IT IS NOON on the Sunday before the annual Varsity match against Cambridge, and the Oxford University boxing team has just finished a grueling two-hour session of sparring, shadowboxing, bag work and circuit training.

Still dripping sweat, they gather around an upright, gray-haired man known as the Colonel. A veteran of the Second World War, Lt. Colonel Peter Fleming boxed for Oxford in the late 1940s, and each year he delivers a series of talks on strategy to the team as they prepare for the big match.

"Fighting a good bout is like writing a good essay," the Colonel said. The clipped tones and unhesitating fluency of his voice evoke a bygone era of crackling wartime radio broadcasts. "As my English master at school used to tell us, you want to start out with a striking opening sentence to grab the examiner's attention.

"In boxing terms, that means come from your corner punching. Jab-jab-jab."

The Colonel steps nimbly toward the group, throwing three surprisingly sharp lefts in rapid succession.

"Follow that point with a powerful paragraph that backs it up. Left-right-left. Now, once you've got the momentum going, you can explore a few more complex ideas. Left-right-hook, double-jab-right-uppercut-uppercut. And finally you must be sure to tie the various strands all together and build to a climax that leaves your examiner gasping with your ability. Yes! First-class honors! My God, I better read that again."

The world in which the Colonel's words make sense, where it is perfectly natural for great academic universities to field boxing teams, disappeared from America so long ago that it is hard to escape the feeling that you have been transported into scenes glimpsed in grainy black-and-white yearbook photographs.

This sensation of time travel is strong again on the night of March 10, as the crowd files through the stone doorway of the Cambridge Town Hall, up the stairs and into the very image of fading Victorian splendor.

The walls of the long, high-ceilinged hall are covered with a maroon wallpaper embellished with golden crests and lined with oil paintings of 19th century town mayors in their mink collars. Lighted by brass chandeliers, the ring sits on a raised platform at the center of the room, and the long pipes of the organ that looms behind it have been painted Cambridge's jaunty light blue.

Tonight, in the absence of choristers, rowdy students jostle for standing room on the risers below the organ and take turns shouting, "Caaaambriiiiidge," in a soccer stadium sing-song.

The rows of folding chairs that surround the ring are occupied by an initially more subdued group of boxing alumni who return for the match every year, both recent graduates who look ready to jump back in the ring and gray-haired doctors, businessmen and Members of Parliament itching to tell the stories of their fighting days long ago. They wear the jackets and ties they've won for competing in past Varsity matches, and the blues of their crested blazers (navy for Oxford and teal for Cambridge) add an air of pageantry to the event that invests it with the power of a coming-of-age ritual.

First, gentlemanly jabbing

The men who fight tonight will earn the right to join the blue-coated ranks, but first they must perform a ceremony that requires the spilling of blood.

That blood comes quickly. Some of tonight's participants have been training for as little as two months -- most no more than five months -- and the fights all reflect the cruel truth of amateur boxing: It is much easier to learn to throw a punch than to avoid one.

The featherweight contest, the first of nine bouts, which progress from lightest to heaviest, begins as a sporting affair -- an exchange of gentlemanly jabbing. Oxford's Javier Colayco fights in a caricature of the traditional boxing stance, both hands fixed firmly on guard in front of his face. His head and back stay completely stiff as he shuffle-steps forward and back, throwing long straight jabs and the occasional right cross.

While both fighters continue to probe cautiously, Colayco's height and reach give him the advantage. But his opponent, Dave Ottunu, after being charged with a standing eight count, abandons the hunt-and-peck in favor of loaded, looping swinging. These wild punches leave him completely open, and an experienced fighter could easily slip and counter. Colayco, however, is cowed by the off-balance charge and begins backpedaling, a horribly ineffective defense. Ottunu's punches land heavily, and Colayco's nose opens up, which delights an unabashedly bloodthirsty section of the crowd.

'Hit him in the face!'

Egged on by screams of "Let's have him!" and "Hit him in the face!" Ottunu moves on to even crazier combinations, almost diving forward with leaping lefts and rights. Each punch to the nose coats his glove with blood, which Ottunu then returns to his opponent's face with the next. With this daubing stroke, he paints Colayco's entire face into a red, tribal mask.

Ottunu scores two standing eights in the second of three two-minute rounds but tires by the middle of the third. By this point, Colayco is content to have survived, and the two wait out the last 30 seconds at a safe distance, circling, but not punching. Ottunu is awarded a unanimous decision.

The second bout is a forfeit, a casualty of a dispute that almost destroyed this year's match entirely. After 13 consecutive defeats, Cambridge was looking for any advantage and fixed on the weigh-ins as a tactical opportunity. Knowing that the Oxford fighters had more pounds to drop to make their weight classes, Cambridge attempted to change the weigh-in time from the traditional noon to 6 p.m. -- too late for starved fighters to end their fasts before the 8 p.m. match start.

Citing the advice of the Amateur Boxing Association Medical Commission on the dangers of fighting dehydrated, Oxford declared that they would not honor the time change, but Cambridge stood firm. The bickering went down to the wire and delighted the British press, which gave the weeklong impasse extensive coverage.

