Lords of the Ring

For most midshipmen, stepping into the ring is the closest they will ever come to real battle before becoming Navy or Marine Corps officers. The choice there is stark and simple: Destroy the enemy, or he will destroy you. Retreat, and you are cornered. Drop your guard, and you get your nose broken. The only option is to fight for your life.

Boxing is war writ small, and war, after all, is what they teach at the academy.

"We have to take kids who have never been in a fight in their life," Virgets says, "and we have to get them in touch with themselves, so that in a combative situation they have the courage to step up to the plate."

The day-to-day task of actually teaching midshipmen to box falls to Jim McNally, a wiry, voluble coach from Philadelphia who started his pugilistic career at Joe Frazier's gym. Every year, McNally instructs hundreds of midshipmen on the basics -- the jab, the hook, the cross, the uppercut, the block and the slip -- in an eight-week boxing class.

"There's gonna be a lot of blood," McNally likes to tell his students. "That's good. We have a lot of guys who hit the other guy, see blood, and stop and say, 'He's bleeding!' We say, 'That's good. Make him bleed more.' "

McNally puts all the midshipmen through their paces, but his real passion is coaching Navy's intramural boxing team and its elite boxing club, whose members represent Navy at intercollegiate tournaments. These are the fighters who will step into the ring for the academy's premier boxing event: the Brigade Boxing Championship.

Aside from the Army-Navy football game, the brigade championship is perhaps the most storied event at the academy, a tournament where the top boxers at Annapolis strive to prove themselves the best in the entire 4,200-member brigade. Past champions include astronauts and admirals, and the finals are fought each February before a crowd of thousands.

Alumni still talk about watching rival southpaws Oliver North, later of Iran-contra fame, and James Webb, a future secretary of the Navy, duke it out in a legendary 1967 fight that North won in the final round by a single point. Later, when North was brought before a military board threatening to discharge him because of injuries sustained in a car accident, he simply played a film of the bout to show the board members how tough he was. His future as a Marine was assured.

Each year, a few plebes try to become brigade champions by taking on older, more experienced fighters. It's a rare chance for first-year midshipmen to humble upperclassmen and maybe even go down in academy history. This year, Frank Hernandez will be one of those upstarts.

WHEN HERNANDEZ WAS GROWING UP in South San Francisco, his father hung a heavy bag in their garage and taught his three sons how to hit it.

William Farinelly Hernandez wanted to be a fighter, but couldn't afford to train in a gym in his native El Salvador. He was a bus and truck driver. He left El Salvador in 1978, right before the Central American nation plunged into civil war. He and his wife, Rosa, came to San Francisco with a 3-year-old, and nearly nothing in their pockets. They both worked for the Giants baseball team for 15 years as personal assistants to then-owner Bob Lurie, driving him around and baby-sitting his grandchildren. Now they buy houses, renovate and sell them. They've scraped together enough money to send all three boys, William, Franklin and Jorge, to St. Ignatius Prep, an exclusive Catholic private school where tuition runs more than $10,000 a year.

Frank's father thought boxing offered some lessons his kids might not get at a prep school. "I try to teach them, never give up," he says in heavily accented English. "Always, always, you have to survive, you have to do something to make you better in your life."

Frank would practice his moves by fighting Jorge, who is a year younger and also plans to attend the Naval Academy. Their father would serve as referee of these garage bouts. More than once his sons gave each other bloody noses: "Sometimes I would have to go into the middle to separate them. They would box like they were enemies."

Yet Frank came to Navy boxing almost by accident. It was raining the day he planned to try out for soccer, so he signed up for the intramural boxing team instead. He instantly felt at home in the ring. "It's one-on-one," he says. "There's no one else to blame but yourself if you lose. And I like that fact." Punching people offers another benefit. It relieves some of the relentless stress of being a first-year midshipman.