TWENTY-FIVE YEARS is a long time for anyone to hang onto a memory, sometimes even for those who made them.

Sometimes especially for those who made them.

It was 25 years ago this summer that Tyrell Biggs won an Olympic gold medal. And after nearly a quarter-century of living in California and Texas, the once-celebrated Biggs, 48, is back home in Southwest Philadelphia to be near his elderly father and try to put together the pieces of a jigsaw-puzzle life that at its peak took him to international acclaim, and at its lowest point was marked by drug addiction and the rapid erosion of his fame and fortune.

The young man who was cheered during a parade for Philly's 1984 Olympians and presented with a key to the city by then-Mayor W. Wilson Goode, now spends his afternoons hanging out at the Shepard Recreation Center at 57th and Haverford, occasionally assisting longtime boxing director Mitch Allen, but mostly killing time.

"I got a key to the city. That was nice," Biggs said. "But you know what would be nicer? For me to take that key back to City Hall and trade it for a really good job somewhere."

Apparently being a history-making Olympic gold medalist in boxing doesn't carry the cachet it once did. Time marches on. People forget.

Asked if the young amateur boxers with whom he sometimes works have any inkling as to who he is or what he accomplished, Biggs shrugs. If they don't ask, he doesn't tell. What's past is past. Kids today live for the moment. Hey, he understands. He has been there himself.

"Some of them know a little bit of my history, some of them don't," said Biggs, who has a girlfriend he doesn't see as often as he would like living in Dallas and a son who he sees even less frequently, Tyrell Jr., living in California. "The ones that do know, they're not so much interested in the Olympics these days. But when they find out I fought [Mike] Tyson, that gets their attention. They ask about that."

Except that Biggs won it all at the Olympics, then absorbed a terrible beating from Tyson when he attempted to unseat the seemingly invincible wrecking machine as the undisputed heavyweight champion in their Oct. 16, 1987, showdown in Atlantic City's Boardwalk Hall. Tyson stopped Biggs in seven bloody rounds, inflicting as much or more psychological damage as he did in a physical sense.

"It was nice being on top, or around the top, but you can't get too down when you begin to fall," Biggs said. "When I go to meetings [for recovering addicts] I hear people say, 'Poor me. I used to have this-and-that, and now I don't.' But you know what? You can't dwell on that too much. I've learned to take whatever's in front of me and to deal with it.

"The things I've done, I know they're going to stand. I'm the first Olympic super heavyweight champion. No one can ever take that from me. It was all grand and wonderful."

Biggs admits he sometimes feels he has one foot in his 1980s heyday and one in his less prosperous present.

"Sometimes," he said, "it seems like [his Olympic glory] happened yesterday. Other times it seems, like, 50 years ago."

The truth, of course, lies somewhere in between. On Aug. 11, 1984, Biggs entered the ring at the Los Angeles Sports Arena to take on Italy's Francesco Damiani for the gold medal in a new weight class, super heavyweight (over 201 pounds). Biggs won, becoming one of two Philly gold medalists, along with 125-pounder Meldrick Taylor, for an American boxing team that won more total medals - 11, including nine golds - than any in Olympics history.

All right, so the absence of 14 nations that boycotted those Games - most of the Soviet Bloc countries, along with Cuba - paved the way for a very strong American boxing team to do even better than it otherwise might have. Biggs notes that all he and his teammates could do was defeat whoever was standing in front of them, which, for the most part, they did.

"Before I got involved in boxing, I was a big fan of the Olympics," said the 6-4 3/4 Biggs, who was known as "Burt" when he was a forward on West Philadelphia High basketball teams that won 68 straight games stretching over the 1976-77 and 1977-78 seasons. "I heard people who won gold medals talk about what an indescribable feeling it was. And it's true. Words can't explain it. That had to be the best feeling I ever had. It's an unbelievable high, man."

Unfortunately, Biggs knew about other kinds of highs.

"I started with marijuana in high school, or maybe it was in junior high," he said. "From there I experimented with cocaine. I think I did it just because I liked doing it. But it does affect you when you're frustrated or disappointed. You're doing whatever you can to make yourself feel better."

An Olympic champion presumably has little need for feeling frustrated or disappointed, but Biggs - a low-key sort whose basketball coaches and teammates at West Philadelphia High didn't even know he was into boxing until his image appeared on their television screens during the 1984 Olympics - was not as popular or as marketable as some of his fellow Olympians. He was booed after his 4-1 decision over Damiani by spectators who didn't appreciate his defense-first style, and he was booed after his pro debut, on Nov. 15, 1984, when he scored a six-round unanimous decision over Mike Evans in Madison Square Garden.

