EDISION TURNS ON THE LIGHTS

No doubt Edison Miranda got a bad break last September in Germany, when he was twice on the same night denied the IBF middleweight title it appeared he'd won. Yet that is far from the gravest injustice he has experienced. Try twice being denied by your own mother before you reach the age of 10. After that, who can cry about injustice any more?

Today, Miranda is one of the hottest young middleweights in the world, a fighter who comes to the ring with bad intentions and why wouldn't he? He's been carrying enough anger around for ten since before he was 10.

On Dec. 16, he will get to unleash some of that anger in the geneal direction of a hard-nosed guy from Philadelphia named Willie Gibbs who is a fair boxer himself on HBO's final Boxing After Dark show of the year. It is a fight Miranda earned the way he's earned most things in life. He got it the hard way, by breaking in two places the jaw of IBF champion Arthur Abraham and then hearing him tell his cornermen he did not want to continue in the midst of a fourth round stoppage of the action to check the damage.

For more than five minutes doctors and German boxing officials attended to Abraham before the champion's corner incredibly pushed him back out to fight and referee Randy Neumann allowed him to continue despite the long delay.

Fight the champion did, bravely and for seven more rounds with a jaw unhinged in two places and in need of two titanium rods and 22 screws to fix the damage. Abraham fought furiously at times but he did not appear to fight well enough to win yet after the judges' cards were counted and five points had been deducted from Miranda for alleged head butts and phantom low blows the title did not change hands. Miranda was shocked. His handlers, Warrior Boxing, were outraged. But, in the end, the controversy that grew out of that night has led him to his first opportunity at national exposure on HBO. That doesn't make his experience in Germany a good one but by comparison with the way his life began he'll take it.

Miranda was born on the wrong side of the street in Buenaventura, Columbia 25 years ago, a town with far more wrong sides than right ones. He was immediately abandoned by the 14-year-old child who bore him and he floated without love or encouragement from house to house; from family to friends to stopping off places. There was no love for this boy anywhere it seemed and no real family either, just people who tolerated his existence until he decided, at the age of nine, to go off on a search. He would find his mother, he decided, because surely she would love him now.

Miranda seldom speaks of these times but the story has been told enough now by men in boxing who have grown to love him in a way his mother could not that no one questions the details. The young boy walked and hitch hiked hundreds of miles before he finally located his uncle on a construction site. The man demanded to see a birthmark he knew his sister's baby had on his leg before he would believe the child's story. When Miranda pulled up his pants the two-inch circle the uncle spoke of was staring back at him

It was then that he got what he thought was the answer to a dream. He was taken to his mother, now 23 and married, for a meeting he knew would be about love. When the door quickly closed in his face he was worse than alone because now he had been rejected in a way no one could call an accident or a result of grim circumstance. This time the boy was rejected simply by choice.

That day nine-year-old Edison Miranda became a fighter, although he didn't realize it at the time. It would be six more years before he would find the salvation boxing can bring though, empty years spent living by his wits in the plantain fields and on Columbian streets. He worked as a laborer on construction sites, he worked as a cattle butcher, he worked at any job he could find. He no longer worked to find his mother though, or to find love until, quite unexpectedly, it found him in a boxing ring.

Less than 18 months after first slipping on the tools of what would become his calling, Miranda became a national champion. He would go 128-4 as an amateur fighter, winning his country's national title three times, only to be beaten in the fight that would have sent him to the 2000 Olympics in Sydney. Now, it seemed. even his sport had rejected him, although not for long.

Miranda turned professional the next year and won 20 straight fights by knockout, fighting at outposts in Columbia, Panama and the Dominican Republic against opposition as unknown as he was before he finally came to the United States a year and a half ago to make his debut under the Warrior banner in Hollywood, Fla. He would win three straight times there by decision, including a one-sided 12-round victory over fellow prospect Jose Varela in the longest fight of his career to date, before he would again exhibit the eye-popping power that has made him one of boxing's most feared young middleweights.

In the run up to his title fight with Abraham, Miranda destroyed former British champion and world title challenger Howard Eastman in March in the seventh round, the only time Eastman had been stopped in 44 professional fights despite having faced the iron of the division in th person of champions like Bernard Hopkins, William Joppy and Abraham himself. That victory set the stage for Miranda's meet, greet and beat with Abraham and the revisionist historians who run German boxing.

Miranda gives Abraham credit for the bravery he exhibited that night when his cornermen overroad his wishes and pushed him back out to take seven more rounds of punishment from an angry challenger who first found boxing not in a gym but in a dream he barely understood. Later he would call that dream a calling from God. Others, who know boxing for the harsh landscape it sometimes can be, might argue the dream came from a different place but wherever it came from it pulled Edison Miranda out of an abyss not of his own making and took him to the doorstep of a world championship.

Although it would end there, the injustice of that decision was even too much for the people who run the IBF to abide. They ordered that Miranda (26-1, 23 KO) remain Abraham's mandatory challenger despite the loss, insisting a rematch be set by June 23, assuming the champion's face has healed. In the interim Miranda has been able to turn that dark night into an opportunity to shed some light on the kind of puncher he is against Gibbs, who at 20-1 (16 KO) is a formidable opponent who is coming off a stoppage of Lenord Pierre that won him the vacant USBA middleweight title in his last outing.

"This is great for Edison,'' said Leon Margules, Warrior boxing's executive director. "After what happened to him in Germany it's a great opportunity. Fight fans will get to see the real middleweight champion. The people's champion.'' What they'll also see is a guy who has been fighting all his life. Fighting first to find his mother, then to find himself and always to find something to love. In the end he found boxing, a hateful sport to many but a salvation for a boy without a family lying in a plantain field in the dark of a Columbian night wondering where his place in the world might be.

"This is what God has planned for me,'' Miranda says, acceptance being a life skill he learned long ago. "I have always overcome adversities. I will again. Abraham has the belt but I know, and he knows, that I won that fight. "I heard him say he didn't want to continue. I heard the referee say the fight was stopped. Then someone hollered at him and he shrugged his shoulders. I know he didn't want to continue. The fight should have been stopped. But I respect him as a warrior.''

Miranda showed that when he held Arthur Abraham's hand aloft after the 12th round, not to signal that he felt the champion had defeated him but to show respect for what Abraham had put himself through. He went through a night of pain authored by a young fighter who knows too much about such a thing for he has lived a life of pain. Not like the kind Abraham suffered that night. Not the kind that fades away. A lasting pain that has been eased only by a sport known to many as the pain business.

When Edison Miranda takes his pain into the ring on Dec. 16 and turns it into fire, he hopes it will not only consume Willie Gibbs but also inspire an American television audience to fall in love with a kid who knows little about such an emotion but quite a lot about what it means to be a fighter.