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Khan-Malignaggi: A Fighter’s Code
Sat 22-May-2010 07:27
(Paulie Malignaggi)
By Thomas Hauser
Paulie Malignaggi sat on a folding chair in his dressing room one floor above The Theater at Madison Square Garden. He’d just been stopped in the 11th round of his bid to wrest the WBA 140-pound title from Amir Khan. There had been no knockdowns. Paulie was on his feet when referee Steve Smoger intervened to save him from further punishment.
Malignaggi’s face was bruised and swollen. A New York State Athletic Commission doctor sat beside him.
“Do you have a headache?”
“No,” Paulie answered.
“Is there any pain?”
“I feel bad that I lost, but I don’t feel that bad physically.”
“Are you sure?”
“Believe me; I’ve been through worse.”
“You’ll need some ice on those bruises so your face doesn’t swell up.”
“I know.”
The doctor left.
Cutman Danny Milano moved to Paulie’s side and pressed an iced towel
against the fighter’s face.
Paulie looked at the people around him. His brother Umberto, trainer Sherif Younan, co-manager Anthony Catanzaro, and longtime friend Pete Sferrazza.
“I felt old tonight,” he said. “It’s the first time in a fight that I felt like the older guy. I had a good training camp. I’m only 29. But he was moving around, getting off first. I said to myself, ‘That used to be me.’”
“You’re not one of the kids anymore,” Catanzaro told him. “You’re still a young man, but it’s different in boxing.”
Paulie smiled ruefully. For a fighter with his pride, each loss is a bit like death.
“It’s a long way from KeySpan Park,” he said. “That’s for sure. I remember coming out of the tunnel that night, my pro debut. I had all these dreams. My whole career was ahead of me. Sometimes that seems like a long time ago, and sometimes it seems like it was yesterday.”
Paulie took a deep breath and let it out slowly.
“Did anybody talk to Grandpa? Could someone call Grandpa and tell him I’m all right.”
***
Paulie Malignaggi was the kid who couldn’t, who did. Abandoned by his father, mistreated by an abusive stepfather, he moved in with his maternal grandparents at age 15 and turned to boxing for self-esteem. Three years later, he won a national amateur championship. He turned pro on July 7, 2001, under the promotional guidance of Lou DiBella.
Malignaggi was good-looking (still is). He had a big mouth (still does). And he could box (still can). Throughout his career, his weakness as a fighter has been a lack of punching power. Five knockouts in 31 fights. The last time that Paulie knocked an opponent out, LeBron James had yet to play in the NBA and Barack ***** was representing portions of the south side of Chicago in the Illinois state legislature.
Paulie won his first 21 professional fights. On June 10, 2006, he challenged Miguel Cotto for the WBO 140-pound crown. Cotto was at his peak. Malignaggi fought heroically and went the distance in a losing effort, absorbing a brutal beating in the process. After the fight, Arturo Gatti commended Paulie for his courage. “I’m proud that you’re Italian,” Gatti said.
One year later, Malignaggi got another title opportunity. This time, he won every round and seized the IBF 140-pound championship from Lovemore N’dou.
“After I beat N’dou,” Paulie says, “I thought the gates of heaven would open up for me.”
He was wrong. Victorious but unimpressive title defenses against Herman Ngoudjo and N’dou followed. Then Paulie got another shot at the stardom that had eluded him when he lost to Cotto. On November 22, 2008, he fought Ricky Hatton in Las Vegas.
“If I’d fought like I’m capable of fighting,” Paulie declares, “Hatton wouldn’t have been able to hit me in the ass with a handful of rice.”
But Paulie wasn’t Paulie that night. He hadn’t been for a year. Whatever else was going on in his life, the chemistry between him and Buddy McGirt (who’d replaced Billy Giles as Malignaggi’s trainer) wasn’t right.
