NEW YORK -- The pretty young woman hits, cuffs and clutches a 68-year-old man while another man shouts at her to do more of it, and better.

A group of tough-looking men, boys and several women, encircle, wait, smile, shout or stare -- all waiting to follow her.

Into the ring.

Suzie Guillette, 28, Attleboro High School Class of 1994, is sparring in a Bronx gym with an ex-New York Golden Gloves champion named Willie Soto who is old enough -- and kind enough -- to be her grandfather.

Her trainer, ex-pro fighter Dudley Hart, shouts a litany of instructions to the boxer with the pony tail: `` Snap it! That's it! Snap the jab! Double up! Come up with the right! Work your left. Don't back up. Sideways. Step through the right. Throw the right. That's it! Beautiful jab. Now, do it again ...'' After five rounds, Soto gives a congratulatory clinch to a weary Guillette, and awaits his next opponent, a pencil-thin, polite boy named Frankie, who looks as if a stiff breeze might knock him over.

But the windowless Morris Park Gym in the shadow of St. Dominic's Church is breeze-starved.

`` In the gym, they are all tough,'' Soto said. `` They get four or five champs every year out of this gym.''

Now, it's young Frankie's turn to imagine that.

`` I don't hit girls,'' Frankie said as he turns to Soto. `` But I'll fight you with one hand.''

Soto smiles a vast, substantial smile, puts his head gear on again and cuffs the popular gym rat into the ropes.

They are under the watchful eye of the legendary Carlos Ortiz, the former three-time world champion, now 69 and in the Boxing Hall of Fame, who has returned to help the kids of Morris Park learn how to fight.

Around the corner in the next room stands still-handsome, but contrite, Luis Resto -- the former local welterweight fighter who also trains kids and literally lives in the gym.

Resto's fall from grace is well known in Bronx circles.

He was thrown out of boxing in the mid-1980s and served jail time -- along with his trainer Panama Lewis -- for taking some stuffing out of his gloves in a fight with then-unbeaten contender Billy Collins. Collins was 14-0. It was his Madison Square Garden debut in June 1983. Resto, who never hit hard, was hand-picked as his opponent.

But Resto hit very, very hard that night.

Collins' eye irises were so damaged from the heavy pounding, he could not fight again. His burgeoning career ruined at 23, he turned to drink and died in an alcohol-fueled car crash at 25.

Resto has always proclaimed his innocence in the incident. He never fought again, except on the inside.

But boxing is within him. A popular fixture in Victor Pena's gym, he helps out teens and children, offering advice, hoping to be restored.

Elbow to elbow with this slice of rugged humanity stands Attleboro's Guillette.

Blond, blue-eyed, slender and academic, Guillette will spar, box, skip rope, and then write about all of these memorable encounters by April.

She studies boxers by becoming one. It's her master's thesis.

Guillette, who majored in philosophy at George Washington University, is a second-year graduate student now at Sarah Lawrence College in Yonkers.

Four to five days a week, she takes the 20-minute drive from her idyllic ivy-covered campus to two large, concrete and fluorescent-lighted rooms smattered with old fight posters and dried blood.

It is a repository of tattooed dreams, swollen lips and bloodied ambition.

And Guillette couldn't be happier.

`` Part of what appeals to me is the adventure,'' Guillette said. `` Adventure is always good.''

The seed of the adventure began several years ago in Boston.

Guillette -- the daughter of Ray and Martha Guillette of Flora Road -- worked as a waitress, an events coordinator and then a proposal writer for a nonprofit women's group. She took up boxing as a conditioning sport in a local health club.

`` I wasn't hitting anyone else,'' Guillette said. `` It was fun. The best workout I've ever had.''

Last summer, she went to the Czech Republic, for a writer's program comprised of American students, entertaining the idea of doing research about what was going to be her thesis -- a cerebral investigation of human rights workers in the aftermath of the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

`` I learned it was too big a topic,'' Guillette said.

While wrestling with the idea, she found a boxing gym in Prague run by the Czech Republic's former lightweight champion.

`` There were all Czech men in the gym. I was going every day,'' Guillette said. `` I realized I should be writing about the gym in Prague. There was so much there. It was so much more alive.''

The men were so polite, they offered to leave the gym to allow her to shower alone.

When she returned to Sarah Lawrence for the second year of her master's program, she still entertained thoughts of immersing herself in Rwanda.

Then, after a bizarre meeting in a laundry with a neighborhood man who was looking for women to model his line of underwear for black and Latino women -- `` His wife and daughter were right there,'' Guillette said -- she thought, perhaps, she should write about the colorful people who inhabit the Bronx.

By September's end, however, she had found the Morris Park Gym and had begun renewing her love affair with boxing.

`` I realized it was perfect for my thesis, a very manageable idea,'' Guillette said. `` It was really fun, and the other part of me had really enjoyed boxing in Prague. So, I said I might as well do something that I love, two hours a day, four days a week.''

