"When you get knocked out, you don't feel any pain. You jus blink your eyes and everything shuts off. Total blackness." -- Golden Gloves boxer Ricky Ray Taylor

"We have no other sport that deliberately destroys brain substance. Boxing should be banned, not only for pros but also for amateurs. The brain can't tell whether or not the fist hitting it is paid to do so." -- Dr. George Lundberg, editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Jamey Carnell's brain is getting battered.

The blows from Carnell's opponent, Juan Rosales Jr., are brutal, systematic and entirely within the rules of our most savage sport. A right to the head sends Carnell's brain smashing into the right side of his skull. A left hook spins Carnell onto all fours and hurtles his brain the opposite direction, tearing several small blood vessels inside his skull.

Carnell shows no outward signs of bleeding, and none of the 525 fans can see the inner damage that may not be apparent for years. But the referee in this National Golden Gloves bout last year at Miami Arena has noticed Carnell's glazed look, and he stops the fight midway through the third round. Carnell, a 112-pound wisp of a teen-ager with features as fragile as a porcelain doll, leaves the ring, staggering slightly.

"At least I wasn't knocked out," he says. Carnell, 18, takes pride in the fact that in 80 amateur fights, 40 of which he has lost, he has never sunk into mental oblivion for more than five seconds. He has always struggled up.

"Sometimes when you're fighting and you get hit hard, though, ** you don't see nobody for a second," says the Jerome, Idaho, native. "You don't see a thing. You're trying to open your eyes, and they're already open. Then all of a sudden the guy is there, hitting you again."

Cornell Shinholster, 18, a 125-pound fighter from Cincinnati, has been knocked out once in 73 amateur bouts. Although it happened three years ago, he still remembers the bewilderment he felt. "You don't know where you are, or what's going on after it happens. I saw double for maybe an hour."

The possibility of long-term brain damage for boxers with as many fights as Carnell and Shinholster approaches 80 percent, according to published studies. Their chances of accomplishing fantasies of making millions of dollars as a professional -- "I'm in this because want to have lots of Rolls Royces and a big house like Sugar Ray Leonard," Shinholster says -- pale by comparison. Yet they repeatedly take the risk. Aren't they worried about brain damage?

"A little bit," Carnell says. "If it happens . . . oh well. It'd bother me, but I couldn't do anything about it by then anyway."

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Picture a bowl of Jello, cut into cubes and glistening in the light.

One of the nation's leading neurologists says that is the best way to visualize the brain if you want to understand what happens when a boxer gets knocked out.

"OK, your skull is the bowl, and your brain is the Jello," says Dr. Nelson Richards, a former president of the American Academy of Neurology now in private practice in Richmond, Va. "The Jello has some very weak strings running through it, connecting it to the bowl. Now start shaking the bowl around a lot, slapping it all over. The Jello is going to slop out all over the place. It goes flying. All these delicate little connections are disrupted."

zTC If enough of them go, the brain shuts down. The boxer wobbles and falls. Even if his brain only switches off for several seconds, he technically has suffered a concussion.

Hansel and Gretel left bread crumbs to mark their path. Boxers leave brain cells. "You lose a few brain cells somewhere every time you box," says Richards, whose organization followed the American Medical Association's lead in the mid-1980s by calling for the total abolition of boxing. "It's cruel. Boxing is not a sport. I can't believe you can fine somebody for cockfighting, and yet it's kosher to put a young kid in the ring."

Last year's Golden Gloves tournament at Miami Arena is not boxing at its bloodiest. Fights consist of three two-minute rounds, which is the primary reason that only 15 percent of the bouts in the first two days ended early. The fighters wear headgear (although some doctors say this doesn't help the brain a bit). Referees routinely stop fights like Carnell's just before the knockout blow, awarding technical knockouts instead.

"I like amateur boxing much better because it has the well-being of the boxers foremost in mind," says Armando Garcia, the chief of officials for Florida's Gold Coast and a frequent referee of both amateur and pro fights.

Yet Garcia, a front-row witness to boxing's fury, acknowledges that some of the critics should be listened to. He knows the face of terror a boxer flashes when he realizes that he has no control of his body.

"Sometimes you look in a fighter's eyes and he tells you, 'Help me. Help me,' " Garcia says. "You've got to stop it then."

Which is why amateurs don't draw nearly the crowds that pro bouts usually do, according to a man who has a lot of administrative experience in both. "Fans don't really like the amateurs," says Harry Brennan, who was involved in amateur boxing for 15 years before becoming the assistant executive director for the state agency that regulates pro boxing. "They say the refs are always interfering, there's not enough action. They want to see guys stretched out on the canvas like they do Sunday afternoon on the tube. I guess boxing appeals to the primitive nature of us all."

Those crude urges need not be fulfilled, critics argue. "It's savage, it's brutal, it's gladiatorial in nature," says Miami neurologist Seth Hochman, a consultant to the Dolphins. "You're talking about human life here. Boxing should be abolished."

Deaths -- such as Howard Brooks' in a Golden Gloves tournament at Miami Beach in 1985, or Duk Koo Kim's in 1982 shortly after a title fight with Ray "Boom Boom" Mancini -- always spark outrage. Howard Cosell wrote in his book "I Never Played the Game" that he decided to stop covering pro boxing after 25 years because ". . . the dying slowly eats away at you."

But the more insidious, widespread health problem around the ring is boxers' encephalopathy, or punch-drunkenness. A New Jersey pathologist named Harrison Martland first used the term in 1928, and it has been part of the fighters' lexicon ever since.

Images of former champions like Muhammad Ali slurring their words have been seared into the memory of some young boxers.

"Every time I see somebody who's punch-drunk, it really makes me think about what I'm doing," says Shinholster, the Cincinnati amateur. "I fight scared because of that, and that makes me fight better. I think more about moving and slipping punches."

Then there are fighters like Ricky Ray Taylor of Gulfport, Miss., a top Golden Gloves boxer at the 125-pound weight, who simply don't think there is any risk.

"I don't believe in any of those studies myself," said Taylor, who at 20 has already fought 117 times. "I think people get hurt a lot more in football. All of the boxing and brain damage stuff is just a big myth."

George Lundberg, a pathologist by training and editor of JAMA for 8 1/2 years, is probably boxing's best-known opponent. He has condemned adults who push kids into boxing as child abusers and called the sport an "obscenity."

He estimates that a fighter's odds of developing brain damage goes up dramatically after 20 fights.

Lundberg has been carrying on his own fight since 1983, and right now is behind on points. There is little legislation in front of state or national governments to ban boxing.

"Voters kind of get lulled into security when there haven't been any deaths for awhile," Lundberg said. "And they also enjoy the blood."

Recognizing that a total ban isn't likely, Lundberg has concentrated some effort into arguing for a ban on punches to the head. "Why do the Golden Gloves have to hit each other in the head?" Lundberg asks. "People may think that headgear is helping, but it isn't. Blows that wouldn't stick on a slippery head get more grip on headgear."

An oft-cited point by boxing critics is that punches to the testicles were outlawed in the 18th century, yet ones to the head are still allowed. But the Golden Gloves fighters here seem uniform against any changes in their sport.

"Not that many people are getting hurt," Taylor says. "It also builds discipline. And besides, you're in the spotlight."