The blood gushes from John Ohman’s nostrils, pouring a red river across his upper lip, dribbling down into his mouth, bubbling back onto his chin and finally collecting in pink puddles on the front of his gold T-shirt.

Twenty seconds to go, behind on points, and Ohman, the plebe, is in trouble.

He is flailing, now, punching the air, searching for Troy Turner, a senior, a leader of leaders at the Naval Academy.

Ohman misses with a right. And then a left.

The clock keeps ticking.

All turner must do to win is retreat, to stand as the final bell sounds. He is the model student with the perfect resume on his way to a career in the Marine Corps, and yet his academic mission is incomplete. Twice before he has fought for titles, emerging from the ring with a broken nose, a broken heart and two defeats.

But Turner can’t lose on this night, to this plebe, in a 180-pound bout inside Halsey Field House.

So Turner steps forward.

Ohman winds up again, a scared and desperate 20-year-old coming overhand with this right, throwing a high, hard one, searching for a miracle, finding not air, but the left side of Turner’s nose and upper lip.

The senior’s left leg buckles. Blood trickles from his mouth.

There is a shriek from the bleachers.

Ohman throws another overhand right.

And another. And another.

Four punches. Four strikes.

Turner begins to topple backward, his arms waving wildly, his legs turning to anchors, until he sinks softly to the mat.

The crowd stands and screams, drowning out the referee’s count. Even the officers in their dress blues are on their feet.

Ohman sags against the ropes, leans his head back, the blood still oozing from his nose.

A second remains on the clock.

The plebe prays. The senior weeps.

Welcome to the Friday Night Fights at the Naval Academy. Part rite of passage, part bloody entertainment, the Brigade Boxing Championships, which were held for the 52 nd time Friday, are all Academy, bringing together the toughest, roughest Midshipmen in Annapolis.

They may wear protective headgear and thumbless 12 ounce gloves, they may only box three, two minute rounds, they may often lunge awkwardly and slap punches blindly, they may even bleed on contact and transform a ring mat into a slaughterhouse floor.

Yet boxing at the Academy is not about a relentless pursuit of skill and style. Victory here is measured in courage and heart.

“There is so much emotion,” said Jim McNally, Navy’s head boxing coach. “People don’t think any less of you if you lose. Men can cry here.”

And they do.

There is nothing elective about athletics at the Naval Academy. You master engineering and mathematics and history. You drill. And finally, you play, three times a week minimum.

By 3:30 each weekday afternoon, the campus looks like Planet Reebok. Out of their uniforms and into their sweats, the 4,200 Mids work hard at playing in 33 intercollegiate varsity sports, 12 intramural programs and 10 club events.

The boxers stake out a corner in McDonough Hall, by half moon shaped window overlooking a track, and, beyond that, the Severn River. It is here, for six months, where they will train, preparing for a tournament among themselves, measuring one another for one cold winters night in February.

“We’re a team,” said Shane Voudren, a junior from Turners Falls, Mass. “But in the ring, it’s just you and the other guy.”

Instead of fight posters littering the brick walls,, like you would find in the old-time gyms, there is an orderly assortment of black and white pictures of past teams, plaque bearing the gold lettered names of the Brigade Champions, and lockers filled with gear.

But the practice is just like something out of Gleason’s. Speed bags are whipped, heavy bags thumped and lone fighters sweat through the ritual of shadowboxing agisnt unseen foes.

“In boxing, it’s just you, and you learn mind over matter and you learn to keep pushing yourself,” said Rear Adm. Thomas C. Lynch, Naval Academy superintendent, two-time heavyweight champion, the baddest man in the Brigade.

The sport survives here as a club event because male plebes and sophomores are required to take boxing classes. Women Mids also take required courses in self- defense.

Some 40 other colleges have club-boxing programs, and the best fighters annually compete in the national Collegiate Boxing Association championships. But since a University Iowa boxer died in 1960, the sport has gone unrecognized by the NCAA.

At Navy, though, boxing is celebrated.

“You deal with a little fear and a little uncertainty, and what better place to find that, but in a boxing ring,” said Col. Terry Murray, the Academy’s deputy commandant and former Brigade champion.

The night Murray won his title, “You deal with a little fear…what better place to find that, but in a boxing ring” he got a little help in his corner from a friend, a gung- ho Marine, a future National Security Council aide, Oliver North.

North is one of four men who have dominated the history of boxing at Navy.

Hamilton M. “Spike” Webb was a bantamweight of a man from Baltimore, who won 115 pro fights, served with the U.S. Army in France during World War I, returned home to Maryland, and literally fought his way into a job as Navy’s first boxing coach in 1919.

For five decades, until near his death in 1963, Spike Webb was “the man who taught the Navy how to fight.” His credo was simple: “It is not the size of the Midshipman in the fight that counts but the fight in the Midshipmen.”

Under Webb, Navy once went 13 years without a loss. Two of his boxers became Olympians. And Webb himself coached four U.S. Olympic teams.

Webb’s successor, Emerson Smith, took a more cerebral approach to the sport during his quarter century reign as head boxing coach.

For Smith, safety came first, and with the help of an Academy physics professor he developed the thumb less glove.

