That man who owns the World Boxing Organization's (WBO) heavyweight champion belt - which glistened ringside moments ago - is moving lightly on his toes. Inside the ring, a bald, thick white dude mirrors the boxer's sidelong steps, his hands covered with mitts used periodically to goad the champ into hitting harder, to make him move. These leather slaps work, and the two men's dance is punctuated increasingly by the sounds of hard punches landed. The sounds ricochet like hard-rock drum licks off the fight posters and plaster on the walls of the Tru Boxing Club on Highland Avenue, embroidering beats from a Tupac's greatest hits collection and competing with the television's volume and the strong murmur of an unusually large a.m. crowd. At 6-2 and a notch or two under 225 pounds, the man with the champion's belt probably isn't the biggest man in the room. He is, however, the baddest. In a good way.

Across the room, Lamon Brewster fights more, on TV and for real, and a chunk of the crowd watches the entire May match, on video and over and over in the span of 10 minutes. Brewster raises his hands in victory, a TV remote moves the fighters backward across the screen, and Brewster kicks Andrew Golota's ass again. Then the champ hugs Jesse Reid, his trainer, hugs everyone including Gino Rodriguez, the referee. He punches and poses for the news camera that's so rarely focused on him, and he kicks Golota's ass again.

Every one of the dozen men watching knows their fighter is a heavyweight champ. Most are likely sure that he's the city's first titlist in that class since Jim Jeffries. But Lamon Brewster's the right man in the wrong weight class, a heavyweight in a town partial to lightweights. Plus, his WBO title is not unified; World Boxing Association champion James Toney is considered the Baddest Man on Earth. Brewster, who seems extremely nice, has risen to the Number Two.

The guys in here are not the TiVo set; they don't have this fight recorded at home. So his biggest fans in this city - probably Brewster's biggest fans in the nation - are glued to the TV, watching the Golota fight, even though their man is sparring live right in front of them in Hollywood. As though TV gave his victory validity. If he were badder, things might be different.

"Lamon Brewster has a legitimate heavyweight title," says Freddie Roach, his onetime trainer, "and you couldn't get 10 people to see him at the Staples Center."

The fighter's obscure fame, in a sport in which you're nothing if not half-hated, prompts questions of whether he can be boxing's bright light. Will he ever draw, lacking a dysfunctional gimmick or a cartoonish persona?

A leg to stand on

Like a lot of men in his sport, Brewster's past is kinda blurry. At 18, he came west from Indianapolis, where he learned to box - not punch - under bare-knuckle legend Bill Brown, a veteran of 330 fights. When he was a skinny teen, Brewster's parents signed him up at the Riverside Boxing Club to help Lamon "burn off some energy." The young fighter got big, won state fairs, Golden Gloves, and the Indiana State Expo - but had no foreseeable future when he graduated from the Westside's Washington High School in 1991. Aside from Bill Brown's legacy, Indiana is probably known in boxing annals as the place where Mike Tyson went to prison. Brewster had nothing akin to a plan.

One summer day after graduation, Brewster walked through a family reunion and heard his cousin's mother say she'd broken her back and needed help driving back to Los Angeles.

"I'll do it!" Brewster found himself volunteering.

"What did I just say?" he found himself asking.

He took his gloves along for the ride, just to check out the California competition, or so the story goes. For real, he slept in a Studio City bunk bed, with three other kids in the room, started missing his girl, returned to Indy, got mixed up in some street mess, prayed to a higher power, came back. Simple as that.

"I stayed there for the summer, got back into the streets, man, and got into some situations where I found myself asking: God, if you can get me out of this situation, I'ma get my butt back on the plane and go back to California, and you're gonna have no more trouble out of me," the boxer says. "You get home and you can't get a job, and your boys are out hustling and they got nice cars, and you find yourself out there with them. Things go down. Some bullets fly, some people start getting shot and you're right in the middle of it. Being a man of God, I felt I had to call upon him and he delivered me out of this situation. He kept his word and I kept mine."

