"I was the three-time middleweight champion of the Department of Corrections boxing program, two times fighter of the year," recalls Wilson, who recently gave an exclusive phone interview from Graterford. "When I met Bernard [in prison], my dream was to become the real middleweight champion of the world. In prison, I was the guy.

"But, you know, the boxing program began to dissipate in the mid-1990s. You didn't have outside fighters, from the Silver Gloves and the Army, coming in no more. And that was that. Could I have been as good as Bernard? Who knows? I'm a dreamer and a believer. I've been incarcerated nearly 38 years and I still haven't given up on my dreams.

"I always could fight real good. But boxing and fighting are two different things. Boxing is only a scientific way of fighting. I used to fight in the street all the time, but I didn't know the techniques of boxing. Once I learned those, I was off. I really think I could have pursued that."

Instead, he watches proudly as his career aspirations continue to be carried on by longtime boxing champion Hopkins (48-4-1, 32 KOs), who will defend his The Ring magazine light-heavyweight championship against the long-reigning super middleweight champion from Wales, Joe Calzaghe (44-0, 32 KOs), Saturday night at the Thomas & Mack Arena.

Once, it was Hopkins who lurked in the shadows. He was a teenage street thug, a predator preying on the weak, a product of some of North Philadelphia's meaner streets. He frequently found himself in the juvenile justice system, a criminal-in-training who gave scant evidence that he ever would discover the better angel of his nature.

And when Hopkins "graduated" to strong-arm robbery, a transgression for which he served 56 months in prisons populated mostly by hardened adult offenders, it seemed likely he would forever topple into the abyss, assured of a brief life or one mostly spent behind bars.

But then a strange and unexpected thing happened. Behind prison walls, the then-17-year-old Hopkins met a teacher and role model who steered him toward the light.

That angel was Wilson, now 55, who has spent the past 37-plus years serving a life sentence for murder.

"Smokey Wilson was like my Gandhi," Hopkins says. "If I had run into somebody else in prison, with a different set of values, the world might have never known one of the greatest boxing talents ever to come out of Philadelphia."

And if Hopkins defies the oddsmakers, as he once thumbed his nose at polite society, he again will offer up a silent prayer - or maybe not so silent, given B-Hop's loquacious ways - of thanks to the father figure who taught him that the hardest thing any man can do is to seize control of his own destiny.

"We're not biologically related, but we might as well be," Hopkins says of Wilson, with whom he maintains intermittent contact. "When I'm fighting in that ring, I'm fighting for some souls that can help others and for some lost souls that don't want to help others. But they're all God's children, you know?

"Everybody inside those walls don't make it. Yeah, I know what Smokey is in for. He never has tried to hide the fact of what he did. His story is kind of like Rubin 'Hurricane' Carter's, except that Smokey isn't saying that he's innocent.

"Regardless, to me, Smokey is more of an asset to society than a threat. Look, I'm not advocating prison. Prison is a bad, bad place. But the discipline that I have today, that is where it was developed. Smokey showed me that just because you start out doing wrong, it don't have to be like that forever."

Premium cable is not one of the amenities provided inmates of Pennsylvania's penal system. Neither, anymore, is an organized boxing program. But should Hopkins take down Calzaghe, the grapevine at Graterford will spread the news nearly as quickly as if each cell were wired for HBO. And the reaction will be one of celebration as one of their own again demonstrates that it is indeed possible to make it in "the world," which is how the incarcerated refer to life on the outside. Wilson talked about it during one of two 15-minute interviews, on consecutive days, that the Daily News was granted.

"That would be such a big deal," Wilson says of the reaction to another watershed victory by Hopkins, who has scored so many. "Sure, there are some people in here who want to see him lose because there's always going to be jealousy and envy. That's just human nature. It's the same in here as it is in the world.

"But most of us in this place want Bernard to win because, in a way, he's fighting for us. He showed that it is possible to leave prison, make it on the outside and never come back."

Except that Wilson never received the guidance he later sought to provide a younger man in whom he saw so much of his earlier self. For lack of that guidance, two lives - that of the man Wilson killed and of the shooter - were swept away.

"Growing up in foster homes, running away from foster homes, wanting to be with my brothers and sisters," he says of his troubled youth. "Then I got in with the gangs as a sort of family. I was just drawn to negative things. I was really angry, and I acted out that anger.

"In hindsight, if I had had someone to encourage me, to show me the potential I had, I might not be in here now. But there always are consequences for the things you do."

Like Morgan Freeman's character in "The Shawshank Redemption," Wilson wishes he could go back in time and slap some sense into his younger self before he pulled the trigger. His career path became permanently altered on Oct. 10, 1970, at the time a member of a gang called the Moroccos. In previously recounting the day, he has said that he and a friend decided after getting drunk and high at a North Philadelphia party to go looking for members of a rival gang. Arriving across town, they ran into a group of boys on a street corner. Wilson said he drew his gun and fired twice when he thought one of them appeared to be reaching for something in his pants. Gregory Davis, 15, was killed. It was later reported he possessed neither a weapon nor a police record.

"It was a gang-related thing," Wilson says. "I was highly intoxicated, which the DA noted at my trial. The other guy, the one I shot, had a starter's pistol. I had a gun. He died. The police locked me up 2 days later. I confessed to the shooting.

"Look, I'm not saying this to take anything away from what I did. I did it. But I wouldn't take a plea of 6 to 20 because I wouldn't testify against my [friend], who was an adult. So I got natural life."

