Like Sean Thornton, the fictional heavyweight played by John Wayne in the classic 1952 John Ford film, John Ruiz is known as The Quiet Man. In Ruiz' case the sobriquet was bestowed for reasons utterly devoid of irony. He is a man of few words in almost any circumstance, and since in most public appearances he is accompanied by manager Norman Stone, who would make Don King look like a quiet man, the appellation becomes even more fitting.
Ruiz is by any standard a nice fellow, a family man who coaches his son's Little League baseball team and gives unstintingly of his time toward charitable causes. He is rated the world's top heavyweight contender by the World Boxing Association, and until he signed to fight for that organisation's championship, was ranked number one by the World Boxing Council as well.
At the same time, Ruiz is a fighter a lot of people have trouble taking seriously, which may help to explain why he is a 4 to 1 underdog in Saturday night's title fight against the venerable three-time champion Evander Holyfield.
John Wayne's Thornton, had, if memory serves, a skeleton in his closet - he had once killed a man in the ring. Ruiz' own haunting history, alas, is common knowledge. Four years ago, on March 15th, 1996, he stepped into the ring with New Zealand's David Tua for a bout on an HBO card billed as "The Night of the Young Heavyweights". Tua clocked him with the first punch he threw, a hard left hook that caught Ruiz high on the temple, and he was counted out 19 seconds after the opening bell.
Nobody's let him forget it since, and now, with Ruiz fighting Holyfield in Paris (or at least the Las Vegas version thereof) on Saturday night, it will inevitably be brought up again and again over the next two days.
"The questions are going to come up, and there's nothing I can do to stop them," Ruiz said. "Against Tua, I got caught with a shot. It happens. It's pretty hard to judge me by that fight, but if someone wants to, that's fine.
"I have the heart," vows Ruiz. "Without heart, you've got nothing."
Ruiz is 36-3 with 27 knockouts, but the names on his CV do not exactly comprise a Who's Who (or in a couple of cases, Who Was Who) of the heavyweight division. In addition to Tua, he lost controversial split decisions to a pair of decent fighters, Dannell Nicholson and the late Sergei Kobozov. He knocked out the late Jerry Ballard when the latter was rated a Top 10 contender. He stopped former IBF champion Tony Tucker, who had gone the distance with both Lennox Lewis and Mike Tyson, but for the most part his victims were culled from the vast sea of heavyweight mediocrity, the sort of fellows boxing types are apt to describe as "Opponents," with a capital "O".
"It doesn't take anything away from what I can do in the ring when people say I haven't fought anybody," says Ruiz. "In many cases, the same guys who are saying that are the ones who wouldn't fight me. But the bottom line, the only way to prove people wrong and end the questions is to beat Holyfield. That's what I intend to do."
This suggestion that others may have ducked Ruiz as much as he has avoided them is not entirely without merit. Lewis, while contemptuously dismissing his one-time sparring partner as "Johnny Louise", essentially gave up one-third of his undisputed domain rather than fight him. Earlier this year Stone had signed a deal for Ruiz to meet the then-unbeaten 6ft 7in Michael Grant, only to have Grant wriggle out of the contract to instead fight Lewis - who proceeded to thoroughly unmask him. The cynics, however, continue to insist that Ruiz' presence atop the rankings owes more to his association with promoter King than it does to his history in the ring.
"I'm number one in the WBA and WBC ratings, which I earned," Ruiz points out somewhat defensively. "I didn't jump from number 15 to number one. I came up the ladder."
In the four years since the Tua debacle, Ruiz has won 12 straight contests. He is the first New Englander to fight for a heavyweight title since Tom McNeeley lost to Floyd Patterson nearly 40 years ago, and were he to win, he would become the first-ever heavyweight champion of Latin American descent. Managed by Stone since turned professional, his career is also guided by the noted attorney Anthony Cardinale, a lawyer who dabbles in boxing (15 years ago he handled Sean Mannion) when he is not representing the nation's most celebrated mobsters in court.
For several years Ruiz was a Lewis stablemate, indentured to promoter Panos Eliades and manager Frank Maloney before Stone and Cardinale escaped that contract and signed with King, thus precipitating Ruiz' miraculous rise up the rankings.
Ruiz sparred with Lewis prior to the 1994 Oliver McCall fight (and, by all accounts, gave as well as he got), and participated in several fights in England - including a fourth-round KO of former Commonwealth champion Julius Francis at Bethnal Green back in 1994. In a couple of other fights against respectable second-tier contenders, he outpointed Jimmy Thunder and knocked out the durable Ray Anis in 22 seconds.
If Holyfield is impressed by all of that, he isn't letting on. "I've seen Ruiz fight before - he fought on a couple of my undercards," yawned Evander.
"For the longest time, I never expected to be fighting him or any of the younger guys, but when the last Lewis fight did not go the way I expected, I had to alter my game plan. I know Ruiz has some confidence and that he looks at this fight as his opportunity of a lifetime. But, I am always confident I will win."
John Wayne's Thornton only had to beat Victor McLaglen. Holyfield could be a taller order.
Ruiz is a wonderful kid and a credit to boxing, and while the possibility always exists that Holyfield could turn into Dorian Gray and get old before our eyes on Saturday night, we simply can't make a case for Ruiz winning. We can't see him outboxing Holyfield over the distance, don't see him knocking him out, and while we're inclined to agree with Ruiz and label the Tua fight an aberration, neither can we see Ruiz going 12 rounds with Holyfield without getting hit at least once - and that could be enough.
