Paulie Malignaggi Caught With His Pants Down

Brooklyn boxer Paulie “The Magic Man” Malignaggi has built a career around being a fast-talking, flashy, Italian-American kid from Brooklyn. This past Saturday, Malignaggi fought a bout against Juan Diaz in Diaz’s hometown of Houston and ended up getting robbed by the judges, something that he predicted would happen going into the fight.

The scoring was inarguably horrendous. In a bout that many, including HBO’s Harold Lederman, scored in favor of Malignaggi, Diaz was awarded a unanimous decision with one crooked judge scoring it 118-110, meaning that he had Diaz winning 10 of the 12 rounds. Myself, I had the fight scored a draw, and I think I would have been fine with a very narrow decision either way. But a 118-110 scorecard is a robbery, plain and simple. There’s absolutely no other way to look at it.

Of course, there’s a slim possibility that this judge was simply offended with Paulie’s inability to keep his trunks on in the ring. Malignaggi wore an absolutely ridiculous pair of knee-length purple trunks (emblazoned with the name “Arturo” on them, in tribute to the late Arturo Gatti) with enough fringe on them to make even Hector Camacho say, “You know what man? That’s too much fringe.”

Starting around the seventh round, these trunks started to go south under the weight of their various flouncy accoutrements. By the eighth, they had slipped below ass-level, and the announcers were openly laughing at the situation. “Boxing After Dark,” Bob Papa said. “Where the moons come out.”

Of course, a fighter, with his hands encased in boxing gloves, is unable to pull up his own trunks, and that fact made for a first in my own boxing-watching lifetime. In either the 10th or 11th round, the referee, Laurence Cole, stopped the action between the two fighters, and then stepped in and pulled up Malignaggi’s trunks himself. Never in my life have I ever seen this happen, and I imagine that I will never see it again.

And here’s the crazy thing – this is the second such ignominy fashion-first Malignaggi has recorded in the past two years. In May of 2008, facing Lovemore N’Dou in Manchester, England on a Ricky Hatton undercard, Malignaggi wore very long dreadlocks (which were later revealed to be hair-extensions) pulled back in a ponytail. Early in the fight, these dreads started breaking free of the ponytail and flying into Paulie’s face. By the third round, he was completely blinded by his own hair. His corner tried everything, including wads of tape, to hold them back, but nothing could keep them from coming loose and obscuring his vision. Finally, his corner was forced to hack his hair off with tape-shears. It was the first, and only, impromptu haircut I have ever witnessed in the corner of a fight.

Many, including Malignaggi himself, are bemoaning the condition of boxing in the aftermath of the bad Diaz decision. I hear that complaint and feel it is valid to some extent. But I’d have to add this: Having a fighter who suffers one fashion disaster after another on national television is not exactly a great boon to the state of the sport, either. You want to be a credit to boxing, Paulie? Keep your damn pants up.

This post originally appeared on the Sporting Blog. For more, see The Sporting Blog Archives.