and you know what you’re talking about in the production world? There’s nobody that can disagree with me that Showtime is a horrible, horrible f*cking production team.”
For more on the card, visit MMA Junkie’s event hub for DWCS 65.