By Bart Barry-
Saturday in Brooklyn, Philadelphia welterweight Danny “Swift” Garcia laid waste to the remnants of Brooklyn’s Paulie “Magic Man” Malignaggi in a PBC main event distributed by ESPN, home of Rosie “Amazingly Knowledgeable” Perez and Teddy “The Sandcastle” Atlas. It was not a particularly suspenseful affair, an absence of suspense being the one flaw in the PBC’s revolutionary new Inevitable Outcomes matchmaking model, but it worked just fine as a vehicle for saying goodbye to Malignaggi and hello to Garcia – the newest monster in PBC’s welterweight stable.
Garcia is an excellent fighter whose recent aversion to worldclass opposition does not wholly subvert his pre-PBC accomplishments. After going-in tough as any fighter in the world, 2011-2013, Garcia has paused to let his PBC coworkers catch up, and it’s not his fault those coworkers, having accomplished fractionally so much, have paused in synchrony.
Whatever one opines of the PBC or Al Haymon, it’s hard to fault Garcia or Malignaggi for their employment with the promotional/managerial/booking agency. Neither guy was exactly fast-tracked by other meaningful promotional entities at any time in his career. Garcia was actively cheered against by his then-promoter Oscar De La Hoya in fights against Erik Morales, Amir Khan and Lucas Matthysse, and before that Malignaggi was used by Top Rank like a subterranean detonation site in his 2006 humbling by Miguel Cotto, a pay-per-view main event that featured a ring barely larger than a Rikers Island isolation cell and a canvas spongier than what nurses might’ve used to bathe Malignaggi during his subsequent hospital stay. Whatever it might have required for Malignaggi to keep Cotto away from him nine years ago, Malignaggi didn’t have an ounce of it, and after Cotto shattered Malignaggi’s face he went to work peppergrinding the pieces. Hard as it was to like Malignaggi before that night, it was nearly impossible to believe he deserved everything Cotto did to him.
Though it was never quite clear what ingredient of Malignaggi’s showing against Cotto would go better in a mix with other elite competition, Malignaggi’s enduring appeal to New Yorkers kept him drawing crowds enough to get him another chance, one in which he managed to outbox a granitechinned South African named Lovemore Ndou and attain the IBF’s junior-welterweight title. So long as Ricky Hatton could touch 140 pounds at least 15 minutes of each year, though, nobody in the world, not even in the IBF, thought Malignaggi was the premier junior welterweight, and so, when Malignaggi had his rematch with Ndou it was on Hatton’s undercard in Manchester, and it was memorable only for Malignaggi’s airheaded idea to wear Alien braids in the ring, braids his corner had to shear from his air head, midfight.
Unsurprisingly, Hatton stopped Malignaggi on the next card they shared, and then Texan Juan Diaz decisioned Malignaggi in Texas, exactly the way Malignaggi said he would, and, well, that was an outrage. A Texan in the White House had only recently presided over the ruination of world’s economy, tempers were not subdued, and when Malignaggi whined to HBO’s cameras afterward – he’d lost the fight on two fair scorecards so he fixated on the outlier – digital outrage ensued. This was during a bumbling transitional period for American media: Having rolled its eyes at reporting on the internet for a decade, it took seriously the world wide web long enough for the rest of the country to begin rolling its eyes at reporting on the internet – a reaction that continues as unabated, today, as the slideshows that catalyze it.
The outrage over Paulie’s robbery brought a rematch in Chicago, since HBO didn’t know what to do with its investment in Malignaggi or Diaz, and Malignaggi’s vindicating unanimous decision over Diaz got him warmed-up and fed to Amir Kahn five months later in a match whose delicious absurdity retains its tanginess even, lo, these five years since it happened. Malignaggi was 0-2 (2 KOs) against excellent fighters, and 1-2 against good ones, and if he’d been from anywhere but the media capital of the world, he’d have been lucky to get a chance on ESPN’s “Friday Night Fights” – where commentator laureate Teddy Atlas doubtless would have crafted and repeated and repeated a semicoherent metaphor about relocating sandcastles on a disappearing beach, long before Saturday’s spoken-word performance. Because caricatures of Yankee fans apparently are underrepresented in prizefighting, though, Malignaggi merely upgraded promoters, from a then-Golden Boy Promotions- and now-PBC-puppet promoter to the genuine article, Richard Schaefer, who helped him get a welterweight title to lose to Adrien Broner but also a commentating job with Showtime, a then-Golden Boy Promotions- and now-PBC-puppet programmer.
Malignaggi is a bright guy, and so he surely maintained no illusions about the purpose of his last two assignments, though even he must’ve been a little taken aback by the ferocity with which Shawn Porter hornworked him in 2014. The purpose of Saturday’s appearance was to welcome Danny Garcia to the welterweight division with a knockout win over a savvy veteran, and Malignaggi satisfied the requirement ably as a grinning hostess at a Yelp-reviewed eatery in gentrified Brooklyn – it’s still early, but unless Luis Collazo jealously returns to the canvas within 27 days, there’s a fair chance Malignaggi could win August’s PBC Employee of the Month.
Whatever buffoonery Malignaggi has performed while self-promoting on social media or at media events created for social media, he is an excellent commentator and knowledgeable interview. To make a robust living as a prizefighter whose hands, even when healthy, were not very good at punching, Malignaggi had to see details better fighters missed; this made him, again, the rarest of professional athletes-cum-commentators: one whose expertise extends beyond himself. He had a very good career and will not be missed in a prizefighting ring.
Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry
