The Pat Putnam Award, for perseverance in overcoming adversity, was instituted by the Boxing Writers Association of America in 2005 to honor the memory of a remarkable man who spent 17 months in a Chinese POW camp after being captured during the Korean War. He returned to the United States weighing 86 pounds, minus a lung and in need of a steel rod that was surgically implanted to stabilize his spine, which only partially alleviated his near-constant back pain.

Oh, yeah, and the rawhide-tough Marine came back with four Purple Hearts and the Navy Cross.

Putnam was 75 when what remained of his body finally wore out on Nov. 27, 2005. But through it all, Pat cranked out some of the most compelling copy boxing fans have ever read. As a sports writer at the Miami Herald, he broke the story in 1964 that the young Cassius Clay was changing his name to Muhammad Ali, but his greatest triumphs in sports journalism came at SI, for whom he authored more than 50 cover articles from 1968 until his forced retirement in 1995.

Death didn't defeat Pat any more than his Chinese captors could. It merely outwaited the obstinate coot whose life experiences made him realize that there are far worse things to face than a tight deadline or stale nachos in the press room.

The first Pat Putnam Award was conferred upon Uganda's Kassim Ouma, conscripted-child-soldier-turned-world-boxing-champion, on May 5, 2006. The second went to Pat's old friend, Ali, for retaining his dignity all these years despite the debilitating effects of Parkinson's disease.

Now along come the Petersons, who will be presented with their Putnams on Thursday night at the 83rd annual BWAA Awards Dinner in Los Angeles.

"I was not aware of who Pat Putnam was," said Anthony Peterson, the younger of the two boxing brothers from Washington. "But from what I have found out about him, he sounds like he was a very special man. He overcame so much."

So have the Petersons, except that they don't give medals to homeless children who spend what should have been some of the best years of their lives on the streets, cold and hungry.

That the Petersons have risen to places of prominence in boxing - Anthony, 23, is 26-0 with 19 knockouts and is the WBO's No. 1-ranked lightweight; Lamont, 24, is 24-0 with 11 KOs and is ranked No. 3 by the WBO as a junior welterweight - is almost miraculous.

Only last week, the Petersons signed promotional contracts with Top Rank founder Bob Arum, who at one time or another has helped advance the careers of, among others, Ali, Sugar Ray Leonard, Marvelous Marvin Hagler, Thomas Hearns, Oscar De La Hoya, Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Miguel Cotto.

"We feel good about where we are now, but we won't feel like we've really accomplished anything until we win world championships," Anthony said. "Me and Lamont have a hunger to be great."

Which is better than being just plain hungry. Not that it was always that way for the brothers; they once lived in a big house with their parents and four siblings. But their father got into drugs and then he went to jail.

"He wound up coming home to take the rent money," Lamont recalled. "First the lights went out, then the water. So we ended up living in a house with no lights or water.

"Eventually, we got kicked out."

Lamont was 7 at the time, Anthony just 6, but they remember that dark period as if it were yesterday.

"I still have memories that are so detailed," Anthony said. "Sometimes we'd walk all night until the sun came up because we had no place to go. It got cold in the winter, real cold. My mom was all stressed out. Here she was, homeless with six babies, no husband, no place to go. It got to her. A lot of times, she left us on the street to fend for ourselves."

Lamont said the thing he remembers most are the freezing nights when a warm, dry place to sleep would have been preferable even to a full stomach.

"We didn't even have coats," he said. "That cold, man . . . it goes right through you when you're a little kid."

After bouncing around from foster home to foster home for 2 years, the preteen brothers eventually found their way to a gym run by Barry Hunter, who would become their trainer, benefactor and father figure. He's still with them, as proud of the brothers as if they were linked to him by blood.

"What these young men have gone through is amazing, when you think about it," Hunter said. "Their inner strength says a lot about who and what they are. How many people, of any age, could have endured what they did? They were children who pretty much had to lean on one another just to survive."

Anthony said boxing played a role in keeping them focused on a goal, but more credit should go to Hunter.

"Barry taught us the simple rules of life, like having respect for other people," he said.

Lamont agreed. If Friedrich

Nietzsche was right to say "that which does not kill us makes us stronger," then the Peterson brothers are sturdier than steel.

"Whenever there are disappointments in our lives, we come back harder," Lamont said.

"We're not going to let anything get us down. Whatever it is, it ain't the hardest thing that we ever went through." *

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