Her thesis adviser agreed, and encouraged her new pursuit.

As Guillette developed her jab and her cross, she also developed her hook -- five essays that will serve as chapters in her planned 100-plus page thesis.

`` There will be four or five essays in totally different styles,'' Guillette said.

One likely will be a profile of Luis Resto.

`` Obviously, he doesn't like to talk about it (the Collins fight) for different reasons,'' Guillette said. `` It revisits a lot of painful memories for him. Boxing is the biggest thing in his life, after his family. He still says he didn't know about it (removing the glove stuffing), that he didn't do it.''

She was asked if training new fighters was Resto's penance.

`` Penance? I wouldn't say that,'' Guillette said. `` He said he got in a lot of trouble when he was a kid and he wants to help other kids learn from that. He loves kids.''

Another chapter will be about the eclectic people in the gym -- the champions and near-champions, the contenders and, perhaps, the pretenders; the trainers and the kids who dream.

A third piece will be on dishing out and receiving punishment, itself, gleaned from the denizens of Morris Park.

`` It's a survey piece on how it feels to be hit,'' Guillette said. `` There are so many different people, so many different levels. How do you feel to be hit and then hitting someone?''

Another piece will center on the development, ardor and near-spiritual journey of a young man training to fight in the city's annual Golden Gloves tournament -- the pinnacle for amateurs in New York.

She has also interviewed Cheryl Houlihan -- two-time U.S. national women's boxing champion at 106 pounds out of Norton, Mass., -- for her essay.

The men in her gym don't yet know of Houlihan, but one of the female fighters, heavily tattooed lightweight Melissa Hernandez, a New York Golden Gloves champ in 2004, has heard of her.

She isn't impressed.

`` She's all right,'' Hernandez sniffed after sparring three tough rounds with a female pro. `` But she's so little. Let's see how she'd do here.''

Bronx talk that Guillette knows all too well.

Under a poster that reads, `` It's Better to Sweat in The Gym Than to Bleed in the Streets,'' former Morris Park gym rat, now up-and-coming pro, Francisco `` El Gato'' Figueroa Jr. passes out his shiny new, full-color business cards to the two dozen men inside.

`` I used to come here every day,'' Figueroa said. `` I grew up here.''

He left the gym to find a new trainer.

`` I'm 8-2 with 6 KOs,'' El Gato said. `` The three best junior welterweights (140 pounds) in the world are here in the Bronx -- two others and me.''

To carefully develop and hone each essay, to cultivate precious relationships with the fighters she admires so much, Guillette has had to come here almost religiously.

She drives past the graffiti-tagged storefronts, caged up at night to prevent possible theft, under the two-mile tram bridge where the famous chase scene in `` The French Connection'' was filmed.

Her dedication is earning the respect of trainers like Hart, Soto, Resto and maybe, someday, even the great Ortiz.

More importantly, fellow fighters don't snicker because she has the guts to spar; to hit and be hit.

`` I'm not very good,'' Guillette laughed, regarding her technique. `` Carlos Ortiz lives just down the street from the gym. He started coming in this week. He was bored, just hanging around at home.

`` He saw me and asked me, `Why do you come to the gym?' I said, `It's fun.' And he quickly said, `Do you come to work out, or do you come to talk?''

Each day she improves, as does her writing.

Boxing has gotten into her blood like ink did when she did a stint at The New Yorker magazine; when she was writing proposals; when she studied writing abroad.

In April, when her thesis is due, she will learn if she has been selected for a Fulbright Scholarship that will allow her to further her studies in The Netherlands, possibly to profile human rights workers there.

She plans to modify her pieces with hopes of getting them published in The New Yorker or as stand-alone essays.

She is writing sample chapters and seeking a literary agent. If she returns to Europe, she will work on a book.

`` I'll keep publishing and keep researching,'' Guillette said.

Down the road, she is entertaining the idea of applying for a license to train young girls how to box.

In the meantime, as her aquiline nose bleeds slightly, and her sweaty blond pony tail sticks to her neck, in the middle of the fourth round against worldly, willing and wise Willie Soto, she suddenly lands a perfectly straight right hand to the chops.

`` Good right hand!'' shouts Ortiz, master of a Hall of Fame right hand.

It is a brief moment. It is a good moment. It satisfies.

The Attleboro academic has earned a boxing compliment from a man who holds a doctorate in pugilism, a Ph.D. in the school of hard knocks.

When her two-hour workout is finished, she drives wide-eyed Frankie to his home, then rides another 25 minutes to her dorm room to shower.

As warm and welcoming as these many men at Morris Park have been to Suzie Guillette, some things are still not allowed.

Jamie Merolla may be reached at 508-236-0431 or at jmerolla@thesunchronicle.com.