After The Gloves Came Off

By 1996, Ruiz had put together a string of grueling victories that made it impossible to ignore him. He got his big break, a fight on HBO. The opponent was David Tua, a booming puncher well on his way to stardom. Beating Tua would set Ruiz on the path to a title shot. But Tua blasted him out in just 19 seconds, still the only time Ruiz has ever been knocked out. “A lot of people lost confidence in him,” says Stone. “Nobody wanted him on TV. HBO hated him. I couldn’t sell him to a fuckin’ glue factory.”

Humiliated, Ruiz sank into deep despair. He didn’t want to show his face at his own gym. Stone set to work on his fighter, convincing him that Tua had caught him with a lucky punch because Ruiz hadn’t warmed up enough before the fight. Stone promised he would never let that happen again. “I had to get him back into the gym to face his peers,” Stone says. “Took a couple of weeks. We sat down. We talked a lot. He didn’t do anything without me, I didn’t do anything without him. Finally, Johnny said, ‘Get me the toughest guy out there. Let me see what I got.’” Stone started him out with easy matchups, working him back up the competitive ladder. “I had to do the right thing. Build him up. Protect him, and my investment.” The loss to Tua had seemed like the end, but as Stone says now, “that’s the one that made us.”

Ruiz, his confidence painstakingly rebuilt, went on another impressive streak after the Tua fight, winning 11 in a row over the next three years, 10 by knockout, taking out several prospects and the fading ex-champ Tony Tucker. That earned him a title fight in 2000 with Evander Holyfield, a future hall-of-famer best known for defeating Mike Tyson. Ruiz lost on a debatable close decision, then beat Holyfield convincingly in a rematch, then fought him to a draw in a third fight. Ruiz emerged from this brutal trilogy with the World Boxing Association’s belt in hand, lost it, got it back, and defended it with honor, beating another series of talented big men—among them Kirk Johnson, Hasim Rahman, Andrew Golota, and Fres Oquendo—many of whom had been favored over him.

Stone handled Ruiz’s business with comparable bulldog valor. “Stoney was always on me,” Don King told me. “Always on me. In the morning, Stoney. In the afternoon, Stoney. I couldn’t breathe. ‘Jawny! You gotta think of Jawny! Do this for Jawny!’ Tylenol made a million dollars off me with Stoney.” King laughed his Old Scratch laugh. “Stoney was always fighting for Johnny. He just wants his man to win. That’s why he gets thrown out of fights. That’s why he yells and screams. He became more of an attraction than Ruiz. It made him look bad, but no one can deny the fervent passion and love for Johnny Ruiz. Even to his own detriment.” A note of wonder had crept into King’s voice. He couldn’t fathom loyalty powerful enough to trump self-interest, but he admired it. “They say of lawyers that they’re supposed to fall on their sword for their clients. He must have daggers all through his ass.”

Promoters and TV networks complained that Ruiz was a bad draw, but he still managed to earn some good paydays. With Stone at his side, he brought in more than $5 million in purses for the Holyfield trilogy, $1.5 million to wear out Johnson, another $1.1 million to soldier through a 12-round boxing lesson from the incomparable tactician James Toney. It wasn’t Tyson money, but it added up. “If you look back over the history of the heavyweights,” says Eric Bottjer, a respected matchmaker who worked for King during Ruiz’s championship run, “there are a lot of guys with John Ruiz’s abilities who didn’t make a tenth of what he made.”