By Keith Idec
Paulie Malignaggi was pleasantly surprised when he was offered his Aug. 1 fight against Danny Garcia.
The former junior welterweight and welterweight champion didn’t expect Garcia to become a full-fledged welterweight so soon. The 34-year-old Malignaggi also assumed his year-plus layoff would’ve prevented being presented with the type of opportunity he'll get in five weeks at Brooklyn's Barclays Center (ESPN).
“When I got the call I was surprised,” Malignaggi said. “And then I got to thinking like, ‘Man, that’s a big fight.’ Any competitor wants big fights and wants to be in the limelight and wants to be on the big stage. I was wondering if I would ever get a chance to fight on this stage again. And so I was more surprised than anything else.”
The Brooklyn-bred Malignaggi (33-6, 7 KOs) is in no way surprised detractors have dismissed him as an easy opponent for Philadelphia’s Garcia (30-0, 17 KOs) in the 27-year-old former WBA/WBC junior welterweight champion’s first fight at 147 pounds. As if having just seven knockouts on his 39-fight professional record isn’t enough ammunition for his harshest critics, Malignaggi hasn’t fought since Shawn Porter (26-1-1, 16 KOs) knocked him out in the fourth round 14 months ago in Washington, D.C.
“I really didn’t go into thinking as to why I got the fight or why I got offered the fight,” Malignaggi said. “I think that’s more [the media’s] job and I’m sure they’ll let me know about it on Twitter and in the media and whatnot, why I got this fight. Even if I didn’t think about it, just seeing what everybody says about it, I kind of get the gist of it.
“And again, it’s nothing new to me. If that’s the reason I got offered the fight, it’s the same reason I got offered the Juan Diaz fight in Houston in ’09. It’s the same reason I got the Vyacheslav Senchenko fight in Ukraine in 2012. And my confidence comes from me knowing I have the mental capacity to not let that kind of pressure bother me and I have the mental capacity to just go into my zone and eliminate all the negativity from my mind.”
Malignaggi lost a controversial unanimous decision to Diaz (40-4, 19 KOs) in August 2009, but beat the Houston native convincingly 3½ months later to earn a unanimous-decision win in Chicago. Senchenko (36-2, 24 KOs) was undefeated when Malignaggi traveled to Donetsk, Ukraine for their April 2012 fight for Senchenko’s WBA welterweight title, but Malignaggi stopped him in the ninth round to become a two-division champion.
Keith Idec covers boxing for The Record and Herald News, of Woodland Park, N.J., and BoxingScene.com. He can be reached on Twitter @Idecboxing.