Biggs, one of five U.S. Olympians to sign with the promotion company Main Events after the '84 Olympics - Taylor, Pernell Whitaker, Mark Breland and Evander Holyfield were the others - made a conscious effort to transform himself into a bigger puncher and more of a crowd-pleaser, but the results were at best mixed. He was 15-0 with 10 knockouts when his handlers elected to put him in with Tyson, against whom Biggs' best chance was to stick and move. That Biggs, however, was gone, replaced by one who had undergone a stylistic makeover that made him more vulnerable to Tyson's awesome power and constant pressure.

It didn't help that Tyson, resentful of Biggs' Olympic pedigree, was enraged by remarks made by Biggs' co-manager, Lou Duva, that Biggs would expose the champion as an overhyped fraud. Biggs admits that he also did a bit of uncharacteristic chirping.

What followed in the ring was a study in brutality. Tyson bloodied Biggs' mouth in the first round, and in the third round he opened a nasty cut over the challenger's left eye. The end came in Round 7, when a Tyson left hook dropped Biggs for a 9-count. He arose on unsteady legs, but Tyson rushed in and was teeing off when referee Tony Orlando waved off the mismatch after an elapsed time of 2 minutes, 59 seconds.

"He was doing so much talking that I wanted to make him pay with his health," Tyson said at the postfight news conference. "I don't want to sound egotistical, but I could have knocked him out in the third round. I wanted to do it slowly. I wanted him to remember this for a long time."

Did the Tyson beatdown irreparably damage Biggs? The record would indicate so: He was just 15-9 thereafter, with six more losses inside the distance, before he finally called it quits in 1998.

Biggs insists that it was neither Tyson nor illegal drugs that dragged him from the ranks of the elite fighters.

"Losing like I did really put a damper on me psychologically," Biggs said. "I wasn't doing hard drugs any more, but I was bingeing on other things. I'd binge on sex. When you have money - and I made a lot of money to fight Tyson [a reported $1 million] - of course that's going to attract women.

"I also binged on food, on certain candy bars. I'd go in the store and buy three of them. Then I'd go back and buy three more. Next trip, I'd buy a whole box."

While he was living in California, there were rumors that Biggs had fallen so far that he was homeless and living on the streets. He insists his troubles never got to that point, but of his present financial condition, he admits, "It could be better."

Once hailed by Mayor Goode as a "bona fide American hero," Biggs has discovered that the parade literally has passed him by. Asked where his life is today, he said, "Is the game room [at the Shepard Rec Center] open? That's where I am today. Waiting for the game room to open."

There are those who believe Biggs, no matter his present circumstances, has earned a chance at more. His older brother, Xavier Biggs, operates a boxing gym in Decatur, Ga., and is staging a reunion tour of the 1984 U.S. Olympic boxing team. The first such gathering was last Sept. 20, in Atlanta. The second was Jan. 22, in Charlotte, N.C., with the next set for Aug. 15, at the Atlanta Marriott Century Center. Among those expected to attend are Taylor, Holyfield, Frank Tate, Virgil Hill, Robert Shannon, Paul Gonzales, Henry Tillman and, of course, Tyrell Biggs.

"Those guys made history together," Xavier Biggs said. "They need people to remember and appreciate what they accomplished. Sometimes it seems like everybody has forgotten them, and that isn't right."

Of his brother, Xavier said: "He is a beautiful person, the most beautiful spirit you'd ever want to meet. That's why it tears me up to know he's barely making it. He got lost in the drugs for a while, but he got himself cleaned up and hasn't relapsed in over 20 years. Doesn't he deserve some credit for that?

"Crack, man, it ain't no joke. You got to fight the temptation to use every day. Tyrell beats that devil every day. It's the hardest fight of his life, and he's winning it.

"He had a nice apartment. He was living well. But I don't know, maybe he didn't appreciate what he had. Maybe, like a lot of these guys, he had too much, too soon."

Duva, told that Tyrell is working with amateur boxers, said that the logical next step for a down-on-his-luck former Olympic gold medalist is to become a full-time trainer.

"Let me tell you, he would be a good trainer if he put his mind to it," Duva said. "Nobody could box like him. When he wanted to box, nobody could touch him.

"Tyrell deserves a break. He still could be an asset to boxing. I'm sure of it."

Biggs, however, said it's a long step from holding hand pads for kids to becoming a real trainer.

"That's not my deal," he said. "If I spot one of these guys doing something wrong, I might say, 'Why don't you try it this way?' But if I had a kid who started to get good, I would turn him over to somebody capable of putting him on the same road that I took - and by that I mean the good road.

"I know some people won't believe this, but I don't even go to fights no more. I was never one to get in the ring and take a bow after I finished fighting. Some guys, they eat that stuff up. I'm not that way. Sometimes you just got to let go." *