Kevin McBride, meanwhile, remains firmly in the Cappiello camp — which may explain the great affection Rich clearly holds for him. "In my opinion, I’m lucky to have Kevin in my organization," he says. "He’s a nice kid. He holds himself well. He’s a gentleman, and he’s got a great personality." With this, Cappiello turns to McBride, that fatherly look in his eyes again. "Kevin always had a lack of trust," he says. "There are guys out there who just don’t care. I feel as though I’m protecting him."

Though he’s been a Boston resident for four years, McBride is still very much a product of his birthplace: Clones, a small town in the west of Ireland that counts author Patrick McCabe and boxer Barry McGuigan among its famous sons. Early on, it became clear that McBride would follow in the footsteps of McGuigan rather than McCabe. By the time he had reached his teens, McBride’s father, a butcher by trade, was serving him a pound of steak at a sitting. "I grew from five-eleven to six-six at the age of 13," he says. "I shot up."

To try to describe McBride now is to invite a stampede of clichés: big as a house, strong as an ox, bull-necked, barrel-chested, a towering presence, a mountain of a man. He is, for lack of a better word, big: six-foot-seven, 260 pounds. Each of his shoulders is the size of an average man’s head, and his head is the size of a Volkswagen Beetle. He has a classic heavyweight’s face — flattened, fleshy — though the country-boy charm hasn’t been beaten out of it yet. But it’s McBride’s hands that really grab you — hands that could palm a watermelon, fists that have sent no fewer than 22 of his opponents into oblivion.

The first hint of the sheer damage of which this man is capable, however, comes when you watch him train, when you feel the room shake with each step, see the heavy bag lurch with each jab. And the noises. When he punches, McBride emits an extremely loud whoosh-phhhtt! sound from his nose. When he unleashes a combination, he’s a staccato sand blaster. It’s this whoosh-phhhtt! that makes you shrink in your chair. But then you discover the reason for McBride’s noisy nose: "I’d say I’ve had it broken 10, 12 times."

There’s no doubt that McBride can pack a punch, but a winning boxer also needs to be able to avoid punches — which requires agility as well as strength. And watching McBride spar makes it clear that those size 17s are no dancing feet.

If speed is McBride’s biggest weakness, this is reflected in his less-than-perfect record: 27 wins, four losses, and one draw. In fact, he lost a fight as recently as January, when a Vegas bout against a fighter named DaVarryl Williamson was stopped after McBride suffered cuts that required 30 stitches. The hardest of McBride’s losses, however, came in 1998, in London, against English heavyweight Michael Murray. "Days before the fight I heard my father was dying of cancer," McBride says. "And I lost it, and he died."

McBride’s father was his inspiration — "He showed me how to make a fist" — and following his death, McBride started to "mess up." He was drinking too much, and not fighting at all. "My father meant the world to me," he says. "His death shocked me. I wasn’t thinking straight for a few years. I was too tired to box." Today, McBride is teetotal, training like a madman, and raring to go. "I’d like to fight Lennox Lewis, John Ruiz, and Mike Tyson in the same night," he says. "I know what I want."

First, however, there is Raynardo Minus to take care of. And as fight night approaches, McBride is beginning to show signs of nerves. At one point, Cappiello remarks that McBride will be arriving at the Roxy in a white limousine, and the fighter smiles dryly. "Arriving in a limo," he says, "and leaving in a hearse." Nobody laughs.

Boxing is, of course, an inherently dangerous sport. In addition to the relatively mundane injuries a fighter can incur — broken noses, split retinas, cracked ribs, bruised kidneys, fractured hands, punctured eardrums — there is the ever-present risk of brain injuries, which can be fatal. A good blow to the jaw, for instance, can turn a fighter’s head so quickly that the brain literally spins on its stem, coming to a halt only when it slaps against the side of the skull.

Just such an injury occurred to one of Cappiello’s boys in October 2000. The fighter was Bobby Tomasello, a 24-year-old flyweight, who fell into a coma following a 10-round bout with a Ghanaian named Steve Dotse. The world-ranked Dotse was way out of Tomasello’s league — indeed, the two weren’t even meant to fight each other — but when Dotse’s scheduled opponent pulled out at the last minute, Tomasello saw a chance to give his career a boost. Though he fought well enough for the fight to be called a draw, the Saugus lad took a vicious beating in the last couple of rounds. Five days later, he was dead. "That’s the sport," says writer Ted Bodenrader. "Every time a boxer laces up his gloves, he knows the risk he’s taking."

It’s Friday NIGHT — fight night — and the Roxy has been transformed into a makeshift boxing arena. Rows of chairs are filling up with well-dressed hard men, wet-eyed pensioners, and cranky-looking members of the press. At the bar, crop-headed boys chug Buds from plastic cups. A trio of girls, two with their hair dyed pink, giggle and jostle through the crowd. A pair of cops pore over the evening’s program. A large Hispanic guy, who will later bellow nonstop ringside advice to a fighter named Jose Ortiz, sweats heavily under the harsh lights.

In the far corner, a Fox TV announcer is interviewing "Dangerous" Dana Rosenblatt, who is on hand to provide color commentary. "He’ll have to turn a Minus into a plus," the announcer says to the camera, looking pained by his own pun. Meanwhile, the Cappiellos and their retinue are hustling around the club in tuxedos, arranging things, sorting things out. In the center of the room, the ring stands empty, shrouded in a cloud of cigarette smoke, an unlikely oasis of peace.