“They say a fighter gets better when he wins a world title,” Paulie notes. “I got worse. Buddy teaches all his fighters to fight the same way. He wants you to fight out of a box, a defensive shell, and move your head a lot. It’s okay to fight in the pocket if that’s the kind of fighter you are. But I use a lot of movement. Buddy was trying to change everything that I was about as a fighter and he took away my main asset, which was my legs.”
Against Hatton, Malignaggi did virtually nothing right. “I stunk out the joint,” he admits. “That fight cost me my dreams. If I beat Hatton, I become a star. I might even have made it to the Hall of Fame. The way I fought that night will bother me till the day I die. It was like God gave me a gift when they made that fight and I f**ked it up.”
Malignaggi’s purse for fighting Hatton was US$1,200,000; far and away his largest payday ever. For his next bout (an off-TV contest against journeyman Chris Fernandez), he was paid $10,000. He changed trainers, moving from McGirt to Sherif Younan. Then, on August 22, 2009, he journeyed to Houston to fight Juan Diaz.
“I knew what the deal was,” Paulie says. “Diaz had just been knocked out by Juan Manuel Marquez. HBO and Golden Boy were trying to build him back up. I’m a light-punching guy who’s a former world champion, so HBO and Golden Boy and the Diaz people said, ‘Let’s get Malignaggi. We’ll put the fight in Texas, in Juan’s hometown. Paulie won’t stand a chance.’”
Paulie made just under US$200,000 for the Diaz fight. “The judges robbed me,” he says. “They didn’t take my money, but they stole the fight. And there’s no telling how much money that cost me.”
Most observers agreed. Gale Van Hoy’s scorecard (118-110 in favor of Diaz) was particularly egregious. “Nobody is that ******,” Paulie says. “It was worse than incompetence. It was corrupt.”
The pain and frustration ran deep.
“It’s easy to throw your hands in the air and say, ‘Why do I bother working so hard?’” Malignaggi raged after the fight. “Why do I leave my family and friends and go to training camp and make all the other sacrifices I make to get ready? When the fight comes, I get screwed anyway. That’s what makes boxing so hard. It’s not just the physical part. It’s trying to motivate myself to train hard [and], at the same time, I’m wondering if I’m going to get f**ked all over again. If Juan Diaz is a man, he’ll fight me again. If I got a decision like that in my favor, I couldn’t live with myself unless I fought the other guy again.”
On December 12, 2009, they fought again; this time in Chicago, a neutral site. Paulie won a unanimous decision.
Every fight has the potential to derail a world-class fighter’s career. A handful of fights have the potential to be career-altering wins.
After the second Diaz fight, Malignaggi had entered the ring for five watershed fights. He’d lost to Cotto; beaten N’dou to become a world champion; lost to Hatton; lost a disputed decision to Diaz; then triumphed over Diaz in a rematch. Against all odds, he had sc****d and clawed his way back into the spotlight and was poised to reach for the brass ring again.
The obstacle to success was England’s Amir Khan.
Khan turned pro one year after winning a silver medal as a 17-year-old prodigy at the 2004 Olympics and started his career with 18 consecutive wins. Then, on September 6, 2008, he was knocked out in the first round by Breidis Prescott.
Following the loss to Prescott, Khan moved his base of operations to Los Angeles and began training with Freddie Roach. After a comeback fight against Oisin ***in, he won a five-round technical decision against a badly faded Marco Antonio Barrera in a fight cut short by an accidental head butt. Next, on July 18, 2009, he decisioned Andreas Kotelnik to win the 140-pound WBA belt. In his first title defense, he knocked out Dmitry Salita in 76 seconds.
Khan is being groomed for stardom by Golden Boy Promotions (which spirited him away from Frank Warren). He wanted to make a splash in the United States, preferably at Madison Square Garden. And he viewed Malignaggi as the sort of opponent a champion faces when he’s taking another step up the ladder toward elite status.
From Malignaggi’s point of view, the match-up was equally enticing. This was a title fight. But the belt was incidental to the fact that it was a high-profile bout against a “name” opponent that Paulie thought he would win.
“This fight is redemption for me,” Paulie said.
continued....
