After The Gloves Came Off

There was boxing at the Castle, the converted armory on Arlington Street, on a warm night in mid-July. Perhaps 500 people filled the building’s main hall, filing into the rows of folding chairs set up around the ring or hanging around in the back drinking beer. Norm Stone stood near the pizza table, receiving. A boxer he manages, Joe McCreedy, a 22-year-old light-heavyweight from Lowell with a 5-1 record, was scheduled to fight later that evening.

Everybody came by to say hello to Stone—reporters, cops, boxers, managers, trainers, fans. Men shook his hand, slapped him on the shoulder, introduced the family. A few unconsciously broadened their own Massachusetts accents to match his, which is of weapons grade. Women he’d never met before kissed his cheek, some diffidently, as if leaning into a cage to kiss a grizzly, and some boldly, as if they knew he was really a teddy bear.

A solid fellow with a paunch and a shock of white hair, Stone cultivates a down-curving piratical mustache that makes him look like Hulk Hogan’s smaller, smarter, dirtier-fighting brother. His epic bug-outs have made him a celebrity in the fight world. Boxing fans have grown used to seeing Stone in a red-faced choking passion, trading punches and grappling with the opponent’s cornermen, restrained by security guards, screaming curses (You cuocksackah!) that non–New Englanders require subtitles to comprehend. Over the past two decades he has turned getting mad on his fighter’s behalf into an art form.

From 1988 to 2005, that fighter was John Ruiz, a heavyweight from Chelsea with a dogged, mauling style. With Stone in his corner as manager, cut man, head cheerleader, sometime trainer, and full-time fount of contagious aggression, Ruiz rose from obscure Boston-area scraps to the world stage and a heavyweight title. Fans and the fight press and the TV networks all complained that Ruiz was boring in the ring and out, but he overachieved heroically, outworking and outlasting an impressive roster of opponents as he ran up a record that, as of this writing, stands at 41-7 with one draw. As much as for his unpretty fights, Ruiz became known for his and Stone’s rare mutual loyalty. Don King, the virtuosic maker and breaker of alliances who has promoted most of Ruiz’s bouts since 1998, told me, “They were like the Corsican Brothers. If you cut one, the other bleeds. When you got a person like Stone in your corner, the support is unparalleled and unprecedented.” But the fight world’s reptilian ethos acts as a solvent on any warm-blooded relationship, no matter how close. Even Stone and Ruiz didn’t stay together for good.

For Stone, this Wednesday night at the Castle was a long way from championship fights in Las Vegas and seven-figure purses. The promoter running the show had agreed to put McCreedy on the undercard and pay him $800 only after the fighter committed to selling 75 tickets to his supporters. Still, ESPN2 was covering the main event, and McCreedy’s four-round bout had a chance to make it onto the broadcast, which would be a nice break for the kid. The cameras represented the attention of the wider world, a reminder that what happened here could matter to an audience that extended far beyond the handfuls of rooters from Dorchester or Haverhill who’d come out to cheer on their own. Stone himself was living proof of the connection between local and global. A son of Kensington Avenue in East Somerville, he had gone out with Ruiz into the great beyond, conquered it, and returned to his people. Today, the toughest guy in the neighborhood; tomorrow, champion of the world. That, after all, is the story of Stone and Ruiz, regular guys who made it big together. King called them brothers; other fight people liken them to a father and son, or a married couple. Before they broke up, that is.

In 2005, not long after Ruiz lost his title by close and dubious decision to a plodding 7-foot Russian named Nikolay Valuev, Stone announced he would no longer manage Ruiz. He said he was retiring to spend more time with his grandchildren. One could imagine, of course, that he must have a life beyond boxing, and he was indeed married and had a son and daughter and two young grandchildren, but it was difficult to accept that Stone would relinquish his livelihood at the age of 54 to spend his days dandling little darlings who couldn’t walk or talk yet, let alone throw proper punches. Stone and Ruiz had come back from far more crushing setbacks than a controversial loss by split decision in Germany, where you have to decapitate a homestanding favorite and bury the head separate from the body in order to get the win. Ruiz was still a top-tier heavyweight, and he had lost and regained the title before. It seemed mysteriously out of character for Norm Stone to give up on him.

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