Fighting Fair : Community work: Twice weekly, gang members take fitness and kick boxing lessons from super-lightweight Hector Lopez and others. They learn respect and discipline, the ex-convict says.

Hector Lopez is making the gang boys sweat.

Not in some airless room down at police headquarters, but in a Van Nuys gym heavy with the sound of fists on pads.

Lopez, one of the world’s top-ranked super-lightweight fighters, is telling a dozen young men to jog in place until their shorts are wet around the midsection and a fine wet sheen is covering the tattoos that identify the neighborhood allegiances for which so many like them have died.

A young man with SANFER emblazoned on his chest and a nasty scar crawling up his ankle shifts into a fighting pose, making sharp exhaling noises through his nose as he boxes the air.

A half-smile softens Lopez’s hard-eyed fighter’s countenance.

Most people could not afford to buy the kind of training Lopez doles out to these young men for free. Lopez’s belief, etched in his own experience, is that society cannot afford not to give it to them.

Twice a week, anywhere from 10 to 35 gang members attend these grueling training sessions at the Jet Center gym, which is owned and operated by champion kick boxers Benny (the Jet) Urquidez and William (Blinky) Rodriguez, along with Rodriguez’s wife, Lilly, herself a champion fighter.

Rodriguez, the principal instructor in the training classes, brings another perspective to the table: He is one of the architects of the peace treaty between Latino gangs in the San Fernando Valley that has lasted the past seven months. Though the truce has not been without problems--isolated shootings and beatings have flared up between rival neighborhoods--there have been no killings of gang members in that time.

Why teach gangbangers to fight? Isn’t that already their specialty?

Because what these young men lack, Lopez and Rodriguez explain, is the knowledge of how to fight fair, and how to respect the combat they have chosen.

Every time they begin their gym sessions, they bow to each other. When they leave, they bow to the gym.

Raul Rodriguez, 23, is a big kid with a shaved head and a body that he has hardened up considerably over the past three months.

“Before, you had one thing in mind: getting in fights,” says Rodriguez, who has spent 16 months in jail for carrying a weapon and has a scar from being stabbed in the head. “Here they’re teaching us discipline.”

The discipline keeps him focused on his responsibilities, he says. He has a wife and two young children, and for the past two years he has worked for a telecommunications company in its fraud division.

“I give a lot to Hector and Blinky,” he says. “They’re not getting paid for this.”

For Lopez, his work with the gang members is a kind of pay-back. He still bears his own neighborhood identifier, a tattoo on his back that says “Toonerville,” a tribute to Los Angeles’ Atwater district.

Once one of Southern California’s most promising young fighters, Lopez was a silver medalist for his native Mexico in the 1984 Olympics and seemed a certainty for professional fame. He built an impressive record as a featherweight, gaining the No. 1 ranking in the world. “But I couldn’t get a title shot,” he says. “I let frustration get in.”

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On Oct. 9, 1988, he was arrested on suspicion of kidnaping his girlfriend at gunpoint. Convicted of two assault charges, he was sentenced to three years in prison.

“I had a real bad temper,” he confesses simply.

Since being released two years ago, he has re-established his career, married the woman he was accused of kidnaping and become involved in Rodriguez’s church, Victory Outreach. When Rodriguez told him he had started a training class for gang members and asked him to help, Lopez quickly agreed to help, even though his own training schedule leaves him exhausted by the time the evening classes at the Jet Center roll around.

“I felt like Blinky and my pastor were there to help me,” Lopez says. “If I can pass it on, so much the better. I’m glad I’m out here.”

Lopez has an obvious and immediate rapport with the young men he teaches. When he goes up on his toes to demonstrate a move, his fluid self-control is obvious. When he tells them to give him 50 pushups, there is barely a groan of complaint.

“I’ve been there sitting in the same holding tank they’re sitting in,” Lopez says.

He knows people would pay him a considerable sum for the training he is donating.

“I’m making treasures in heaven,” he says with a shrug.

The real payoff is in the words of people like Raul Rodriguez, who is thankful for the truce, and says it has shown him a new world without invisible borders of danger.

“It feels safer,” he says. “Now I’m able to go to my grandma’s house and not get shot by a rival gang.”