Jerry Pellegrini, one of the top professional boxers ever to come out of the New Orleans area, died Tuesday. He was 78. Pellegrini’s daughter Dawn confirmed his death in a Facebook post Thursday morning. Pellegrini began to fight professionally as a teenager, but that came a year after he started his other profession as a barber, which gave him the nickname “The Battling Barber.”
Pellegrini, who fought primarily as a welterweight, held the Southern Welterweight title in 1967, stopping Freddie Martinovich in the ninth round to take the title, and was ranked as high as No. 3 by the WBC. For Hall of Fame boxing writer and New Orleans native Bernard Fernandez, the Pellegrini-Martinovich fight was his first in person. “I will miss him,” said Fernandez, who befriended Pellegrini in his later years, even driving to Slidell for haircuts to catch up.
