After The Gloves Came Off

I met Ruiz for breakfast one summer morning in Copley Square. Watching him approach across the crowded plaza, what stood out most about him was how little he stood out. He was a former world champion, after all. Lennox Lewis, the last generally recognized preeminent heavyweight, had given up a belt to avoid fighting him. And yet Ruiz wasn’t particularly imposing; he somehow seemed smaller than 6 foot 2 and 245 pounds. He was out of training at the time, his face a bit pouchy under heavy stubble. In polo shirt, cargo shorts, and flip-flops, he projected no special aura of power or physical pride.

Over a spilled drink or some other typical provocation, your average weightlifter might well take a quick look at Ruiz and miss the mashed nose and air of bland competence and decide that it would be all right to confront him. Obliged to choose between facing down Ruiz or Norm Stone in a rage, such a guy might even choose Ruiz as the lesser problem. This would be a hideous mistake, but an understandable one. The popular ideal of a heavyweight boxer, inspired by Tyson, is a pop-muscled cartoon of menace. It would have been news to almost everybody who passed Ruiz on the plaza that at no time in the past decade would Tyson’s handlers have dared let him anywhere near this vaguely put-upon-looking guy with a fade haircut a little rucked up on one side from bed. Ruiz would have made Tyson cry and quit.

To understand why, you have to understand Ruiz’s fighting style, which minimizes his opponent’s advantages and maximizes Ruiz’s own advantages in conditioning and strength of body and will. Ruiz specializes in being nine miles of bad road, beating men who are bigger, quicker, and graced with more radiant athleticism by dragging them into a contest of wills. He can hit, but he also clinches and mauls, putting his body on the other man to wear him down rather than exchanging clean, crowd-pleasing punches.

“The best way I can put it,” Ruiz said over pancakes and fruit, “this guy I beat, Jerry Ballard, in the [post-fight] press conference he said, ‘Hey, man, you looked so skinny. I felt your jabs in the first round and I thought, No problem. But by the third round they were like cement blocks.’” The cunning application of brawn, the shoving and hauling, wearies a fighter to the point that he’s vulnerable to punches that didn’t hurt early on. “That’s what breaks them down.”

People who fetishize pumped physiques might not appreciate that the smooth-bodied Ruiz is the stronger and better-conditioned man in almost every fight. “He is strong,” agreed Holyfield, who is so stacked with defined muscle that he resembles an anatomical doll. “He would hold, push, mess up my game.” Just talking about it on the phone made Holyfield tired. “If I had to choose to fight a guy, I wouldn’t choose to fight John Ruiz.”

After holding on for a while at the top, Ruiz appeared to begin a gradual decline from his prime as he entered his thirties. As he did, the symbiotic balance between fighter and manager went seriously off-kilter. Gabe LaMarca had quit in 2003, Ruiz says, after falling out with Stone over money, and Stone, who took on the trainer’s duties, was growing ever more operatic, as if trying to compensate for Ruiz’s waning aggression. All his grandest bug-outs date from this stretch. Ruiz, who had always relied on being in better shape than his opponent, began cutting corners in training. “Johnny would never miss a day’s work, but he started missing days,” Stone said. “Johnny lost it. It just wasn’t there.” By “it” he meant the essential will to fight. “Me, as close as I was to him, I tried pressing him and pressing him. But everything became an excuse, and Johnny wasn’t a guy to have excuses.”