For Ruelas, Long Wait Follows a Short Fight

A long night got longer for Rafael Ruelas.

After the fight of his life had lasted only a couple of minutes longer than the Kentucky Derby earlier in the day, Ruelas made the loneliest walk of his life back to his dressing room in the back lot of Caesars Palace, only to find it locked.

“Doesn’t anybody have a key to this damn thing?” Ruelas’ trainer, Joe Goossen, called out plaintively, with his fighter leaning against the door.

“Doesn’t matter,” Rafael said, looking at the floor. “Doesn’t matter.”

Behind the gushing fountains and rippling pools, in the same outdoor ring where Hagler floored Hearns, where Leonard shocked Hagler, where Holmes walloped Cooney, two lion-hearted lightweights from Los Angeles came to blows Saturday night in a clash grandly billed as La Batalla , the battle. There were not, alas, all that many blows, and the ones that landed hardest landed flush on Ruelas’ face.

The meanest fights often end soonest, because of the savagery inherent when one opponent gets his blood boiling and desires to prove something to the other. This one had a ton of buildup and only a snippet of action, before the referee, Richard Steele, wisely stepped in and stopped the carnage that Oscar De La Hoya was wreaking before it got any worse.

ODLH by TKO.

Backstage, the drama before the fight had lingered right to the end. Ruelas was late coming out of his dressing room--and didn’t have much luck getting back into it. He had remained behind that same closed door, making De La Hoya wait, before the fight, until finally someone from Nevada’s boxing commission came banging on the door, yelling: “What’s the holdup in there?”

Goossen opened the door and calmly said: “We’re coming. What’s the problem?”

The problem was that De La Hoya had already spent several minutes dancing inside the ring, trying to stay warm on a chilly desert night.

Thrown together to the bitter end, these two warriors had trained down the road from one another in Big Bear, and their dressing rooms here stood only 10 feet apart. As his arch-nemesis De La Hoya paced his cubbyhole as if it were a maternity ward, skipping rope and prowling like a panther back and forth on a quilt-patterned rug, the sound of music from a Vicente Fernandez compact disc blared away inside Ruelas’ room, loudly enough to be heard a hundred feet away.

A preliminary fight involving Rafael’s brother, Gabriel, came to an end with Gabe’s opponent, Jimmy Garcia, going to a hospital in critical condition. Joe Goossen had worked this brother’s corner as well, and at one point when Gabe declared himself tired, his trainer looked him in the eye and said: “You got plenty of time to get untired. Walk through this punk. He doesn’t want any part of you!”

After his fight, Gabe hurried back to the pavilion where a plaque bearing his own name had been nailed on the same door beneath his brother’s. The actor Gene Hackman patted him on the back, and together they ducked into the dressing room to see how Rafael was doing.

“My fight took longer than I thought it would,” Gabe emerged to say. “I think I was thinking too much about my brother.”

He hurried and dressed to see the main event. The weeks before this night had been stressful on the whole Ruelas family, Gabriel’s wife even stumbling and falling while carrying their infant child. Her son Diego was not injured, luckily, but Leslie Ruelas ended up with a cast on her leg.

Hackman, who has been in the Ruelases’ corner for years, presided over a coin flip that decided which young champion, De La Hoya or Ruelas, would climb over the ropes first. After the toss came up Ruelas’ way, Hackman laughed and said: “Two-headed coin.”

It would be Rafael’s last victory, however.

Once he finally strode to the ring, to the shouts of admirers from north and south of the border alike, Ruelas limbered up in the ring wearing the colors of Mexico’s flag. The ring announcer, Michael Buffer, picking up on the theme for the evening, called into the microphone: “Ladies and gentlemen, damas y caballeros , let’s get ready to rumble!”

Kissing his glove, De La Hoya waved to the crowd, looking for all the world as comfortable as though in his own living room. Introduced as the pride of East L.A. and the golden boy, Oscar had shrugged off the backlash against him that came from fame, saying: “People want to see me lose. The image I have, the golden boy hype, they want to see me go down. But I won’t let that happen.”

He didn’t.

Having said that a slick boxer can beat a tough guy anytime, De La Hoya set about proving his point. From the opening bell, he encountered a Ruelas who stood awkwardly, feet far too far apart, and pummeled him mercilessly.

After a crisp left hook from De La Hoya backed Ruelas into a corner, Roy Jones Jr., the super-middleweight champion doing analysis for television, immediately observed that Ruelas was fighting off his heels, not up on his toes. Ruelas looked so unsteady that Jones remarked: “He looks like an old guy who’s been fighting too long.”

Round 1 ended with De La Hoya striking a proud pose in front of Ruelas, as though asking if that was the best he had. An unofficial punch count revealed that during those opening three minutes, De La Hoya had whistled 55 jabs at Ruelas, landing 24 of them. Ruelas landed none.

The second round was the last. De La Hoya began peppering Ruelas with strong combinations, for which his opponent had no answer. Even before Ruelas went down, Jones said on the telecast: “I think Ruelas is out!”

And soon he was.

“Ruelas is on queer street,” Jim Lampley said on television, using an old boxing expression for a fighter who’s out of it.

“Ruelas seemed to be on queer street before the fight,” Jones commented.

The disrespect that had been part of the fight’s buildup had been more raw and hurtful than some of the actual punches thrown, but now that it was over, the better man had clearly won. Gabe Ruelas stood outside his brother’s door, Rafael finally safely on the other side, and said: “I didn’t have anything good to say about Oscar De La Hoya before this fight, but I’ve got to admit it now and so does my brother. The man can fight.”