Malignaggi, the fast-talking ring stylist as comfortable with public speaking as the Mancunian folk hero is with after-dinner stand-up comedy, hails from an Italian-American neighbourhood in New York which has produced several of boxing’s renowned fighters, including middleweight champions Jake LaMotta and Rocky Graziano.
Like both LaMotta and Graziano, popular and brutal in the ring in the Forties and Fifties, Malignaggi had a tough childhood in which he was often in trouble with the NY Police Department as a teenage miscreant. That all ended the day his grandfather and uncle first took him to a boxing gym at the age o
