"Put everything into it, Les! Throw them hands! Throw them hands! Uppercut!

Come on, punch! Punch! Punch! Come on, Les, work! To the body! Punch! Punch!

Come on, Les, work!"

-- his handlers to Les Johnson,

middleweight boxer

At the moment he climbed the steps, leaned through the ropes and entered the corona of white light in the old, dark armory in Pikesville, Les Johnson, a square-jawed, flat-faced, razor-cut kid with a white towel on his shoulders, looked like the lead in a Fifties fight film. He didn't have the beauty of John Garfield -- in fact, he had a broken nose -- but he offered a trace of the image. He was the young boxer we've all seen before.

At that very moment -- when Johnson bounced on his feet, when handlers in white matching jackets yelled last-minute commands, when the bow-tied, puddin'-faced ref leaned over a blue rope to bark at the time-keeper, when the announcer in the tuxedo reached again for a microphone, when Johnson's opponent, Tim Knight, entered the ring, tapped his gloves, shifted his weight from shoe to shoe and locked into his fight face, when all of that happened -- I realized that everything has changed and nothing has changed in this tough, old sport.

The images are constant.

The refs might wear surgical gloves nowawdays. The main-event fighters might not be as good as they once were expected to be. The noise in the room might be based in rock music. The ring card girls might leave their clothes at home. Public attitudes might have turned against the sport's violent nature. Professional boxing might be dismissed as politically incorrect, practically anachronistic, a subculture that exploits young men like Mike Tyson.

And yet, it still taps into an emotional river that runs deep in the male world. The game looks and feels and smells the same as when we last sat ringside, and there's a certain satisfaction that derives from that. It's like discovering a magic black-and-white TV set that still gets the Friday Night Fights.

It's still a hard, brutal, blunt, naked game -- man against man, and you'd better have the package ready when it's time to deliver. There's no escaping the splash of the overhead lights, no hiding behind teammates, no running for cover. There are dozens of older, proud men in Baltimore who grew up with boxing and they still regard it as the sweet science, the sport of high discipline and craft. Many of them were in the crowd at the armory Wednesday night, and many of them shook their heads at what they considered poor boxing. "Ugly fight," I heard one of them say during a match in the undercard. "Both fighters deserve to lose!"

I set my eyes on these two kids, Les Johnson and Tim Knight, and couldn't take them off. Johnson and Knight both stared each other down, their eyes like little beads of hot steel.

Johnson, a bus boy in a Washington place called the Acme Bar & Grille, came to center ring and met Knight, from Norfolk. They tapped gloves. Someone yelled, "Seconds out!" and the handlers for both fighters scampered through the ropes. I heard the ref yell, "May the best man win!" Dennis Gring slammed a wrench against a bell, and the fighting began.

I sat by the steps that led to the southwest corner of the ring. Behind me was a noisy crowd of men -- big guys with guts, skinny guys in T-shirts, men in suits, men in plaid shirts and men in stylish sweaters, an older man with a cane, middle-aged men with pinky rings. There was a woman with teased red hair, dressed in black, and a few young women in denim and tights. At the next corner of the ring, the ring card girls, dressed in nearly nothing, touched up their lipstick and schmoozed with admirers.

Hard by my seat, two of Les Johnson's handlers crouched at the bottom of the steps and yelled up at their boy. It was a constant chant that will echo in Johnson's ears years from now, when all of this is memory:

"Come on, jab, baby! Come on, work! Come on, work! Come on, work! Work him, Les! Come on. . . ! Work him inside! You gotta work, Les! Les! Les! Les! Work! Come on, Les, work! Work, baby! Come on, Les! Work, baby, work! Come on, Les! Left hook! That's it!

Work that hook! Come on, baby! Come on! Uppercuts! Les, uppercut! Come on, now! Jab! Jab! Jab! Come on! Pick it up, Les! Hook, hook! Over the top! Come on, baby!"

When Johnson and Knight boxed, there were wild moments of arms and shoulders and red gloves flying everywhere, with rapid pops, ripples of punches, sweat spraying into the open air above the ring, each drop shimmering in the white lights. Then they would lock arms, rolling head against head, head against shoulder,head against neck, chin against neck, firing uppercuts as they embraced.

Johnson won his fight by a decision that was widely booed and ridiculed in the arena. Knight had thrown more punches, the wise men said, but Johnson's were "more telling." When Johnson came to his corner to leave the ring, his body was soaked with sweat, his baggy white trunks almost transparent from the moisture, and his wet hair sparkled under the lights.

There were seven fights altogether, with one that was stopped after only 45 seconds because of an obvious mismatch.

Another featured a kid from Boston, Dana Rosenblatt, a kick-boxer with a lavender Star of David on his white trunks. He managed to keep his feet on the floor, his fists up and his back off the canvas long enough to beat a fighter named Tyrone Griffin, from Anne Arundel County. Rosenblatt got off a left hook that sent Griffin's mouthpiece sailing and, at that moment, Griffin's eyes seemed to pop and the fighter was so stunned he could not move, and once he moved he staggered, and the fight was over.

A four-round welterweight match between Robert Taylor of Baltimore and Derrick Wilson of Paterson, N.J., featured an episode of intense punching that sounded like a string of firecrackers exploding. Taylor won, and danced on the ropes.

When Baltimore's Eddie Van Kirk fought Boston's Edwin Curet, Van Kirk's handler, Tony Longo, sat on the second step at ringside and had more than one occasion to bark: "He's hittin' him low, ref! Low blows! Low blows! Hey, ref, what the hell! Watch them low blows! Low blows! Jesus God!" Van Kirk won by decision.

In another main event, Lou "The Sheriff" Benson, a veteran of 17 years in the ring, saw his dreams of one day fighting Mike Tyson --ed by the punches of Jason Waller, a baby-faced kid with an iron jaw and a baby-fat stomach. After Waller knocked Benson down in the ninth round, The Sheriff couldn't get to his feet to beat the count. He climbed through the ropes and down the steps, embraced his little boy, Parker, and carried him into the ring, and waved farewell to the crowd. Just as Lou Benson moved to make his last exit -- at that very moment -- one of the overhead lights exploded and showered the ring with splintered glass.