So, yeah, it's kinda blurry. Some guys - like Jerry Rosenberg, that punch-catcher at Tru, whom Lamon Brewster's known "as long as I been knowin' me"; the guy with a mouthful of gold fronts and a tattoo that reads "Redneck" crawling up toward his face - they made it in L.A., scarred but doing their thing. But that's just Rosenberg. Not making it, for example, was his running buddy Clarence White. That cat was supposedly half Brewster's size but punched just as hard. White went back home and ended up being busted for distribution of cocaine, getting 80 years in an Indiana penitentiary.

Brewster's decision yielded quick benefits. When the teen returned, he took his gloves down to an Orange County trainer named Jess Reid and took two straight California Gold Gloves championships. By 1995, he was the American Boxing Federation's national champion. Cheers producer Ed Weinberger offered to manage him. A more conveniently located trainer, the immortal Bill Slayton of 108th Street's Broadway Gym, took over all of his development inside the ring, and a good chunk of that without.

Brewster knocked out his first professional opponent in the opening round, then went on to win 13 of his first 21 contests by first-round knockout. The only fight before 2000 that the young pro didn't win by KO was a unanimous decision in which its judges awarded him every round. Fights scheduled every three weeks meant eating regularly, without the baggage of a day gig. Sam Simon, producer of The Simpsons, had taken on management duties. Brewster was living the dream.

His 20th fight came in Pittsburgh in May 2000, against Clifford Etienne, "The Black Rhino." At the time, Etienne was an amazing-looking fighter, an animated piece of chiseled shale. His animation was, however, of poor quality and our cerebral protagonist decided he could take Etienne out in whatever way he wanted.

"My ego was like: 'Man, you're 20-0, 18 knockouts. You're Lamon Brewster. If you go out there and hit this dude, you're gonna knock him out like he knocks everyone else out. Don't respect this dude. He didn't fight in the amateurs and comes out of prison,'" Brewster recalls sheepishly. "I'm not Mike Tyson, I don't run out there and destroy dudes. I do my homework."

When the bell rang against the Black Rhino, Brewster leapt out of his corner, ran across the ring, and felt like a million-dollar purse, until his left knee popped a half-dozen steps off the stool. He'd snapped a ligament, but fought Etienne like that for 10 rounds, throwing haymakers, hoping to squeeze out a split decision, maybe. He lost on points.

Bad getting worse

The contemporary boxing game is, at best, seriously concussed or, more likely, completely corrupt. It is going bad. Boxing is a sport that allowed Mike Tyson to fight for 17 years past his last meaningful victory - until last Saturday when the original Baddest Man on the Planet lost to a tomato can named Kevin McBride. Tyson earned $5 million for this. Twenty thousand people in D.C. paid top price to see the fight in person and hundreds of thousands of Americans bought the fight on cable. Showtime will rebroadcast it again on Saturday. Money was made off Tyson's persona. The sport slid deeper into dirt. The culture of boxing hasn't really advanced past the notion that the sport was supposed to compete with the WWF, back in the mid-1980s. So it rode Tyson and turned more quickly than it ought to into a fringe sport that doesn't play west of Chicago (excepting Vegas, of course).

Were you to ask the average L.A. sports fan to identify Lamon Brewster, first off they'd mispronounce his name like the son on that Redd Foxx show - not like "layman," the way it's really pronounced. Then they wouldn't be able to identify him. Even boxing fans might not know him. It doesn't help that the World Boxing Organization is branded mainly in Europe, but it might not matter.

"He's under the radar," says boxing historian Bert Sugar. "If you put the heavyweight champ in a police lineup, not only would no one know him, the cops couldn't tell you what he did for a living."

That's unfortunate, because boxing is the sport from which our favorite athletic pastimes derive, the one in which you cannot tie. In boxing you have to beat someone. And in the process of doing this, defending against concussion while trying to deliver one, character is revealed. It's the realest spectacle we have, pure naked risk.

"Anybody who's sat ringside at a heavyweight fight knows it's the most electric thing in sports," says Sam Simon, Brewster's current manager. "It puts the Super Bowl to shame." No doubt, even as the business of boxing has the game long mired in mess. Metaphoric brutality simply will not die. Pro football's good. But the game features too many stops and starts and far too much headgear.

