After The Gloves Came Off

Stone and Ruiz disagree, of course, about who broke up with whom. When, over lunch at an Italian restaurant in Wilmington, I asked Stone for his version of what happened, he turned to his lawyer, who sat silently across from us in the booth, and asked, “Can I say I didn’t retire?” The lawyer considered, then nodded. Stone turned back to me and said, “I didn’t retire. Tony Cardinale fired me.” He was referring to Ruiz’s longtime lawyer and adviser. Stone said he asked Ruiz why he had been fired. “Johnny said, ‘You got a little crazy.’” Then, according to Stone, Ruiz told him to say he was retiring, rather than that he’d been let go. “‘That’ll soften the blow.’” Stone says he ended up going along with the sham as one last sacrifice for his fighter.

“I never fired Stoney,” Ruiz told me, “and Tony didn’t fire him, either. I did tell him, ‘I want you to be part of the team—we stick together from the beginning to the end—but I want you to be more in the background.’” Stone couldn’t handle that, Ruiz says. “Look, if he could’ve been around the fight and said everything and not got paid, he would rather have that than get paid and be in the background.”

Stone’s exile was a 15-month nightmare of seething tedium. “I just sat home and didn’t do anything. Got up, had a coffee and a muffin, that was my day.” He knocked around the house, aimless, gagging on anger and shame. “John was like my son. I gave everything for that kid. I had a bad taste in my mouth.” Throwing himself so completely into the partnership now felt like a sucker’s mistake. “I made an asshole of myself and then I’m looking for the train and they’re on it and it’s gone. Him and the lawyer are riding the train, and I’m still at the station. John made a lot of money. I didn’t get paid for the work I done. That’s the bottom line.” The manager got his contracted cut over the years, but, as he sees it, Ruiz has at least a couple of million additional dollars that Stone should be passing on to his own grandchildren. “Johnny Ruiz was part of my family. I robbed Peter and gave to Paul, and Paul to give to John. I took out three mortgages on my house. I could have gotten a full pension from the T. I could be on easy street. How could he be so ungrateful? But people start whispering in his ear. When that happens, the guy closest to you is the first to go.”

Fight people sue each other all the time. It’s how they get paid, get even, register strong feeling, or demand respect. The breakup of Stone and Ruiz will end up in court, where money provides the means to keep emotional score. Whatever the outcome of the case, each man will need to go on with his life. Stone, who is 56, says people call all the time asking him to manage this fighter or that one. Ruiz is 35, “old for a fighter,” as he says, but the younger heavyweights at the top of the division strike him as eminently beatable. He’s going to make one more run at a title.

Manny Siaca’s gym is under the bleachers by a running track in Toa Baja, Puerto Rico, outside San Juan. Its concrete ceiling rises overhead in stairstep fashion; in the cavelike gloom below, heavy bags, sit-up benches, a speed bag, a rickety weight bench, and other tools of the trade are crammed into the margins around a single ring with unpadded ropes that burn a fighter’s back when he sags against them. Worn, stained mats and sheets of plywood cover the concrete floor. Mosquitos abound. The walls sweat in the wet heat. On one of them is painted a list of the world champions Siaca has trained.