Khan-Malignaggi: A Fighter’s Code
Sat 22-May-2010 07:27
(Paulie Malignaggi)
By Thomas Hauser
Paulie Malignaggi sat on a folding chair in his dressing room one floor above The Theater at Madison Square Garden. He’d just been stopped in the 11th round of his bid to wrest the WBA 140-pound title from Amir Khan. There had been no knockdowns. Paulie was on his feet when referee Steve Smoger intervened to save him from further punishment.
Malignaggi’s face was bruised and swollen. A New York State Athletic Commission doctor sat beside him.
“Do you have a headache?”
“No,” Paulie answered.
“Is there any pain?”
“I feel bad that I lost, but I don’t feel that bad physically.”
“Are you sure?”
“Believe me; I’ve been through worse.”
“You’ll need some ice on those bruises so your face doesn’t swell up.”
“I know.”
The doctor left.
Cutman Danny Milano moved to Paulie’s side and pressed an iced towel
against the fighter’s face.
Paulie looked at the people around him. His brother Umberto, trainer Sherif Younan, co-manager Anthony Catanzaro, and longtime friend Pete Sferrazza.
“I felt old tonight,” he said. “It’s the first time in a fight that I felt like the older guy. I had a good training camp. I’m only 29. But he was moving around, getting off first. I said to myself, ‘That used to be me.’”
“You’re not one of the kids anymore,” Catanzaro told him. “You’re still a young man, but it’s different in boxing.”
Paulie smiled ruefully. For a fighter with his pride, each loss is a bit like death.
“It’s a long way from KeySpan Park,” he said. “That’s for sure. I remember coming out of the tunnel that night, my pro debut. I had all these dreams. My whole career was ahead of me. Sometimes that seems like a long time ago, and sometimes it seems like it was yesterday.”
Paulie took a deep breath and let it out slowly.
“Did anybody talk to Grandpa? Could someone call Grandpa and tell him I’m all right.”
***
Paulie Malignaggi was the kid who couldn’t, who did. Abandoned by his father, mistreated by an abusive stepfather, he moved in with his maternal grandparents at age 15 and turned to boxing for self-esteem. Three years later, he won a national amateur championship. He turned pro on July 7, 2001, under the promotional guidance of Lou DiBella.
Malignaggi was good-looking (still is). He had a big mouth (still does). And he could box (still can). Throughout his career, his weakness as a fighter has been a lack of punching power. Five knockouts in 31 fights. The last time that Paulie knocked an opponent out, LeBron James had yet to play in the NBA and Barack ***** was representing portions of the south side of Chicago in the Illinois state legislature.
Paulie won his first 21 professional fights. On June 10, 2006, he challenged Miguel Cotto for the WBO 140-pound crown. Cotto was at his peak. Malignaggi fought heroically and went the distance in a losing effort, absorbing a brutal beating in the process. After the fight, Arturo Gatti commended Paulie for his courage. “I’m proud that you’re Italian,” Gatti said.
One year later, Malignaggi got another title opportunity. This time, he won every round and seized the IBF 140-pound championship from Lovemore N’dou.
“After I beat N’dou,” Paulie says, “I thought the gates of heaven would open up for me.”
He was wrong. Victorious but unimpressive title defenses against Herman Ngoudjo and N’dou followed. Then Paulie got another shot at the stardom that had eluded him when he lost to Cotto. On November 22, 2008, he fought Ricky Hatton in Las Vegas.
“If I’d fought like I’m capable of fighting,” Paulie declares, “Hatton wouldn’t have been able to hit me in the ass with a handful of rice.”
But Paulie wasn’t Paulie that night. He hadn’t been for a year. Whatever else was going on in his life, the chemistry between him and Buddy McGirt (who’d replaced Billy Giles as Malignaggi’s trainer) wasn’t right.