Upstairs in his dressing room — actually, a boiler room — Kevin McBride is reclining, alone, listening to the Chieftains on his Discman. When asked how he’s feeling, he sits up and says good, then describes, dreamy-eyed, a late lunch of steak, carrots, and mashed potato. With this, he offers an oddly delicate handshake, lies back down, and closes his eyes again. If he has any last-minute jitters, McBride hides them very well.

The young man spitting blood downstairs, meanwhile, is looking considerably less serene.

The fighting has commenced, and Larry "The Dream" Green is getting a pounding. The problem is, Green has what might charitably be called an unorthodox style. He crouches — crook-kneed, legs splayed — as if preparing to sit on a toilet (which might not be a bad idea, given the look of terror on his face). To make matters worse, he is holding his fists a good two feet apart, which gives his opponent — the thick-necked Jose Ortiz — an open invitation to punch him in the face. And Ortiz is clearly not the type to decline such an offer. He batters Green’s face with a series of neck-whipping jabs until the boy’s mouth looks like a bowl of mashed beets. The crowd, delighted, bays like a playground mob. So one-sided is the fight, you start to think of Bobby Tomasello, his brain twisted in his head "like a sponge."

But Green survives, and nothing quite as dramatic happens between that fight and the main event. Indeed, for the last third of the show, the biggest cheers are reserved for the scantily clad card girl, who flounces around the ring at the end of every round. And then Kevin McBride emerges, along with his bagpipe player, and much of the crowd goes berserk — singing songs, chanting, and roaring with patriotic approval. The arrival of Raynardo Minus, on the other hand, brings little more than a few titters of amusement.

Raynardo "The Terminator" Minus is — how to put this? — fat. Not only that, the Terminator’s trunks terminate about an inch below his nipples. He looks absurd. In the seconds before the fight, Minus shadowboxes furiously, his biceps wobbling like the flanks of an animated sea lion. And then the bell — ting! — and the two men go at it. For the first couple of rounds, McBride seems to have the upper hand — he’s nimbler, his punches a little more accurate. In the third round, though, Minus comes alive, delivering a combination — left, right, left, left, right — that leaves McBride leaning against the ropes. The fat man doesn’t look so absurd now, and you get the sense that two or three more thumps will be enough to end it. And then — whoosh-phhhtt! — McBride lets loose with a lunging overhead right. Minus crumples. He’s out. The crowd goes nuts. McBride throws his arms up in delight.

After the fight, after the little victory trot around the ring, after the cheery interviews and the hundred sweaty back slaps, Kevin McBride stands in his boiler room/dressing room and says, "Thank God he went down." Moments later, a voice on the PA system announces that McBride will compete for an International Boxing Association Continental title in the fall. The fight will take place in a large venue — possibly Mohegan Sun. Cable TV will be there to cover it.

Better yet, if McBride wins that one, he’ll be on track for a World Championship fight, maybe even against John Ruiz. "A fight with Ruiz would be nice," Cappiello says, using the kind of dare-I-even-say-it tone one might use to express the fact that a winning Megabucks ticket would be nice, or sex with Cameron Diaz would be nice. "There’s no doubt in my mind," says Chris Pender, "that Kevin will be the heavyweight champion of the world." And tonight, with McBride glowing and the crowd rah-rahing and the Cappiello camp giving each other high-fives — tonight, this kind of talk is easier to believe.

Fifteen years after Marvin Hagler’s retirement, Goody Petronelli’s gym remains a kind of shrine to the man. There are scores of pictures of Hagler crowding every available space — including a wall-size mural of the Marvelous One, his sunglasses glinting in the sun, his arms raised in salute to the city that, by all accounts, he still adores. "You can feel the history," says Pender, looking around at the shabby gym. For the young fighters who train here, Hagler is a constant, conspicuous presence, a reminder of what might one day be theirs. But these kids haven’t yet felt the intoxication of success. Goody Petronelli has.

"Oh, yeah, I’m still looking for another Marvin Hagler," he says. "As long as I can do it, I’ll keep going. I’ll keep looking for that Marvin Hagler."

But Petronelli knows that fighters like Hagler don’t come along every day, and so do his trainees. For them — Kevin McBride included — Marvelous Marvin also serves as a reminder of what isn’t, what might never be, no matter how good they are, or how good they think they are, or how good others have convinced them they may be one day. All they can do is keep punching, keep dancing, and hope that Petronelli’s alchemy turns up gold again.

But even then, boxing success is a slippery thing. More so than in any other sport, a fighter’s career can turn — can soar or come crashing down — in the space of a single beat. A slip, a blink, a momentary lapse of concentration, a sudden burst of strength, and you’re in. Or you’re out. And in boxing, more than any other sport, once you’re down, it can take an awful long time to get back up again. If you ever do.

Nobody knows this better than Tony DeMarco. "I was the champion," he says. "The boxing champion of the world." And then, three months later, he wasn’t. "I lost my title on my first defense. That was difficult. It sure was difficult for me." DeMarco was a great fighter, but he lost, by his own reckoning, because of bad timing. And, 47 years later, it’s not clear that he has made peace with this fact. "It’s hard to lose," DeMarco says. "And sometimes it’s even harder to win."

Chris Wright can be reached at cwright[a]phx.com