Tyson got to run on empty for the life of a child, not because of his fighting skills but because of his allure as bad guy and his dynamic relationship with fans who hate bad guys. Yet every sport needs its good guys. Maybe Brewster hasn't caught on because not being a bad guy only makes a fighter fit to be a fringe champ.

Running on empty

After the Etienne fight, Brewster lay in bed at his Venice home more often than he should have. Even in his new, relatively cushiony surroundings, he worked toward fighting every three weeks. But because of the leg, he couldn't move around.

The contender tried to find a way to lose weight without running. Guys at Gold's Gym told him to cut out carbs, and he did, dropping pounds as well as all the energy that carbohydrates provide. It was important. After losing to Etienne, Brewster's stock dropped so far that to get a paycheck he had to travel to East Wendover, Pennsylvania to get a fight with someone, apparently a man, named Val Smith. If Val Smith only knew.

"It was by the grace of God that the cat was so scared of me that he didn't even try to fight me - he just tried to box and run. Because he probably could have stopped me," Brewster says. "Look at the fight [on tape]. I didn't have anything."

He hid his diet issues while his management and training team focused on his knee concern. On a May night in Detroit against journeyman Charles Shufford, the lethargic 27-year-old shocked everyone by losing on points.

"He thought he won that fight," recalls his then-trainer, Freddie Roach. "I told him in the last round, 'You need a knockout to win.' He looked at me like he was surprised, like he thought he was winning the fight. I asked him [later], 'Why didn't you listen to me?' He said, 'I thought I was winning the fight.' I couldn't believe he thought he was winning. He didn't win one round."

The boxer got his diet right and the next decision went to Brewster, a knockout, as did the next six fights over three years. Between 2001 and 2003's end, he had some of his best fights, but they were largely blacked out, on the basis of his poor showings earlier. Then, in April 2004, he wrested the WBO belt from Wladimir Klitschko in a slow, strategic contest. Next, he bored a Vegas crowd in defending his title against unheralded Kali Meehan. Certain boxing scribes and bettors began referring to him as "Lemon" Brewster.

Last April, while the fighter was training for a match at Chicago's United Center against Andrew Golota, a contest one almost had to be Polish and from Chicago to credibly give a shit about, the transplanted Hoosier's original trainer, 78-year-old Bill Slayton, died of lung cancer. Brewster's remaining handful of fans could not help but wonder which version of the fighter would step into the ring.

Be like Mike

Tough guys are something Eric Brown knows about, too. A former fighter himself, he trains boxers at Hollywood's Wild Card Boxing Club, where guys with cars stuffed with all their belongings struggle in the hopes of getting where Lamon Brewster is right now.

Brown knew what Slayton had ´´ been to Brewster. Slayton was a trainer who turned tough guys into fighters, fulfilling a surrogate father role that a lot of them needed.

"Lamon always seemed to me like the guy who is emotional," Brown remembers, "and sometimes if he wasn't mentally or emotionally into it, he'd just kind of go through the motions."

This gym, located above a Chinese laundry on Vine, is where Brewster learned to spar like he was warring, where James Toney punked Brewster on a regular basis. It's the place where the contender learned a toughness to match his skill. He had to: In the wake of 2000's lull, Brewster might have become "an opponent," someone who gets paid a big chunk of change to warm up a more polished fighter. Brewster had a wife and two children at this point and really could have used the payday that being an opponent can earn. A few of these quasi-set ups can be worth a quarter-million dollars. They're also a one-way ticket to Parkinson's Disease, as former opponent Freddie Roach can tell you.

On this morning at the Wild Card, a skinny young boxer gets punched in the face repeatedly by an Eastern European who's simply better than him, and though the fighters wear headgear and blows thrown don't damage like a heavyweight's, they're still hard shots. Brown's fighter catches perhaps his 10th shot to the head and blood runs down his brown face when the bell rings. He pauses, hocks deep into his throat, pausing as something's sticking way in the back, then brings forth the biggest crimson loogie imaginable. Brown only turns the fighter around because the expectoration has eaten up time between rounds. "Get your hands up," is all Brown can say, because he traffics mostly in toughness.

"Everything they were trying to show me was foreign," remembers Brewster. "They didn't just work, as I had always been told. They sparred to win." Freddie Roach was struck by Brewster's tendency to analyze fights too much.