“They say a fighter gets better when he wins a world title,” Paulie notes. “I got worse. Buddy teaches all his fighters to fight the same way. He wants you to fight out of a box, a defensive shell, and move your head a lot. It’s okay to fight in the pocket if that’s the kind of fighter you are. But I use a lot of movement. Buddy was trying to change everything that I was about as a fighter and he took away my main asset, which was my legs.”
Against Hatton, Malignaggi did virtually nothing right. “I stunk out the joint,” he admits. “That fight cost me my dreams. If I beat Hatton, I become a star. I might even have made it to the Hall of Fame. The way I fought that night will bother me till the day I die. It was like God gave me a gift when they made that fight and I f**ked it up.”
Malignaggi’s purse for fighting Hatton was US$1,200,000; far and away his largest payday ever. For his next bout (an off-TV contest against journeyman Chris Fernandez), he was paid $10,000. He changed trainers, moving from McGirt to Sherif Younan. Then, on August 22, 2009, he journeyed to Houston to fight Juan Diaz.
“I knew what the deal was,” Paulie says. “Diaz had just been knocked out by Juan Manuel Marquez. HBO and Golden Boy were trying to build him back up. I’m a light-punching guy who’s a former world champion, so HBO and Golden Boy and the Diaz people said, ‘Let’s get Malignaggi. We’ll put the fight in Texas, in Juan’s hometown. Paulie won’t stand a chance.’”
Paulie made just under US$200,000 for the Diaz fight. “The judges robbed me,” he says. “They didn’t take my money, but they stole the fight. And there’s no telling how much money that cost me.”
Most observers agreed. Gale Van Hoy’s scorecard (118-110 in favor of Diaz) was particularly egregious. “Nobody is that ******,” Paulie says. “It was worse than incompetence. It was corrupt.”
The pain and frustration ran deep.
“It’s easy to throw your hands in the air and say, ‘Why do I bother working so hard?’” Malignaggi raged after the fight. “Why do I leave my family and friends and go to training camp and make all the other sacrifices I make to get ready? When the fight comes, I get screwed anyway. That’s what makes boxing so hard. It’s not just the physical part. It’s trying to motivate myself to train hard [and], at the same time, I’m wondering if I’m going to get f**ked all over again. If Juan Diaz is a man, he’ll fight me again. If I got a decision like that in my favor, I couldn’t live with myself unless I fought the other guy again.”
On December 12, 2009, they fought again; this time in Chicago, a neutral site. Paulie won a unanimous decision.
Every fight has the potential to derail a world-class fighter’s career. A handful of fights have the potential to be career-altering wins.
After the second Diaz fight, Malignaggi had entered the ring for five watershed fights. He’d lost to Cotto; beaten N’dou to become a world champion; lost to Hatton; lost a disputed decision to Diaz; then triumphed over Diaz in a rematch. Against all odds, he had sc****d and clawed his way back into the spotlight and was poised to reach for the brass ring again.
The obstacle to success was England’s Amir Khan.
Khan turned pro one year after winning a silver medal as a 17-year-old prodigy at the 2004 Olympics and started his career with 18 consecutive wins. Then, on September 6, 2008, he was knocked out in the first round by Breidis Prescott.
Following the loss to Prescott, Khan moved his base of operations to Los Angeles and began training with Freddie Roach. After a comeback fight against Oisin ***in, he won a five-round technical decision against a badly faded Marco Antonio Barrera in a fight cut short by an accidental head butt. Next, on July 18, 2009, he decisioned Andreas Kotelnik to win the 140-pound WBA belt. In his first title defense, he knocked out Dmitry Salita in 76 seconds.
Khan is being groomed for stardom by Golden Boy Promotions (which spirited him away from Frank Warren). He wanted to make a splash in the United States, preferably at Madison Square Garden. And he viewed Malignaggi as the sort of opponent a champion faces when he’s taking another step up the ladder toward elite status.
From Malignaggi’s point of view, the match-up was equally enticing. This was a title fight. But the belt was incidental to the fact that it was a high-profile bout against a “name” opponent that Paulie thought he would win.
“This fight is redemption for me,” Paulie said.
continued....
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