Like a dirty secret, Paulie Malignaggi hid it from his mom. He travelled all the way to Leeds, England to have his latest dalliance with bare knuckle boxing, the girl from the other side of the tracks, and then he did everything he could to avoid contact with his mom to ensure she was none the wiser.
He knew, after all, that she would neither understand nor approve. It didn’t matter whether she took issue with the comeback itself – Malignaggi’s first fight since a 2019 bare knuckle fight with Artem Lobov – or the extreme, stripped back nature of what would occur. All Malignaggi knew was that she would tut, shake her head. All he knew was that to save her the worry and the pain he would have to conceal the truth. He was, at the age of 44, back to being a teenager again.
“My mother doesn’t even know I fought,” Malignaggi said in the aftermath of his fight against Tyler Goodjohn at BKB 47. “I can just hide it from her. I don’t have to tell her. The funny thing is, my mother likes to call me on FaceTime, so the last couple of days I’ve been telling her that the Wi-Fi doesn’t work here. I’ve got to hide somehow.”
In some respects, Malignaggi pulled it off. He avoided a difficult conversation with his mother and in turn avoided an even more difficult conversation with himself. He then went ahead and used his bare fists to inflict damage on another man and remembered, briefly, what it was like to feel watched and alive again. He also won. Had his mother known, she would have been proud of him.
In truth, were it not for the damage he accrued during his win, Malignaggi would have got away with it, too, his mother still blissfully ignorant. But alas, this was bare knuckle boxing. There, in that world, the evidence tends to be both explicit and painful. For Malignaggi, who retired from pro boxing in 2017, there was no time to clean the house before his mother returned home.
In other words: for as easy as it was shielding his mother from the fact he was fighting again, it was not so easy concealing the evidence on the Magic Man’s face and body after the event. In fact, despite picking up a few gnarly injuries and cuts in the past, never would Malignaggi’s face and body have told the tale of a fight more accurately than it did following Saturday’s gruesome encounter with Goodjohn. Because this was bad – worryingly so. There were deep cuts on his forehead from headbutts and there were broken ribs from all the rabbit and kidney punches he endured during the fight. He even claimed to have trouble seeing from round two on account of eye pokes and only realised the extent of the damage when, after the fight, he covered his good eye with a hand and saw nothing but white through the “foggy” one. Later, in hospital, they checked Malignaggi’s damaged right eye for a torn retina and gave him a CAT scan. They also finally got around to stitching him up, which, he said, became a surprisingly long and convoluted process. “I hope everybody was entertained,” he said to conclude a video message – one of reassurance – from Leeds General Hospital. “I really appreciate everybody’s well wishes and caring.”
Though he smiled while delivering that message, it was a sobering, sombre note on which to end it, I thought. He might as well have said, “I hope you’re all happy.” Or: “I hope this was all worth it.”
Entertained, he had said. I hope you were entertained.
If they weren’t, where was the sense in ghosting his own mother for a few days to go do something she wouldn’t like? Indeed, if nobody was entertained, why put at risk a body and brain he had done so well to protect throughout a decorated 16-year professional boxing career?
Whether it was in the end worth the deception and the damage only Malignaggi, a smart man, will know. Yet the notion of taking damage for the entertainment of others, and then later receiving their well wishes and learning the degree to which they “care” about you while in hospital being put back together, is a strange one to process. Talk about an abusive relationship. Talk about mixed signals.
Malignaggi, of course, is not the issue here. Far from it. He, like all retired fighters, will always be led towards the places he knows best and will always want to test the limits of both his body and brain, as is his right. But the others, those who choose to watch this stuff, have a choice; that is, plentiful options. In the realm of combat sports alone, they have professional boxing, they have kickboxing, they have mixed martial arts, they have wrestling, and they even now have the grim spectacle of two people slapping each other repeatedly – thanks, Dana! Bare knuckle boxing, for its part, does nothing to improve on or advance combat sports, nor does it offer an indication of some sort of evolution. Instead, and quite unashamedly, it seems to mark a regression, much like Power Slap. It takes us back in time; back to a time when, in combat sports terms, we were even less civilised and discerning than we are today.
Not only that, what is most revealing about bare knuckle boxing is how its unsavoury elements are promoted rather than hidden. Unlike pro boxing, say, which has forever tried to hide its black eyes from public view, bare knuckle boxing proudly promotes and wants people to see them. That’s primarily why one’s social media timeline is often awash with images/videos of men and women cut to ribbons, disfigured, or lying unconscious on the ground following a bare-knuckle event. That’s also why so-called purists and traditionalists find themselves trapped in the slush, unable to swim their way back to dry land.
Because even if you try to swim against the dismal tide, you cannot. You find that once you are stuck in that awful combat sports algorithm – which now feeds you slapping, hair-pulling, arse-spanking and God knows what else – you have nowhere to go but with it. You wince at the images but you also zoom in. You gasp at the knockouts but you hit rewind, just to be sure. You then question in the process why you, a fight fan, watch men and women do this to one another yet claim to “care” about their wellbeing. It somehow puts even boxing, or at least your relationship with it, on the stand/in a new context. Gone, after all, are the gloves, most forms of defence, and everything else that offers a comforting pretence of safety and sport. Now, thanks to bare knuckle, there’s no avoiding how the sausage is made, nor how many brain cells it takes to produce a good one.
Perhaps, when all is said and done, the only way to make peace with it is to do as Paulie Malignaggi did in Leeds and go dark. Switch off your phone. Switch off the Wi-Fi. Pretend it’s not happening.
Yet, as our tolerance to violence increases and our attention spans get shorter, many will struggle to look away or see much wrong with it. Even boxing people, those who should know better, will watch it, cover it, and give it the time of day simply because its extreme nature guarantees eyeballs and clicks. They know, as surely Malignaggi knows, that fighting with bare fists in 2025 seems a bit idiotic, or perverted, or just in bad taste, but they also know that idiocy, perversion and bad taste are about the only things that will, in 2025, grab the attention of idiots, perverts and people with bad taste. “Entertainment,” they call it. Just don’t let your mother find out.