At 8:30, Cambridge's threat to call the whole thing off finally gave way to impatient crowds at the door. Only the lightweight bout was canceled -- Oxford fighter John Banks was nine pounds overweight even at noon.

With a decision, a forfeit and two brutal knockouts, Cambridge jumps out to a 4-1 lead. The light-middleweight bout reveals the danger of matching fighters of disparate skill levels.

Although short and slightly pudgy, Cambridge's Jamie Matthews is the most skilled boxer on the card so far, while his opponent, Robert Gaudet, a last-minute replacement, is painfully green, so unprepared you'd have to wonder why he'd want to box.

The allure of a "blue," the rough equivalent of the American varsity letter, can tempt into the ring students who don't stand a chance of victory. A blue carries great status in English society and looks especially good on the resumes of students hoping to find jobs as bankers or consultants after graduation.

The inevitable knockout comes quickly. Matthews slips a jab, ducks down and to the right, and then springs up with all his weight behind a huge hook that catches Gaudet on the temple and sends him for an awkward sideways drop. He doesn't put his hands out to break his fall and lands hard on the side of face. As Matthews hugs his coach and the Cambridge fans shout, a doctor in the front row jumps up to attend to Gaudet. After a few scary moments, Gaudet is helped up, but his knees look ready to buckle again as his legs shake uncontrollably. He sits down in his corner, and paramedics bring him an oxygen mask. A few breaths later, he's well enough to walk to the center of the ring for the referee to raise his opponent's hand in triumph. Oxford coach Henry Dean later admits, "We had boys in the ring today who had no business being there." Nevertheless, Gaudet's got his blue.

During an intermission, the crowd agrees on three things in descending order of importance -- good thing there's lager on tap; "It's a shame they don't have them dolly birds with the ring cards"; and Cambridge has the match won.

But Oxford stages a surprising rally, and when light-heavyweight Ben Sharp, a Rhodes Scholar from North Dakota, delivers a first-round knockout, the score is tied at four. A small group near the ring turns toward the risers and taunts the suddenly quiet Cambridge crowd to the tune of the Welsh hymn "Cwm Rhonda": "You're not singing anymore. You're not singing. You're not singing. You're not singing anymore!"

As it has for three straight years, the final bout will decide the match. The Cambridge crowd is supremely confident in its champion, heavyweight Ollie Slack.

"Ollie, boom-ba-ye! Ollie, boom-ba-ye!" they chant in imitation of the "Ali, boom-ba-ye" cheer that greeted Muhammad Ali when he fought George Foreman in Zaire in 1974. The people of Zaire eagerly embraced Ali, and their cheer, literally translated, means, "Ali, kill him."

Slack, who also plays rugby for Cambridge, is huge (6-foot-6-inches tall) and heavily muscled, but what's most striking about him as he emerges from the dressing room is his ease. His description in the program reads, "His hero is Ollie Slack." The long wait in the dressing room doesn't seem to have checked his self-satisfaction.

While everyone else has looked tense in the moments before the bouts, Slack smiles and waves to friends in the crowd as he struts into the ring.

Although his opponent, Mark Mullins, is similarly a rugby blue and a big boy, the match somehow feels like a foregone conclusion. Slack comes out swinging furiously and landing the hardest punches of the day -- long, heavy lefts and rights exclusively to the head.

Mullins is quickly given a standing eight count, and the Cambridge crowd breaks into a delirious, foot-stomping reprise of "Boom-ba-ye!"

Sudden turnaround

But as Slack rushes in for the knockout, Mullins penetrates his wide swinging with a hard, straight jab. Slack's nostrils fill up with blood. The fans by the side of the ring shake their fists excitedly and yell, "Go on, Mark Mullins!" and then fall into unison in the traditional Oxford chant: "Chew! Chew! Chew that Tab!"

The first blows only spur Slack on, and he drives forward with his eyebrows knitted and his mouth twisted in rage. But as Mullins' punches begin to land consistently, Slack's face smoothes out as shock and anger fade into a dizzy haze. Blood shoots out of his nose in wide spurts and stains his light-blue sleeveless jersey. After a second standing eight count, Slack looks confused and unsteady, and just before the first-round bell, Mullins backs him up on the ropes and drops him with a right cross. Three counts in the first round -- a mandatory TKO. The silenced Cambridge crowd heads for the door, and the small group at ringside jumps up and down on the folding chairs.

After they shower off the blood, both teams will put on jackets and ties and head to the Hawks, a club for Varsity athletes, where, in the fashion of true sporting gentleman, sitting across the table from their opponents, they will enjoy the traditional post-fight banquet and toast each other with port well into the morning.

As the crowd heads home, only the Colonel can provide a suitable epitaph for the evening: "As the Duke of Wellington said when he was asked how the Battle of Waterloo was won, 'They came on in the same old style, and we saw them off in the same old style.'"

Christopher Isenberg is a New York-based free-lance writer who plans to make a documentary film on the Oxford boxing team.