John Ruiz has retired

Haye is all talk

 

a public service

 

Exactly. These guys need to stop making it an issue of nationality and make it an issue related to boxing.

As an American I appreciated Lewis, being one of the few I know who actually cheered for him against Holyfield and Tyson, and to this day think he is one of the greatest heavyweights ever and unfairly underrated by many. I also see Calzaghe as a truly great fighter, he staked claim to his weight class, and moved up to beat Hopkins and embarassed Jones. Hatton is a good fighter, not great, but he gets a lot of credit for not only beating Tszyu, but also fighting Mayweather and Pacquiao.

I give a lot of credit to Froch. He has fought against Pascal, now a titleholder at 175, Dirrell, Taylor and Kessler. His next fight is against Abraham, he is definitely fighting the best available and much credit needs to be given to him.

Haye, on the other hand, should just make the Klitschko fight now. I have nothing against him fighting Valuev and raising his marketability by beating a past it Ruiz, but now is the time to take on one of the brothers. If the fight isn't made then it will be hard to take him seriously.

 

he never signed the contract? yes he did you dumbass....the fight was 5 weeks away and 50,000 tickets were sold.

 

wouldnt be surprised if he retires both klitchkos... he's just better than them in every department

 

wladiimr he did, but vitali he didn't sign the contract. the reason the wladimir fight didn't happen was because haye's financial backer went bankrupt.

 

haye will do the same to thos ****** brothers.. :yep

 

If Stoney was still his trainor, Ruiz wouldn't have gotten TKO ed.

 

stoney would of got ko'd instead.

 

Says who? Haye still lies about that and says it was his back. It's astonishing to me how Haye fans know he lied and continues to lie to them about the Wlad pullout, and they just accept it. The guy is a liar. There is no way around it.

 

He accomplished a lot with very little. I give him props for that.

 

Nice to see somebody recognizes what a FRAUD and a DISGRACE this cheating POS was. If not for King's influence, no one would ever have heard of him after he got laid out by Tua.

It was King's influence that got Ruiz undeserved WBA rankings, and undeserved title shot after undeserved title shot. King's influence also got Ruiz a free pass for his ILLEGAL holding tactics and a friendly attitude towards his overacting to get "low blow" calls.

Boxing fans should be PISSED that they were RIPPED OFF of seeing the legitimate boxing matches they paid to see by this FRAUD. Ruiz cheated his opponents, and the fans, and for that he deserves NOTHING but criticism.

 

Yeah, thanks to DON KING!!!atsch

 

Ruiz was a hell of a determined fighter, he took what tools he had and made the absolute most of a very colourful career.. His career was like a heavyweight who's who glossary.. I was around Ruiz and his whole camp for many of his fights, especially the Kirk Johnson fight at Mandalay Bay .. I never realised how mean he got close to major fights , he was filled with a burning rage by fight time.. His team was full of great characters.. Stoney and Gabe Mari were great, and his PR man Bob Trieger is still a friend to this day... I was at the Haye fight and think it is honestly time the great warrior called time on a proud time in boxing... Not the most skilled, not the most celebrated, but on heart and drive he will be remembered by me as a Spirited World Champion who beat many guys he really wasn't supposed to.. God Bless...

 

THE KIMBALL CHRONICLES: Bidding Adieu To John Ruiz, Boxing's "Quiet Man"

By George Kimball
I wasn’t even in Atlantic City on the night of March 15, 1996. Mike Tyson was fighting Frank Bruno in Las Vegas the following evening, and Don King had dressed up the undercard with four other world title fights (plus Christy Martin-Dierdre Gogarty), so even though I worked for a Boston newspaper and Johnny Ruiz, who lived across the river in Chelsea, was one of ours, there was never any question in my mind where I should be that weekend, even though there might have been in Stoney’s.

But a bunch of us did get together to watch Friday night’s HBO show, a unique event the network’s then-vice president Lou DiBella had cooked up called “Night of the Young Heavyweights.” Not many of the 16 guys who fought that night were especially well known then, though several of them would be later. There were heavyweights from six different countries, and while six of these unknowns would eventually fight for world titles, only two would actually win one – and they both lost that night. Shannon Briggs got stretched in three rounds by Darroll Wilson, and Ruiz was counted out by Tony Perez exactly nineteen seconds into his fight against David Tua.

It was about as devastating a one-punch knockout as you’ll ever see. Nobody, or at least nobody in Boston, was exactly gloating about it, but the long-range implications were obvious. Even though Ruiz and his manager Norman Stone were saying “he just got caught; it could have happened to anybody,” anyone who’d spent much time around boxing could have told you that a knockout like this one usually turns out to be the first of many. (ED. NOTE: Or, I dare say, a career capper)

As an amateur Ruiz had been the best light-heavyweight in New England, but never quite made it to the top in national competition. In the 1992 USA Boxing Championships he lost to Montell Griffin. In the Olympic Trials in Worcester that year he lost to Jeremy Williams. You wouldn’t term either loss a disgrace – those two met in the final of the Trials, which Williams won, but then Griffin came back to beat him twice in the Box-off and earned the trip to Barcelona – but it did sort of define Ruiz’ place in the amateur pecking order.

