After The Gloves Came Off

The highlight reel of Stone’s raging meltdowns—and there have been many—includes the prefight brawl in 2003 with Roy Jones Jr.’s trainer over the selection of boxing gloves, and the drama at the Andrew Golota bout in 2004, during which Stone threatened to throttle the opposing trainer, cursed out the ref, and finally got himself ejected. On his way out he declared, on camera, “This is a fuckin’ fixed fight.” Then there’s his swan song, the Valuev fight in Berlin. After the decision was rendered, Stone ripped the belt away from the hulking new champ and raised it in mock triumph. I like to revisit online a photograph of the ensuing melee in which Stone appears wonderfully intent on delivering a claw-handed shot to the face of some foreign SOB. In the image, Stone pulsates with anger, and yet he also seems strangely relaxed, even fulfilled.

Theatrical calculation went into these episodes, which Stone employed to protect his fighter’s interests, pump him up, and reinforce the bond between them (See how far I’m willing to go for you?). “If they’re on me,” Stone told me more than once, “they’re off him.” But the tantrums also brought Stone a great deal of attention. Once they became his signature, he seemed to feel obliged to satisfy the audience’s expectations.

While Stone provided the histrionics and zingers, Ruiz, dubbed “The Quiet Man,” played it strong and silent and ground out the wins. The arrangement seemed to suit them. When at a press affair an opponent would say he was going to kick Ruiz’s ass and everybody turned to Ruiz for a retort, slow-mounting ire would flicker around the corners of his mouth and eyes, but, after a well-timed beat, it was Stone who responded. Ruiz would nod along, receding in on himself, the drummer keeping time behind the horn player.

Whether managing Ruiz’s fighting career or conducting his own, more informal one in his roistering youth, Stone has never been an x’s-and-o’s man. He knows more about feeling than technique. I once asked him what attributes he values in a boxer, and he promptly answered, “First, the heart. Really, the balls.” Of “Irish, English, and French Canadian” descent, he grew up in Somerville, then left from 1967 to 1971 to serve in the Army in Germany and Vietnam. He had dabbled in boxing since first visiting a gym at the age of seven, but he was really a self-taught brawler. “I fought in the service,” he told me. When I asked what kind of fighter he was, he said, “I was a drunk fighter.” When I asked whether he was more of a tactical boxer or a free-swinging puncher, he said, “Depends what I was drinking. When I went into a bar, I expected to get in a fight. I didn’t always win, but I always fought.”

After he got back home, Stone drove buses for the MBTA. In the early 1980s, he started hanging around with his friend Gabe LaMarca at the Somerville Boxing Club, where he first encountered Ruiz, then a reedy, close-mouthed teenager. “I was sober a while by then. I seen this kid was riding his bike from Chelsea to the gym. To ride by Charlestown when you’re Puerto Rican, that’s something. We became friendly. I talked to some people, set up a salary for him.”

Trained by LaMarca and managed by Stone, Ruiz started moving up and getting better. But even as he grew into a heavyweight to be reckoned with, he showed why he would always be difficult to sell as an attraction. “We’d drive six and a half hours to the fight and six and a half hours back, and not a word,” recalls Stone. “I knew what he was about. He wasn’t comfortable with people, and it was uncomfortable for everybody else. They complained about it. Made him a hard fighter to raise money for. But I knew he was gonna be good. He had it.”