Gonzales Hopes to Fatten Up Image Today Against Canizales

They called him PeeWee, and there’s little wonder why. For that matter, he’d still be PeeWee if he were running with his old gang. For goodness sakes, he weighs just 112 pounds.

Yet Paul Gonzales, who long ago outgrew the First Flats gang of East Los Angeles, is stretching to outgrow the long-overlooked flyweight division. Not that he plans to bulk up and fight Marvelous Marvin Hagler. Gonzales doesn’t need to take on physical size; it’s his name that he means to enlarge.

Today at Caesars Tahoe, the 1984 Olympic gold medalist defends his North American Boxing Federation title against undefeated Orlando Canizales. It is not a fight of monumental importance in the world of boxing. But, as it will be telecast by CBS, it adds to Gonzales’ exposure. In the thinking of Team Gonzales, exposure is all that’s required to make him a heavyweight name.

For a year after he was named outstanding boxer of the Olympics, Gonzales had little exposure, except for his speeches of inspiration throughout the Los Angeles barrios. As for his name, he was almost better known as a pocket-size Jesse Jackson than as a boxer, so eloquent was he in the salvation of his generation. And so little in the ring.

But the hand he broke in the Olympics, repaired by surgery, finally healed, and in the year since he has been active as a pro, he has become the boxer he expected to be. He is not yet the name he expects to be--nobody is breaking down the doors to see his fights--but he is encouraged enough by his progress.

“It’s only going to get better,” enthuses Gonzales, 22, his bitterness seemingly gone. He admits that he wasn’t always so cheerful about his career. The hand injury and the appeal of his division--these seemed to contribute to the notion among boxing people that his glory was all in his past, not in his future.

All around him, Olympic boxers were getting signed to big contracts by big promoters. Networks couldn’t give them enough money or enough fights.

“I was a little bitter about nobody taking a chance,” Gonzales says. His manager, Al Stankie, hints that it was worse than that.

“He was hurt, man, really hurt,” says the man who pulled him into the gym off the streets 12 years ago. “He saw the gold bunch, whatever they’re called, fight on TV, and I saw tears come to his eyes. I said, ‘Supe’--I called him that for Superfly--’Supe, everyone has his day.’ ”

The day of Gonzales would now seem to be upon us. A victory over Canizales (11-0-1) would increase his credibility as a contender, for one thing. Canizales is a big puncher, if somewhat robotic in the ring, and certainly puts Gonzales at risk.

But the simple exposure of Gonzales, a man whose style reminds you why the sport was once called the sweet science, is expected to draw more and more fans. Here is a kid who can box--not lean and bang--and who can entertain you with a jab sharp enough to puree vegetables.

CBS, which will have televised three of his five fights after today, is confident enough in viewers reacting to this ring expertise that it plans to continue devoting its few fight dates to this mysterious division. It is betting with dollars--Gonzales will get $50,000 for today’s fight--on the appeal taking hold.

Gonzales expects plenty to happen. He talks of fighting for as many as six titles as he grows into a featherweight. He talks of a broadcast career. But the truth of the matter is that, already, so much has happened.

“I always had a dream,,” he says. The difference between him and the other dreamers in the barrio is that he acted on them. “I never listened when they told me I was just like them and would never rise above it. They didn’t want to get left behind, was all. But I knew I could achieve, no matter what the neighborhood. They’d say, ‘You’re no better than us.’ And I’d say, ‘No, I’m not, but I can do better.’ ”

And so it is that Gonzales can fulfill that ultimate sports cliche and buy his mother a house. He has done better. It makes him feel warm, knowing all the hustles he pulled as a street kid, and not all of them so innocent. Didn’t his mother deserve something from a kid who lied about the shotgun pellets in the back of his head, telling her it was glass from a broken bottle?

But that’s all in the past, the stories of his best friend killed by four bullets to the head, just because he was in the wrong gang and in the wrong place. The violence of his past is giving way to a somewhat more aesthetic violence of his future. So, Gonzales gets a little richer, a little more famous, and a little larger as well.