Playing in Time: Essays, Profiles, and Other True Stories

by Carlo Rotella

  I met Ruiz for breakfast one summer morning in Copley Square in Boston. 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 current popular ideal of a heavyweight boxer, exemplified 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 [postfight] 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.

  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’ grapplah. 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.”

  Stone and Ruiz disagree, of course, about who broke up with whom. When, over lunch at an Italian restaurant in Wilmington, Massachusetts, 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 “soften the blow” by saying that he was retiring, rather than that he’d been let go. 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 fifteen-month nightmare of seething tedium. “I just sat home and didn’t do anyt
hing. 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.

  On a Saturday afternoon in mid-September, Ruiz was the only fighter on the premises. He looked good—bulkier than ever in the chest and shoulders, and already close to his prime fighting weight of 235 pounds. Stripped to the waist, slicked with sweat, he toiled through a two-hour workout: shadowboxing, jumping rope, hitting pads held by his trainer, hitting the heavy bag and speed bag. Ruiz, who lived briefly in Puerto Rico as a child, had gone back to basics there: weights in the morning, boxing in the afternoon, roadwork at night; eat heartily and sleep well; repeat. He seemed pleased with the simplicity of the daily life he woke up to. Living in a rented condo in Old San Juan with his second wife and newly christened baby, he worked hard every day, honing himself. “I feel rejuvenated here, training, going into a fight prepared,” he said as he stretched, rotating his body at the hips and bending from side to side. It was a relief to be with a veteran trainer. Without Stone on hand to egg him on, he was taking a quieter, almost contemplative approach. Concentrating on refining his technique had rekindled his love of craft.

  There was something different about the way Ruiz carried himself in the punching drills. Siaca had altered his balance, resetting it so that Ruiz stayed back on his feet a bit more and was less inclined to dive forward at an opponent when he threw a punch. He also turned his hips and shoulders more than before, improving the leverage of his blows. Siaca, lumpy and bespectacled, said, “You see? The punches, the power? Shorter, more chop.” It was a subtle shift, but potentially an important one, as it could well denature the headlong style Ruiz and Stone had developed together. He would hit more crisply, but it’s far from certain that a more conventional Ruiz, standing back to throw more punches that might well win over more fans, could still break a man down. “We have seen Ruiz with Norm Stone,” as Don King put it. “Now we will see him without.”

  Ruiz would fight somebody soon, but he didn’t know who, where, or when. Maybe King would line up a marquee bout for him with a highly ranked contender, the short path to another title shot. Or he might meet a make-work opponent or two first, while Cardinale angled for a bigger fight. All he could do was train hard and try to be ready.

  A former champion who fights past his prime runs the risk of hanging on too long and becoming reliably beatable. Then he becomes a trial horse, a name that younger contenders can put on their résumé to establish their bona fides on the way to their own title shot. Such men in decline typically say they feel great. They always believe they’ve still got it, even as they absorb too much late-career damage. Ruiz would have to fight in order to find out which he was: a rejuvenated craftsman or a bereft singleton Corsican Brother who couldn’t beat the best without his foaming soul mate.

  Ruiz finished his workout at the speed bag. Its familiar clatter rose and filled the gym. He rocked from one foot to the other, alternating wrapped hands, in his rhythm, entirely consumed in doing it properly.

  After the split with Ruiz, Stone was sure he could never work with another fighter. “I was depressed, missing the gym. It was my life. I was in a bad state. But I didn’t realize alls I had to do was get off my ass and go to an AA meeting. It was ‘Poor me.’ Luckily, a friend of mine got out of jail and said, ‘C’mon, let’s go to a meeting,’ and bingo, I’m back in the life, at the gym. Guy called me, told me to take a look at Joe McCreedy. He needs a lot of work on his defense, but he’s a good kid, hard-workin’ kid. Doesn’t drink, no drugs.” Still, it was only after a great deal of hesitation that he agreed to manage the young boxer. “I wasn’t sold on it,” he said. “It’s here,” he said, pointing at his chest. “Gettin’ over Johnny.” Eventually, he talked himself into one more fling. “I’ll give it all I have, but I don’t know how much I do have. It’s been a long road.”

