As I was walking toward the ring

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Sunlamp-tanned biceps bulging inside a pink and black Hawaiian shirt, gravel-voiced Blassie - who turns 70 on Feb. 8 - talked this week with 300 second, third and fourth graders at the D.N. Fell Elementary School in South Philadelphia. The presentation was arranged by the Spectrum, which has ''adopted" the school as part of a city program in which businesses get involved with education. The kids, of course, were too young to know about "the Hollywood Fashion Plate," who started wrestling in gold lame jump suits before their parents were even born, and whose only hit record, "Pencil Neck Geeks" (his epithet for good-guy wrestlers and anyone else whose neck measures less than his hefty 19 inches) was No. 1 on Dr. Demento's novelty-record hit parade for 21 weeks in the late '70s. So they sat stone-faced as the 5-foot-10, 260-pounder started his Standard Elementary School Assembly Talk, urging them to continue their education ("It's something you can always fall back on," he suggested) and warning them always to say "no" to ***** ("Stay as pure as you are," he advised). They had heard this stuff before, of course (mostly from the Standard Police Department Elementary School Assembly Talk), but they continued to sit politely. That is, until Blassie started his pitch for an upcoming World Wrestling Federation match at the Spectrum. The main event on Feb. 6, he started to say, will pit WWF Heavyweight Champion Hulk Hogan . . . "Yay!" cheered 300 kids. It was, in all likelihood, the first time they had ever heard the words Hulk and Hogan used together over the Fell auditorium loudspeakers. ". . . and Bam Bam Bigelow . . ." "Yay!" "Against Andre the Giant . . ." "Booooo." ". . . and Ted DiBiase." ("Booooo.") These fans know their wrestlers. And these are the kind of fans Blassie appreciates now. Still, he can't forget the other kind - those who routinely hissed and booed during the decades he used "every trick in the book" to beat the nice-guy wrestlers like Bruno Sammartino and Ricky Starr and Antonino Rocca. It was those early fans who helped turn him from a 17-year-old St. Louis kid being paid $1 a match in 1935 first into a top-drawing international wrestling star and then a manager of other famous ring rats with names like the Iron Sheik and Nikolai Volkoff. But there was a down side, too. Some of those fans also: * Shot at him (one instance, during a 1958 car chase in Crestview, Fla., still gives him the shakes). * Slashed and burned some of his favorite cars (he still mourns a Lincoln Continental convertible and Cadillac Coupe de Ville). * Come after him with knives (he stopped counting after 21 stabbings, but the worst - 38 stitches across his left shoulder blade - was in 1956 as he was leaving the ring in Marietta, Ga., after beating a local favorite). And once, at Olympic Auditorium in Los Angeles in 1963, he was doused with acid. "As I was walking toward the ring, two teenagers - one about 15, the other about 17 - threw this liquid at me. It felt warm, and I thought it was just warm beer. But it had the most offensive odor, like somebody had thrown up. "By the time I walked from the back of the building to the ring, there was a blister covering my entire right thigh. So the announcer, Jimmy Lennon, who was the uncle of the Lennon Sisters, gave me a handkerchief, and I tried to wipe it off. But the stuff had already gone into my pores. "The dressing room attendant, a guy named Tiger Nelson, ran and got me some wet paper towels, but they didn't do any good. I should have gone right to the showers and washed it all off, but I had to wrestle. "My opponent that night was Lord Jan Blears, an Englishman, and it was the main event on TV. But by then the odor was so bad they had to open up all the doors and windows in the auditorium. "When I finished wrestling, the blister had broken. There was just raw meat there, and I was in agony. It looked and smelled so bad that even Blears threw up. "There was no doctor there, and I had an appointment after the match. I was supposed to go to a deli to meet with a reporter. So on the way, I stopped at an all-night grocery store and bought a jar of Ponds Lotion, which my mother always used. I went to a men's room in a gas station, dropped my trousers and poured that stuff all over me. It wasn't the pain I was trying to get rid of, it was the awful smell." That scar has long since blended into the others on Blassie's bolted- together chassis. He says he's happier now as a WWF publicist - ''prognosticator extraordinaire," he terms it - traveling across the country as an advance man for the World Wrestling Federation. His last match was three years ago. He's settled down in the matrimonial ring, too. After seven other marriages, he's living the good life in Hartsdale, N.Y., with his wife of 20 years, Miyako, a movie actress he met while wrestling in Japan. And he'll tell you he doesn't really blame the fans for all they've done to his already battered body. "I guess I just bring out the worst in people," he says.