In prison, Wilson channeled his energies into boxing. And when he wasn't in the ring himself, his services as a trainer were sought out by other inmates.

Meanwhile, out in the world, Hopkins - already a veteran of Pennsylvania's juvenile correctional institutions - was following in Wilson's more wayward footsteps.

"Where do people think I got that toughness, that discipline? It's so obvious," Hopkins says. "I'm not perpetrating a fraud. That is who I was when I was ignorant. I never got stabbed in prison, but I got stabbed three times out on the street. Didn't bother me. I wasn't afraid to die. In life, you're either a wolf or a lamb. I was a wolf. People scattered when they saw me coming."

As a wolf, one of Hopkins' first acts in a real, grown-up prison was to pick out one of the largest, meanest inmates in the yard, walk up to him and knock out several of his teeth.

"I can believe that," Wilson, who did not witness Hopkins' impromptu announcement that he was not someone to be trifled with, says of the prison fight that is recorded nowhere in history. "In this place, you go after the biggest dude to earn your respect. Kick his [butt] and everything else just falls into place. People see you take on and take down someone like that, nobody else is going to mess with you. Not in this joint, anyway."

But beyond his teen wolf's exterior, Hopkins was, to Wilson's way of thinking, basically a good kid in need of some positive direction.

"What I saw was someone who could be saved," Wilson said of his first impressions of Hopkins. "I'd been in the system since I was 17. I'd been around the horn - [spending time in such penal institutions as] Graterford, Camp Hill, Pittsburgh, then back to Graterford. I didn't see the extreme hardness that a lot of boys come in here with. I saw in him a disposition that he wanted to show his mother that he wasn't really the person he had been to wind up in this place. We started talking about boxing. He had a kind of tenacity to him, you know? He wanted to be a fighter. I just liked his attitude."

It didn't hurt that Wilson had once mixed it up, in the prison ring, with Hopkins' now-deceased uncle, Art "Moose" McCloud, who posted an 11-8 record as a pro.

"Artie could have been good, but the street got him," Hopkins says. "Anyway, once Smokey found out I was Artie's nephew, we sort of got attached. He started training me. We had tournaments against other prisons. Two times a year, we had these box-offs. I was middleweight champion for 4 1/2 years, the Pennsylvania equivalent of [former light-heavyweight contender] James Scott in Rahway [a New Jersey prison]."

Wilson says it was evident to him early on that Hopkins not only had the talent but the drive to succeed, which is the mark of a true champion.

"Bernard was a natural," Wilson says. "A lot of guys didn't want to spar with him. He was that good. He was even good when he started out.

"And he knew enough to stay away from the drugs and the guys who weren't really about anything good. He worked hard at boxing. You didn't have to tell him to go out in the yard and run; he was doing it."

But Hopkins says he wasn't always motivated to do what was necessary to advance his future career.

"If I didn't go to the gym at 1 o'clock, guess who came looking for me?" Hopkins says. "Smokey Wilson. And let me tell you, there were days when I didn't feel like training. I know that sounds hard to believe now, but where you think I got that from?

"Smokey taught me to stick it out, even in the worst days of my life. He was like a big brother looking out for a little brother."

Hopkins, of course, eventually was paroled and left prison. Upon getting his release, he was told by a jailer he would be back.

"No, I won't," said Hopkins, who walked off 9 years of parole without getting so much as a parking ticket.

"When you leave prison, the odds are so stacked against you," Hopkins continues. "People figure that if you were a criminal, you're always a criminal. And the fact is, 80 percent of the people who get locked up and get out come home [to prison] eventually. Eighty percent! But what else can they do? You got to have some reason to believe in something better.

"I want to show people, on the inside and on the outside, that it don't have to be that way. I mean, look at me now. I know the mayor, the district attorney and the governor. They tell me how much they support me, how much of an inspiration I am to kids who could go the right way or the wrong way.

"To some people, that might not mean squat. But if we want to save these young people, they have to know that they can make it. They don't have to become victims or victimizers."

Wilson says Hopkins gives him too much credit for turning his life around.

"All I did was to encourage Bernard to take what he had and to make the best of it," Wilson says. "It helped, of course, that he had a real talent. But you don't need to be anyone special to take what you got and to roll with it."

Wilson also has rolled with it, in a manner of speaking. He might or might not ever gain his freedom; he is up for commutation of sentence for the fifth time. But he does what he can, and he likes to think he is making a difference.

"Look at those juveniles [charged with murder after an alleged Philadelphia subway mugging]," Wilson said. "They can't even begin to grasp the kind of trouble they're headed for. They're going to wind up in here, spending time. We got to try to do something to change that.

"I started something called 'Lessons for Lifers.' I went on escorted leave, did a TV program. What we do is to talk to at-risk youths about choices, attitudes, behaviors. We shared our life experiences, told them what happened to us.

"I always cite Bernard as an example of someone who got it right. I always close with that. Some people want to keep beating you down. In Bernard's case, he was another young kid who could go one way or the other. His life was the same as those of a lot of kids growing up in the inner city. Many are going to get in trouble and keep on getting in trouble. Some, thankfully, won't.

"I'm just glad Bernard didn't kill no one. I'm glad he was able to get out of here. To me, he's the epitome of what rehabilitation is, or is supposed to be. He never came back. He showed what, given the opportunity, an individual - any individual - can do. That makes you feel good." *