By Thomas Gerbasi

This was supposed to be the easy interview – Paulie Malignaggi at rest - a moment to catch up on the exploits of the “Magic Man” since his win over Gabriel Bracero last July.

It was his third win in a row, he beat Bracero in his hometown of Brooklyn, and now, at 36 years old, why not walk off into the sunset, continue his stellar work as a television analyst, and enjoy a retirement that had not been decided upon yet?

But Paulie, oh Paulie, you are always full of surprises.

“I agreed to a deal yesterday on the Haye vs. Bellew card in London against Sam Eggington,” he said in late-January, chuckling as he finished the sentence. He knows he’s battling against Father Time as well as Eggington, but that fighter’s flame doesn’t burn out that easily.

“Like I told you before, you want to dream for just a little bit longer,” he said. “The sun’s coming up though (Laughs); it’s almost time to stop dreaming. I have come to that grip of reality. I’ve been making New Year’s resolutions since 2015 to retire, and in 2017 I once again made the resolution to retire and this one I intend to keep. I’m 36.”

He’s also a 36-year-old coming off a trio of wins, and if he beats Eggington at the O2 in London on Saturday, there will likely be another offer for another fight. No one knows this better than Malignaggi.

“I did want to finish the combat part of my career at the end of 2016, but I wanted to come up with a decent fight,” he said. “Nothing happened.”

He pauses.

“Then I wind up in fight situations.”

So he will make that walk again. There’s a WBC international title on the line, but he’s under no illusions that a world championship is in his future, and as honest as ever, he admits that his reasons for still continuing to fight aren’t the typical ones.

“A lot of times, fighters go into boxing from bad circumstances, then they make their life better and then they wind up back to where they started,” Malignaggi said. “And that’s always been my nightmare – don’t wind up back where you started, don’t wind up with the problems you had at the beginning of your career where you’re wondering where you go from here and how do you pay your bills and all this stuff. So I can say I’m one of the rare ones that comes out better off from having been in boxing. Having said that, there’s still a bit of coming to grips with the fact that you’re not going to fight anymore. It’s hard to put into words and people are going to think that you’re weird that you can’t come to grips with something that to them is so simple, but in reality, it’s not so simple.”

That means when the call comes, he’ll take it. Why? Because fighting is what he does, and he feels that even as he closes in on 40 years old, he’s a smarter fighter. Not necessarily better, but smarter.

“Sometimes I forget my age is catching up,” he said. “It’s funny because I feel like I’m a smarter fighter, and a better fighter in my mind, but physically, I’m not a better fighter. I feel like I know more. It’s like if only I had ten years extra. If I was only 26 with the mind that I have now. At 26, I was all ability, speed and reflexes.”

Ten years ago this June, he was in a ring with Miguel Cotto. It was a small ring in the middle of Madison Square Garden, and most expected the brash Brooklynite was going to get run out of it by the ferocious punching Puerto Rican. But he didn’t. Malignaggi didn’t win that fight, but in losing a punishing decision that was a dead even fight through the first eight rounds, he earned a respect that even the fiercest critics had to give him.

To this day, after 36 wins in 43 fights and two divisional world titles, the Cotto bout remains his defining moment.

“I’m able to appreciate it for a lot of reasons,” Malignaggi said of the first loss of his career. “Number one, I didn’t know Miguel Cotto was going to be the best fighter I ever fought in my life. At that time, I had yet to enter the big time of boxing, so I thought after that they were all going to be like that. They’re not all like that. That guy was a special fighter, and even the big-time fighters are not as good as that guy.”

That’s high praise from someone who went on to face Ricky Hatton, Amir Khan, Zab Judah, Adrien Broner, Shawn Porter and Danny Garcia. But for those of us outside the ropes, it was the heart of Malignaggi that left the lasting impression. The odds were against him from the start, but he didn’t blink an eye. He just kept fighting.

“The ring was small, the weigh-in was early, he was constantly fouling, and it is part of the game and I learned that you have to deal with it, but in the ring, I was on my own, even with the referee in there,” he said. “It was all up to me. I always felt that I was a man about all this stuff. I was tough enough to deal with adversity because I had dealt with plenty of it in my life before that. So I always felt I was built to deal with adversity. And I take it with a certain amount of pride. There’s always a love-hate relationship with it because the pride is there for those moments, but there’s a bitterness there too of what could have been.”

There is a distinct “What If” quality to Malignaggi’s career. What if he wasn’t born with bad hands, what if he had more power, what if he was able to win certain key fights over the years? But that would have been the perfect scenario, and boxing is never perfect. It’s about making due with what you’ve got and seeing where it takes you.

It took Malignaggi to a pair of world titles, big fights against the big names, a commentating gig that will carry him into the next chapter of his life, and to places most fighters never get to. Whatever happens on Saturday or throughout the rest of 2017 and beyond, that’s something to be proud of. But can Malignaggi, his own toughest critic, do that?

“I believe I’m special in my own way,” he grudgingly admits. “I appreciate what I’ve done. I was able to change my life in boxing, and I can appreciate the journey to get to this point.”

Anything more than that, he’s not ready to give yet.