After The Gloves Came Off

Ruiz acknowledges that he slipped. “Since I won the championship, it’s been nothing but a downslide for me as the team came apart. It affected me mentally and physically. It affected my training.” The problem, he believes, was Stone, who was never a good enough businessman to exploit Ruiz’s status as the first Hispanic heavyweight champion and didn’t have the boxing mind to help him adjust to top-flight competition as Ruiz entered fistic middle age. Telegenic emoting didn’t make up for these deficiencies.

Ruiz traces the beginning of the end all the way back to 1998. “Things started getting a little more crazy when we signed up with Don King. For Stoney, it was like the world was his oyster. The more he talked, the more he wanted to talk. The more he got on television, the more he wanted to be on television. In my mind he did too much, in his mind he didn’t do enough. The weird part is he actually felt he was the fighter and the trainer, the manager, the promoter. I was like a phantom that came in the ring and left; that was one thing that felt kind of awkward.” Ruiz can talk when he wants to, obviously. I asked if his Quiet Man persona had been exaggerated by Stone’s tendency to suck up all the available air. Ruiz smiled thinly and said, “I wanted him to get publicity, set me up with reporters, and they were calling Stoney and he wasn’t even telling me.”

Ruiz came to regard Stone’s dramatics as not just distracting and embarrassing but also dangerous. While Stone describes his ejection from the Golota fight as akin to a baseball manager getting himself thrown out to inspire his team—and Ruiz did win enough late rounds to squeeze out a decision—Ruiz told me, “Hey, he took the cut stuff,” the coagulants and other treatments that a corner uses to keep cuts and swelling from becoming so grave that the ring doctor stops the fight. “I asked him, ‘What would have happened if I got cut?’ There was no cut stuff. I would’ve lost the fight because he acted up.”

They also came to disagree about Ruiz’s fighting style. “In the gym, he never done that shit, grabbing and holding,” Stone told me. “He was flawless. But on fight night you get the fuckin’ grappla. That style was safe for him, so he kept doing it. Half of the things you tell a fighter, it goes in one ear and out the other. If he had done in the ring what he done in the gym, he’d have been making 25 million a fight.” Ruiz, for his part, now says Stone and LaMarca made him one-dimensional. “When I was a kid, my stepfather taught me all kinds of boxing styles,” he said. “He would watch a fight on TV, then we’d try to do whatever he’d seen. I was knocking more guys out when I was younger.” It was Stone, he said, who pushed him to clinch more and punch less, turning a fight into an endurance test. “My stepfather stopped coming around the gym,” Ruiz said, “and I wondered about that. Later I found out that Stone told him to stay away. He wanted control.”

The breakup of Ruiz and Stone has produced the bizarre situation in which each now blames the other for the very tactics that allowed Ruiz to knock off so many gifted opponents and become champion. Eric Bottjer, the matchmaker, told me that the former partners can’t yet fully appreciate what they accomplished together. “When a marriage ends, things are said, things you regret, but then later you let that anger go. Right now they’re mad, but when these guys are older and they sit back, they’ll see how much they did for each other.”