WBA welterweight titleholder Paulie Malignaggi has given as good as he's got in the trash talk leading up to Saturday night's, but the Brooklyn native does feel that things have gone a little further than they should have, intruding on a personal life he wanted to leave out of his fight hype:
"This is more than just the normal trash talk," Malignaggi said before a Tuesday afternoon workout at Gleason's Gym. "He went and dragged out some stuff that I thought I had buried four months ago. I don't mind trash talking about boxing, saying he's going to knock me out and stuff like that. But this is really stuff about my personal life that I wanted to keep personal."
When Malignaggi (32-4, 7 KO) feels things have gotten out of line, that's saying something. And he's right. This all went far beyond the lines of good taste, and had nothing to do with boxing or their fight. And it's not even as if there was any real personal beef between the two -- it was just all attention-grabbing BS, and while Paulie fired back with the same level of nonsense, it sounds like he reacted with a hot head more than meant for it to go this way.
Either way, you have to wonder if Broner might be in his head going into the Showtime main event. If Paulie is beaten mentally, he's going to have an extremely hard time with this fight.