"For a while there," according to Brown, "his career was kinda on hold and there was really nothing staring him in the face to push him hard." The famously over-analytic Brewster plainly wasn't tough enough to make it to the next level. Now, with his seminal trainer gone, a drop in performance wouldn't have been unexpected.

"When Bill died, it took me off. I was lost," Brewster says. "He was the only reason I stayed in California. As a boxer, you fight so much, especially as an amateur and as a young professional, that you can't have a job. So he was giving me money out of his pocket. But not just that, he was everything to me. When he died, all of the knowledge, all the wisdom that I tried to make myself like was gone." This, says Brewster, led to long nights leading up to last month's Golota defense. "You have six weeks before you step in the ring and fight for that title. It's like, 'What do you do?'"

Let the bad man out

In Chicago, 20,000 fans predominantly from the city's ethnic North Side, poured into the United Center with hopes that Golota, the Polish-born challenger for the WBO belt, would represent. Not only was the paying crowd against the champion, but someone had taped the word "Lemon" to his dressing room door.

Without Slayton in his corner, Brewster would put all the cerebral aspects of boxing in its proper place, in the basement, well away from the show outside. He wouldn't make an unnatural leap, as he'd done against Etienne, but he would not relive old video of "The Powerful Pole," either. He'd box his way into Golota's notoriously weak chin. So, at the opening bell, Brewster walked out of his corner looking like a fighter who'd never had any fall from grace, no snapped ligament, no dark nights. In 12 seconds, Brewster landed a left hook that put Golota on the canvas. The referee counted almost to 10 and in l3 more seconds, the Pole was again lying prostrate. Gino Rodriguez gave another 10 count and Golota was down for good.

Brewster's title defense took all of 53 seconds, and is the second-fastest defense of a title in heavyweight history. No longer holding on to self-consciousness as if it were righteousness, the good man let the bad guy come out, once and for all.

"That's all he ever needed to do," says Freddie Roach, "let his hands go."

Ask Brewster if that's right and he'll admit it, in an interesting way. "He'll give you an honest, eloquent, surprising answer to anything you ask," says Simon. "He has a cohesive worldview."

And he ought to, barring an "opponent" designation, stay that way.

"I was raised well - I had a great family who loved me and I'm trying to represent them. I'm a man who believes in the word of God, the living God, so I'm trying to live as he would have me live, be meek and humble. So it doesn't make sense for me to be an idiot, be a jerk," Brewster says, upon finishing his practice time in the ring at Tru. "On the other hand, the bad part about being a good person, a nice person, is that boxing has been so misguided by names I won't mention that when you see a nice person you take them for granted, you take kindness for weakness, you try to take advantage of the good people. And that isn't right."

The purse for beating Golota was $750,000, Brewster's biggest payday yet, and even with the hunk of cash that management, trainers, and promoter Don King will take from his earnings, the fighter is in a comfortable place. The pressing question is whether the titleholder will be seen as a legitimate champion. After a tune-up fight in August, his next opponent ought to be Vitaly Klitschko, brother of the older Klitschko Brewster took the WBO belt from. But Vitaly Klitschko is no fan of Don King and won't make the date, despite the L.A.-based Russian's recent proclamations that he'll fight Brewster anytime, anywhere - implying that the bout would be about revenge.

These are the insular, small-time conflicts that keeps our most brutal, revealing pastime firmly ensconced in marginality. There's actually talk of matching up Tyson with - you guessed it - Andrew Golota for Tyson's comeback.

Earth's widely recognized heavyweight champion is the one Brewster calls his mentor, James Toney. Not a lot of people in boxing think the 31-year-old would have a chance against him. Toney, who tested positive for a banned substance after a title fight in April, holds a genuine grasp on the Baddest Man on Earth title. While not a true heavyweight, Toney is widely considered to have a mental edge over the husband and father of three who's regarded with general suspicion as a nice guy.

Whatever comes to pass, the necessary leap would be just another threshold conflict, same as 14 years ago when Brewster stepped up at that family reunion or last's month's throwing off of patriarchy. The ability to battle outside the ring is what defines a fringe champion.