Up for the Count : These young men are reaching for the ring, and it’s not brass. In an attempt to improve their lives, they’re giving it their best shot at the La Habra Boxing Club.

By his peers’ standards, Anthony Torres started late cultivating his talent. He was already 16 when he began training in a little basement in the South Bronx. He figured the streets made him a pretty good fighter and that through championship boxing he could get a better life.

He’s not sure what took him so long to get into a gym. Boxing has been sort of his destiny, because of a baby photo where he and his dad are both wearing gloves. It’s his only memory of his father, who killed himself when his son was still an infant.

Even though Anthony was beginning to confine his skills to the gym, his mother feared that he was hanging with a bad crowd. So two years ago, she sent him to Southern California to live with his older brother and sistr-in-law.

The attention Anthony attracted here for his fighting style got him in some trouble, but it also got him to check out the La Habra Boxing Club, a city-funded program operated as an extension of the Boys and Girls Club of La Habra.

In this dank, former Catholic church, 45 aspiring fighters, mostly Latino, train. They range in age from 8 to 32, with 18, including Anthony, being groomed for the professional arena. In fact, there is a celebrity among them--former world champion featherweight Jorge Paez, who at 28 is an old-timer, but who is waging a comeback this weekend at the Great Western Forum.

Heroes such as Paez and Julio Cesar Chavez are partly the reason why Anthony and others at the club spend hours after school and on the weekends jumping rope, doing endless abdominal crunches, pounding the speed bag and sparring within the ropes.

David Martinez, director of the boxing club since it opened in 1983, knows why they get into the ring. “These young, Latino men, many from Mexican barrios here in La Habra and the area . . . see their countrymen fight on TV, and they think, ‘I want to be like him.’ ”

Martinez says it’s also financial. “Boxing is an individual sport. A lot of kids can’t afford to play on teams because of all the costs involved.”

Since transplanting from New York, Anthony, now 18, has rediscovered school and pursued creative outlets such as drawing cartoons and writing rhymes for his rap band. And he trains hard for competition in the ring.

“I’ve changed a lot since moving here,” admits Anthony, a senior at Pioneer High School in Whittier. “I used to fight a lot. I still have an attitude. But now I let trouble look for me instead of the other way around.”

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Although trouble came with the scenery where Anthony’s boxing mate Oscar Llamas grew up, he managed to escape it. His barrio is in Whittier, ironically where Anthony’s mom thought her son would be better off.

“The gang members around me try to pick a fight with anyone, but they don’t try to pick a fight with me. It’s not because I’m into (boxing),” says Oscar, whose 5-6 body stands solid at 135 pounds. The introverted 17-year-old says he just wasn’t a joiner.

But his homies are responsible for introducing him to his trainer, Ray Espinoza, when he was still in junior high. “He was out in the street recruiting. My friends weren’t interested, but they knew I was, and they sent him my way.”

Like Anthony, Oscar first connected to the sport through his dad, who would take his 8-year-old son to a gym near work to watch aspiring fighters train. The visits gave Oscar “a desire to box that never went away.”

His parents are divorced, but, on the rare occasions that they see each other, Oscar’s father reminds him to eat right and get enough sleep as part of the training.

His mother insists that he quit and “study to become a lawyer,” says Oscar, who is finishing high school at Frontier Continuation School. “You know, every mother’s dream. I wanna show her that I can do this. She thinks I can’t. I want to show her that she can be proud of her son.

“I just tell her ‘once I start making money and buying things you’ll think different.’ ”

Oscar rises at 4:30 a.m. to run five miles before school. He spends most Saturday mornings at the club, so Friday nights he usually finishes early. He’s learned to be more self-assured--although he’s still shy about his achievements--and to stay focused. “They tell me I’ve got talent. I think I’m good, but I don’t have a big head. I have confidence in myself. If I lose, it’s not going to be an easy win.”

As for Anthony, even on days when he’d rather sink into his bed, he endures the hassle of getting transportation to the club. While other teens feed on junk, the 5-6 fighter had to lose seven pounds this week to make the 125-pound limit for a local amateur match Friday. He cranked the salsa music that he says “psyches” him up to work out harder.

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Both guys are prepping fiercely right now for state level entries in the biggest amateur competition, the Golden Gloves, next month in Los Angeles’ Lincoln Park.

“I like boxing because I want to become something,” notes Oscar. “I want to stay away from drugs, from all the party scene, especially the shootings. It keeps me off the streets. I come out of a session, and it’s a different world. My blood’s pumping; I’m all banged up. I come home tired, take a shower and burn out for the night. That’s my definition of partying.”

Since September, he’s been staying at his trainer’s house. The move got him out of the neighborhood and focused, he says.

“Ray is like my friend in some ways; sometimes he’s like my dad. He and his wife aren’t really strict, but they give me chores. I now always clean my room, wash the dishes,” he says wit a laugh. “I’m being responsible.”

Both young men are driven by a need to set themselves apart from the rest, not unlike a student who spends hours poring over books to earn a degree or an artist laboring over the creation of a masterpiece.

“Boxing is the most important thing right now,” says Anthony, who also spends his spare time with some of his brothers and cousins in their rap group, Nonsense. Between rehearsals and workouts, he doodles cartoons and hangs with his girlfriend.

Though the women in his life worry about him getting “messed up, or, God forbid, brain damaged,” he says, the risks aren’t enough to dissuade him from boxing and pursue one of his other talents. If Shaquille O’Neal can rap and play basketball, then why can’t he rap and box?

“It’s a sport. I don’t go in there to beat someone up and be bad. Boxing is a test of endurance. It just shows what you can do and what you’re about,” Anthony says.

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Q uien es mas macho is also what it’s about, although Anthony is reluctant to call it a test of machismo. His views trigger his girlfriend to call him a “typical man.” As he says: “Boxing, it ain’t for women. There’s no place for them boxing inside a ring. I don’t know who would pay to see women fight. They should stick to tennis or something.”

Like something more graceful, he agreed. Wasn’t part of Muhammad Ali’s legend built on a grace that only emphasized his own strength? But not all is lost to primal thinking. Oscar says he thinks the fad of women boxers is cool. “I just wouldn’t know where to hit her.”

What will set these guys apart from becoming another boxing cliche is that they want to avoid ending up like Jake LaMotta, whose life Robert De Niro immortalized in Martin Scorsese’s 1980 “Raging Bull,” Oscar’s favorite fight flick. Anthony prefers the eternal hope and happy Hollywood endings of the Rocky series.

“It’s a sport,” Oscar says. “And it’s an art--even though it’s brutal. I think about how these guys are beating the hell out of each other for the money and to entertain other people. It almost makes me laugh. But I know they’re just trying to win something, to be a champion. To become a champion at anything has to be the greatest feeling a guy can have.”

More significant than the blood they’re sure to taste getting there is savoring the satisfaction of always giving their best shot.