It was during Smith’s era that the most famous Academy brawl occurred.

James Webb vs. Oliver North.

The future Secretary of the Navy and future central figure in the Iran contra arms for hostages deal were tough as nails welterweights and juniors who walloped one another in the winter of 1967.

North won on a decision, and the bout would have been long forgotten if not for history and literature.

By the time the Iran contra hearings broke, reporters from every national newspaper and television network in the country were swarming through Annapolis, in search of the film of the fight.

Navy officials kept the black and white film locked in an office.

“Reporters would come into my house, send my wife upstairs, and grill me about the fight,” Smith said. “To me, when the fight took place, it was just an incident that I had seen every day, not just with Ollie North and James Webb. I saw that every day with hundreds of Midshipmen.

James Webb would go on to write about the Academy and the Brigade Championships in his second novel, “A Sense of Honor.”

In the book, the main character is ahead on points, moments from winning, when suddenly, from nowhere, like being mugged in an alley or hit with a baseball bat, he is clubbed, and though he isn’t counted out, the fight is stopped.

“He loved boxing,” wrote James Webb. “It was real. It was guts and pain, love and loss, all wrapped up inside a fat leather glove.”

Friday night. Friday night.

The pep band plays the theme from “Rocky.” Two thousand fans cram into a corner of the cavernous Halsey Field house. Twenty boxers, survivors of six months of training and two elimination rounds. Gather in the ring. Half wear blue shirts. The other half are dressed in gold.

McNally, the 35-year-old head coach who pulled himself up out of Philadelphia’s gym wars and got a degree from Lock Havent ( Pa.) State, mans the blue corner. Ron Stutzman, a former Navy heavyweight champion and a Chief Petty Officer, guides the fighters in the gold corner.

Snapshots from a rumble:

Voudren vs. Eric Stenzal, 132 pounds. They know one another’s move like they’re twins. Voudren, a wannabe Navy Seal who revs up for fights by listening to Metallica sometimes drops the left. Stenzel the little kid from Dallas turned tough would be Marine, often tiers and then starts throwing wildly.

Stenzal walks into a right in the second round. Blood spurts from his nose. The crowd erupts. Stenzel fights on into the third, but when the decision is announced, it is Voudren’s left hand that is raised.

As he leaves the ring, Stenzal weeps.

“You never get a loss like this.” He says

Alex Bullock vs. John Bobo, 156 pounds.

Blood is everywhere. Gushing from Bobo’s nose, onto Bullock’s left shoulder, on the mat, on to the referee, on the ropes, even on to the fight doctor who is wearing rubber gloves, a concession to an era of AIDS. Bullock, a junior from Greenbelt, is the team’s best boxer. Bobo, a sophomore from Albany, N.Y., still is learning how to fight.

“I almost beat him with my blood,” Bobo says.

Joe Wiendl vs. Matt Reimann, 190 pounds.

It ends with one punch in 52 seconds. Wiendl, a senior from Merritt Island, Fla., an ultimate Frisbee player, for goodness sakes, in his first year on the team, unloads a left hook. Reimann, a junior from Cotage Grove, Minn., a reigning champion, third son in a military family, takes the full force of the punch on the chin and goes down.

The referee doesn’t even bother to count.

“I just got lucky,” Wiendl says. “I was all set for a three round war. A lot of bloodletting.”

Turner vs. Ohman. 180 pounds. Senior vs. plebe.

For three rounds this is as ferocious as Academy boxing gets. Turner 5 feet 11 off balance pushing his punches, while Ohman, not yet filling out his 6-foot-3 frame, absorbs blows, lands some of his own and refuses to go down.

Turner is a star at the Academy. He grew up in Cleveland, but says he always dreamed of the sea. He’s a member of the gospel choir and honor’s committee. He’s president of the Midshipman Black Studies Club. He’s a five striper, overseeing half the Brigade as a regimental commander.

For Turner, boxing is the ultimate expression of his manhood.

“It teaches you everything about yourself,” he says.

Ohman says he wanted to be a Navy boxer the moment he read “A Sense of Honor” as a high school freshman back in Santa Barbara, Calif. He spent a year in the Marines before earning his way into the Academy. And for months, he has endured the rituals of life as a plebe, answering the incessant questions from the upperclassman, running through the halls, ultimately finding pleasure in the ring.

So, they fight to the third round. The second’s ticking down. Turner winning. Ohman losing. When suddenly, Ohmans right fist turns into an anvil clubbing away four times at Turner.

In the mayhem after the bout, Ohman and Turner struggle out of the ring. Turner is weeping. And Ohman is finally smiling; blood caked on his noise, his lips, his chin, and his shirt.

The crowd still stands and roars. Fifty plebes rush down from the bleachers and surrond Ohman. It looks like a scene from a movie but it’s real life. One plebe even screams out: “I could kiss you.”

“I was going for broke,” Ohman says.

Away from the ring, back in a corridor, turner is still crying.

“I never fought so hard in my three years here,” he says. “I gave it everything I had. It hurts. You come so close and it hurts. I lost, but it’s not the end of the world.”

The tears will dry. And so, too, will the blood.