The Champ's Fist Was On The Sparrow's Eye

We can take him in 15," Angelo Dundee said before the fight. "But I think we gonna take him quicker if we can bust him up. We got Willie hitting flat-footed, because this guy busts up easy."

"We seen him three times," Lou Gross, Pastrano's trainer, said. "He ain't seen us at all. That wasn't Willie he beat in Miami Beach. I don't know who it was, but it wasn't Willie."

Charley Johnston, who is the American manager of Argentine light heavy Gregorio Peralta, looks like a man left over from a Damon Runyon story. Even in warm New Orleans he wore a hat and a coat and vest, and he disagreed completely with Pastrano's managers.

"They been talking about the weight," he said the day before the championship fight last week in New Orleans. "My boy has been 75, 76 all week. I didn't let it out, because it gives something to write about. Now I can tell you something else, too. He's gonna fight the same fight he did in Miami Beach. He can throw punches from anywhere. I don't mess with his style. It works. I'll tell you something else, because now it is too late for them to do anything about it. He is the best body puncher I ever see, and he is gonna beat Pastrano to the body. He is quicker than Pastrano. They the same age, but he hasn't been through the mill like Pastrano."

Peralta, tall but sparrowlike, with a deep, thin, arched chest and slender arms and legs, looked as if he had had trouble making the weight. In his last workout at Curley's Gym the skin on his face and body was stretched paper-thin. If he carried an excess ounce it was nowhere apparent.

Pastrano looked gaunt, too. He had left Miami a month before the fight at a cushiony 186, but the once-plump cheeks now seemed sunken. He did not look as drawn as Peralta, however.

"I'm gonna dry Willie out," Gross said the day before the fight. "But I always dry out my fighters. It's good for them. Makes them faster."

At the weigh-in the scales registered 174� pounds for each fighter. Pastrano might have come in at 174, but he had breakfast in his room at the Sheraton-Charles Hotel with his wife, Faye. Gross, who had hovered over him like a mother hen for a month, for once was not present, and Willie, who no doubt felt dried out enough, nibbled hungrily at his wife's breakfast. The little break in training added the three-quarters of a pound. After the weigh-in Pastrano went to Moran's Restaurant with his wife, Dundee, Gross and some friends for his pre-game meal and—surprise—he wasn't hungry enough to finish the rare fillet he ordered.

"I'm sleepy," he said to Faye. "Finish your coffee, honey. Let's go. I got to get that twilight sleep this afternoon."

He left with Faye, and Moran said, "You won't forget? The gloves?"