As a pro Ruiz had already lost twice. Both were split decisions (to the late Sergei Kobozev in ’92 and to Dannell Nicholson a year later) and controversial enough that Stone could scream “We wuz robbed!” on both occasions, but now they, coupled with the Tua result, appeared to have defined his place in the heavyweight picture as well.
* * *
Three months later at the Roxy in Boston, Ruiz TKO’d Doug Davis in six. Davis was 7-17-1 going into that one and lost 16 of the 17 fights he had afterward. Davis was a career Opponent from Allentown, Pa., a little guy built like a fireplug who lost to nearly every mid-level heavyweight of his era, so the only real significance to this one was that back then he usually tried very hard to finish on his feet so that he’d be available the next time the phone rang.

To watch Stoney’s reaction, you’d have thought Ruiz had just knocked out Lennox Lewis at the Roxy.

As soon as the main event was over I’d glanced at my watch and realized there was an edition I could still make if I filed my story in the next 20 minutes. I was already pounding away at my laptop before the fighters cleared the ring.

Next thing I knew, a red-faced Norman Stone was directly above me, bent over and shouting through the ropes, which was about as close as he could come to getting in my face without falling out of the ring.:yep

The invective consisted for the most part of a stream of disconnected expletives, but from the few decipherable words in between I gathered that he hadn’t much enjoyed my interpretation of what the Tua loss might portend for Ruiz’ future.

Since I was on deadline, I just ignored him and kept writing. Trainer Gabe LaMarca and Tony Cardinale, Ruiz’ lawyer, finally dragged him away.

Seated next to me was a young boxing writer named Michael Woods, now the editor of The Sweet Science.

“What,” asked Woodsy, “was that all about?”

“Nothing, I shrugged without looking up. “He’s just a f------ psychopath, is all.”

I finished my story and filed it, and then raced to Ruiz’ dressing room. Stone was still there.

“I don’t come up in the corner and interrupt you between rounds,” I told him. “If you want to act like a jerk (though I don’t think ‘jerk’ was actually the word I used), fine, but don’t try and drag me into it when I’m working.”

Having gotten that off my chest, I added “Now. Is there something you want to talk about?”

Actually, there wasn’t. He’d just been blowing off steam. The point of the exercise had been to remind Ruiz that he was standing up for him.

But I’ll have to admit two things. One was that John Ruiz had 27 fights after the Tua debacle, and he didn’t get knocked out in any of them. (Even when he was stopped in what turned out to be the final bout of his career, it was Miguel Diaz’ white towel and not David Haye’s fists that ended it.)

The other is that if somebody had tried to tell me that night that John Ruiz would eventually fight for the heavyweight championship of the world, let alone do it dozen times, I’d have laughed in his face, so on that count maybe Stoney got the last laugh after all.
* * *
No boxer ever had a more loyal manager. Stone was a hard-drinking Vietnam veteran who eventually kicked the booze and replaced it with another obsession. He had enough faith in Ruiz’ future that he twice mortgaged his house to keep the boxer’s career afloat, and was so protective that he eventually convinced himself, if not Ruiz, that it was the two of them against the world.

At that point in his career Ruiz was still vaguely aligned with London-based Panix Promotions, the same people who were guiding the fortunes of Lewis. It is unclear exactly how beneficial this might have been to Ruiz, who between 1993 and 1996 flew across the ocean to knock out obscure opponents in some fairly obscure UK cards, other than giving him the opportunity to boast that he knocked out Julius Francis a good four years before Mike Tyson got paid a fortune to do he same thing.

Working with Panix’ other heavyweight client was also supposed to be part of the arrangement, but Ruiz’ actual time in the ring with Lewis was brief. Ask Stoney and he’ll say that Lennox wanted no part of him after “Johnny kicked his ass.” Ask Lewis and he’ll laugh and point out that sparring with Ruiz was pretty much a waste of time anyway unless you were getting ready to fight a circus bear.:yep

In any case, a few fights later Cardinal and Stone made what turned out to be a pivotal career move by enlisting Ruiz under Don King’s banner. (Panos Eliades seemed utterly shocked that a fellow promoter would poach a fighter from under his nose. “Ruiz isn’t Don’s boxer, he’s my boxer,” exclaimed Eliades.)

If Cardinale and Stone get full marks for aligning Ruiz with King, matchmaker Bobby Goodman deserves credit for the next critical phase of Ruiz’ career.