An American Dream Expanded/Mailer hosts party for Jose Torres, Herald Tribune April 1, 1965: Difference between revisions

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The party was to honor Jose Torres, the new light-heavyweight champion of the world, and the fight mob turned out in force. Jimmy Baldwin was there, of course. And Leslie Fiedler and George Plimpton and Norman Podhoretz, and there was, in the atmosphere, the special camaraderie of people who have read and understood "The Killers” and "Forty Grand" and "The Sun Also Rises." When Torres came through the door at 2:45 yesterday morning, the first person to shake his hand, naturally, was a literary critic.  

Mailer was the perfect host, charming and gracious, mingling among the hundreds of crowded guests, guiding people toward the two well-stocksd bars, seeing to it that Jose's mother and father and his own mother and father did not get lost in the crush. And now and then Mailer paused and talked about the fight and about the punch that crippled Pastrano, that shattered his insides, and among all the guests, Mailer was one of the few who knew what he was talking about. It was a very good party  

A clique collected around Leslie Fiedler, who had come in from Buffalo. Fiedler had not seen Torres fight. He had delivered a speech in Stony Brook, then had hurried to the party. But he was talking about the last fight he had watched, Gene Fullmer against Joey Giardello, in Bozeman, Montana, in 1960. He remembered the fight vividly. "When Fullmer came into the ring," Fiedler said, “somebody turned to me and said, ‘I didn't know he was a white man. I thought he was a Mormon.’" Fiedler laughed heartily, and the people around him nodded. He is a professor and a critic and a novelist, and his words carry great weight among the fight crowd.

One book reviewer was having a terrible problem. He wanted to talk about the fight. He wanted to find somebody who would stand still and discuss the fight seriously. He finally found Norman Mailer's father, and the two of them stood in a corner and analyzed Torres' jab and Torres' peek-a-boo defense and Torres' surprising strength, and most of the people who wandered past them, toting glasses of scotch and bourbon, didn't have the foggiest notion what they were talking about.

The best thing about the party was Torres. He is an impressive young man, calm and friendly and confident. He has matured a great deal since he was fighting in Sunnyside Gardens seven years ago, ringing up an imposing string of victories. He was friendly then, too, and immediately likeable, but now he is his own man. He looked so good against Pastrano, so much better than many of the people at the party had expected him to look. Some of the ones who were slapping him on the back and shaking his hand had been saying, before the bout that Torres still looked like a middleweight, that he was in over his head against the veteran Pastrano.