He Handles Fights, She Handles Books : Boxing: Junior-middleweight champion Terry Norris has a financial adviser in his corner.

Last spring, shortly before junior-middleweight champion Terry Norris became a million-dollar fighter, Joe Sayatovich pondered an investment deal for his boxer.

Sayatovich is a San Diego dry-wall contractor when he isn’t managing Norris, who fights Simon Brown on Saturday night at Caesars Palace.

He decided to include Norris in a deal with him and two other partners--a project to build 340 medium-priced homes on 200 acres at Branson, Mo., a town in the Ozarks that has boomed in country music.

It has also sparked a boom in hotel construction there--and a housing shortage for hotel workers.

Sayatovich said: “The four of us will put up $51,000 each. Terry will make about $1.3 million on the deal.”

So you figure Sayatovich went directly to his fighter and spelled the whole deal out, right?

Wrong.

He went to Kelly Norris, the champion’s wife and financial adviser.

Kelly Norris might not know a left hook from a straight right, but she knows where every penny of her husband’s skyrocketing income is going, and how much is coming back in interest and dividend checks.

What’s happening is an attempt to break one wealthy fighter, Norris, out of a century-old stereotype--boxer achieves sudden wealth, spends and gives it away, then finds himself broke when the music stops.

“Terry’s going to be different, I really believe it,” Sayatovich said. “He wants to be known as a guy who hung on to his money as much as he wants to be known as a great fighter.

“He listens to me and he listens to Kelly. We’re all on the same track.” Norris is becoming recognized as one of boxing’s superstars.

He is 25, but has already defended his piece of the junior-middleweight championship seven times. In the last 19 months, he has beaten three of the biggest names of the 1980s and ‘90s--Sugar Ray Leonard, Donald Curry and Meldrick Taylor.

His wife, of course, is more interested in his purses than his record, which is 26-3.

Here are Norris’ purses for his last six major fights:

--July 13, 1990: $350,000 (defeated Rene Jacquot).

--Feb. 9, 1991: $780,000 (defeated Sugar Ray Leonard).

--June 1, 1991: $650,000 (defeated Donald Curry).

--Aug. 17, 1991: $400,000 (defeated Bret Lally).

--Dec. 13, 1991: $375,000 (defeated Jorge Castro).

--Feb. 22, 1992: $150,000 (defeated Carl Daniels).

--May 9, 1992: $1,300,000 (defeated Meldrick Taylor).

On Saturday night, Norris will take a $1-million check to his Alpine, Calif., home and present it to his wife.

Kelly Norris is a friendly woman who knows exactly where she wants to take her husband’s investment portfolio--to a lifetime income of $20,000 per month.

“The way Terry’s going right now in boxing, he can set us up for life, providing we make all good decisions now,” she said Thursday.

“And when we decide we are set for life financially, then I want Terry to retire. I say when he’s 30, Terry says, ‘Around 30.’ ”

“We have two young children (Terry II, 2, and Krystan, 4 months), and I insist that when Terry’s 30 he begin spending quality time with them.”

She was asked what if her husband, in a few years, is earning $20,000 per month on his investment returns, is retired, and some promoter asks him to come out of retirement to fight some hotshot for, say, $10 million.

“I’d tell him no, don’t do it,” she said. “Why should he? At that point in his life, he’d have earned enough money to take care of us for the rest of our lives. What would be the point?”

Kelly Norris has no formal schooling in investment planning. But she did work in the accounting department at the Copley Newspapers’ headquarters in La Jolla.

“I did accounts payable and receivable there, some payroll, and I really learned a a lot,” she said. “I want to go to San Diego State and get an accounting degree.”

First, though, she said, she and her husband need a new house.

“We’re looking to buy a bigger house in either Rancho Santa Fe or Fairbanks Ranch,” she said. “We have a nice three-bedroom home in Alpine (about 10 miles from Norris’ training camp at Campo), but we’ve outgrown it.”

The Norrises also own a home in Atlanta, where Kelly has family.

She said she grew up in a hard-working family in Gary, Ind., where thrift and planning were bywords.

“My father was a milkman for most of his life and my mother was a bank teller,” she said.

Chances are, neither of her parents ever imagined earning an income the likes of which their daughter, with the help of an accountant and investment broker, keeps track of now.

“We’re investing Terry’s money in mutual funds and some insurance annuities,” Kelly said. “And everything is set up so that the principal grows all the time, even after we get the monthly dividend and interest checks.

“I see every check that comes in, and if it isn’t exactly what I think it’s supposed to be, I make some calls and find out why. I even know when the rates change.

“I’ve got two big financial books. In one, I log everything going into our investment plans, and in the other I log all our investment income and household expenses.”

The Norrises met on a plane in 1987, when she was flying to Atlanta and he was on his way to Texas. That was early in Norris’ boxing career, after he had left his hometown of Lubbock, Tex., and was boxing mostly at the Forum and Las Vegas.

“It was Oct. 16, 1987, and he sat down right behind me, and started talking to me,” Kelly said.

“He told me he was a boxer, but I didn’t believe him. I told him I was a sports fan, and if he was a boxer, how come I’d never heard of him?

“Well, he started calling me in Atlanta, and then he started asking me to move to San Diego. He was always telling me how great San Diego was. So I did. We were married in December, 1988.”