Paulie Malignaggi is Ready For The Next Step
By Mitch Abramson
“At the end of the day, you have to judge a boxer by his skills and what he can do in the ring, and not by his hair, and at the end of the day, Paulie Malignaggi is 25-1 and he’s the IBF junior welterweight champion. And there’s only one IBF junior welterweight champion, and right now it’s Paulie Malignaggi.”
- Paulie Malignaggi, IBF junior welterweight champion of the World
He wants to right all his wrongs, he says, all those crimes against humanity.
After he beats Hatton, he says, you’ll forget about the bad hair day against Lovemore N'dou, or his pedestrian effort against Herman Ngoudjo, or the time he was led away by a security guard after he yelled at the boxer Al Gonzales for losing a fight and he was doused with water.
Once outside, the security guard asked the bouncy kid with the spiked hair for his autograph.
That’s Paulie Malignaggi in a nutshell. The restless kid raised in Bensonhurst would impress you one second then make you scratch your head the next.
It was that way after he went 12 rugged rounds with Miguel Cotto in 2006 when some ruminated he might not last one. He was a club fighter with an outsized personality, a gimmicky white kid who was nothing more than a circus act, his critics laughed, but Paulie showed them. He took Cotto’s best shots and kept coming, damn the blood that was flowing from his nose like a hose, or the golf ball that seemed to be lodged in his cheek from the swelling. He even stunned Cotto in the later rounds with some stingers when Paulie looked as if his face might fall off. It almost did in the dressing room after the fight, caught on film in his documentary, “Magic Man.” There’s Paulie collapsing. There’s Paulie being rushed to the hospital. There’s all the visitors milling about in the waiting room of St. Vincent’s until night turned to day and it was just his uncle and his brother and an odd reporter who watched Malignaggi lose to Cotto but earn the respect of even the most grizzled of boxing followers.
When he thoroughly outboxed and outclassed N’dou for the IBF junior welterweight title on June 16, 2007, Paulie probably converted more skeptics who weren’t sure what to make of this kid, a little Hector Camacho, a little Vinny Pazienza, totally unique.
Then, it all seemed to wither away in his rematch against N’dou on May 24 when every natural disaster short of a hurricane seemed to keep Paulie from doing his job.
First the cornrow extensions, which he got the week of the fight, never sparred with to see how they’d react to a punch, and came undone after the first few rounds.
Paulie could take a punch better than the cornrows could, it seemed. The braids were whipping around like they were caught in a current and by the eighth round, his cut man Danny Milano was chopping them off to appease the referee, and the fans and probably Paulie. By the end of the fight, Paulie was lucky to escape with a split decision win. He seemed to stop throwing meaningful punches after the sixth round, when he said he injured his hand. Sure enough, it was reported that he had fractured his right hand and for the fourth time in five ½ years, he had surgery to repair a hand injury. Still, he won the fight, and now will probably face Ricky Hatton in October or November, he said.
But here's the question: For a fighter who worked so hard to get respect after his match with Cotto, why would he do something so bizarre as to get hair extensions to jeopardize all the good will he built up? The answer is simple, really. You just have to know Paulie, the kid who wants to put on a show so badly, to have fun in this tough, rancorous business.
“I was trying too hard to impress the fans,” he said of the braids. “I knew I was on the undercard of Ricky Hatton and I knew I had the reputation of being this showmanship type of fighter. I said, ‘You know what, I’m going to come in with a bang. I’m going to show these people that I’m all about the show, and I think I was concentrating too much on the show so that it affected my performance.”
He hasn’t put on a really good performance since he wrested the belt away from Lovemore the first time they fought. Since then, he looked ordinary against a sneaky fighter named Herman Ngoudjo. He pulled out a UD in January, but didn’t look good doing it and he knew it.
“I’m a perfectionist when it comes to boxing, and it’s completely unacceptable,” he said. “The Lovemore performance is unacceptable. The Herman Ngoudjo performance is unacceptable. So I expect to be criticized, but when it comes to stuff about my hair and stuff like that it makes no sense. In no way shape or form am I happy with these performances. I won a world title with a great performance and I have not lived up to the hype of that win. When I fight Ricky in October or November or whenever the fight is I have a chance to right all those wrongs.”
He added, “There have been performances when I’ve blown away my opponents and blown away people’s minds because of I’ve looked so good. If I can put together one of those types of performances against a Ricky Hatton type of opponent I’ll have righted all my wrongs.”
He predicts an easy win over Hatton. I’ve already dealt with a monster like Cotto, he reasons, so why should a fighter like Hatton, who looked extremely vulnerable in his last fight against Juan Lazcano pose more of a challenge?
He is already readying himself for the response he will get from his critics after he wins.