  McCreedy’s mid-July bout at the Castle was supposed to help Stone figure out what his fighter had. In McCreedy’s last fight, in October 2006, his jaw had been broken on both sides. They had to find out if the repaired bones would hold up in the ring, and also whether disaster could inspire McCreedy to discover a deeper toughness and desire in himself, as Ruiz did after being knocked out by Tua. That was the plan, anyway, until the state boxing commission informed Stone shortly before the evening’s first bouts that McCreedy’s had been canceled. The opponent, a bearded guy from Maine with the bright-eyed, questioning look of a psycho, hadn’t gotten the required signatures on his medical paperwork.

  Suddenly Stone and a tall black man from the commission were exchanging looks, stiffening, going into head-tilted pre-beef attitudes. “He threw me out of two fights,” Stone muttered to me, still holding the prospective opponent’s gaze with an infuriating come-and-get-it smile. “I don’t know what his fuckin’ problem is.” Suits and uniforms intervened, and Stone let himself be steered away from trouble, but he and his nemesis continued to exchange yearning gazes.

  The moment passed, though, and Stone just as swiftly regained his good humor when a two-year-old boy with a gorgeous head of tumbling dark golden ringlets ran up to him. Stone scooped him up in his arms, where he settled with regal familiarity. This was one of those grandchildren he had supposedly retired to spend time with. After a while Stone put the boy down, took him by the hand, and said, “Let’s go tell Joey he can’t fight.” To me, he said, “Joey’s gonna be bullshit.”

  Fighters and their cornermen were getting ready in the basement, a dingy, cluttered space broken up by crumbling once-white brick columns. The crews were scattered around folding tables strewn with jars of Vaseline and rolls of white athletic tape. Satiny robes on hangers dangled from exposed pipes.

  Stone found McCreedy, took him aside, and broke the bad news. The young man stared at the floor, miserable. “Things happen for a reason,” Stone said. “We don’t always know what the reason is. You got all your people here, you go up and see them. And you get your money. You get paid.” Stone put his arm around McCreedy’s sweat-suited shoulder and gave him
a bucking-up squeeze. “Thank God nothin’ happened,” he went on, gently insistent. “We didn’t lose the fight. I’ll make some calls, see if we can get you a fight quick. Okay? That’s why I hate this sport, but I love it, too. It’s bullshit, but it’s the greatest sport there is. You’re runnin’ down the field with the ball in your hands and somebody comes out of the stands and tackles you. But then another time you run down the field and nobody tackles you and you get all the glory. So be a man. Go on up.” The grandson took it all in, wide-eyed.

  This could be a bitterly wasted night for McCreedy, or it could turn out to be a small but telling moment for him—and for Stone, who forged his bond with Ruiz out of shared disappointment as well as hard work. The bond, more than anything else, is what brought him back. “What I’m lookin’ for now,” Stone told me, “is someone that’s gonna work hard, be at their own level, and not change.”

  * * *

  Original publication: Boston, November 2007.

  The Greatest

  RECENTLY (AS THESE THINGS are measured), and after almost three millennia of not imitating Muhammad Ali, a Greek boxer named Epeus started saying, “I am the greatest.”

  Epeus is a character in Homer’s Iliad; he makes a brief appearance toward the poem’s end, in book 23, during the funeral games for Patroclus. His moment at center stage begins when the bereaved Achilles proposes a boxing match, offering a prize mule to the winner and a two-handled cup to the loser. Epeus stands up to lay his hand on the mule, telling the assembled host that somebody else will have to settle for the cup. He freely admits he’s not much of a soldier, but he claims to be the best boxer around, predicts extravagant suffering for his opponent—“I’ll open his face and crack his ribs,” in one translation—and suggests that the opponent’s seconds stay close by to carry out the loser.