By Bart Barry-
GUADALAJARA, Mexico – Sunday nights at Arena Coliseo, downtown, are noches familiares (family nights) when the lucha libre begins at 6:00 PM local time. The masked luchadores congregate in the lobby whilst ticketbuyers queue and mask vendors assemble their displays. If you spring for $10 ringside seats, in front of the chainlink fence, a selfemployed usher shows you your spot for a small but assumed gratuity.
What follows is 150 minutes of theatrical, performative violence done by acrobatic athletes. What thousand children gather wear smiles, every one. It’s combat sans sadism, catharsis without malice. Most of all it is fun. Rarely is our beloved sport fun. Enough alcohol and friends, and our sport has funny occasions. But how often does anyone review a prizefight and think it was a fun evening? Now take that number and subtract the folks who feel guilt shortly thereafter – a man could die in the ring, after all, we remind ourselves tirelessly – and you’re left without a handful.
With one blessed exception: Ruiz-Joshua 1 – the rematch of which happens Saturday on DAZN somewhere far away from wherever you’re reading this. Ruiz-Joshua 1 was boxing’s one night of delivering guiltfree jollity enough to be a beersoaked family night of lucha libre.
That night a made-man got exposed indecently by what looked like a bellyjiggling toughman. None of us gave Ruiz a shot, not necessarily because we didn’t know who he was or what talent he had but because everything about Joshua’s ascent was so preform scripted none of us imagined a happening so absurd might befall him; any man with better than a 1-in-10 shot of beating Joshua, we assumed, had been filtered before the Madison Square Garden contract collected its ink.
Yet there Joshua was, the prodigy – Olympic gold medalist, sculpted giant, undefeated collector of men’s souls, unrivaled seller of tickets – stankylegging his chiseled bulk about the bluemat and transferring his disbelief to the rest of us, refusing to toe the line in round 7 after his fourth knockdown. Then Ruiz jumping in ecstasy, his back shimmying everywhere like spilled glitter, and his unmanned foe commandeered the microphone to call him the better man several times and several more. Well.
Here are some things that didn’t matter until Joshua got stopped but matter in retrospect and preview. Ruiz and Joshua are the same age, 30, but Ruiz has been boxing twice as long. Joshua won a gold medal at London 2012, but Ruiz had more than twice as many amateur bouts. Joshua was 22-0 as a professional before their June match, but Ruiz was 29-0 three years ago. Joshua is the darling asset of his country’s best promoter, but Ruiz spent nearly all his career under boxing’s best promoter. And as ace writer and editor Matthew Swain tweeted last week, Joshua may be an athlete, but Ruiz is a fighter.
That distinction is the one that mattered in their first tilt and anticipates their rematch. Watch the men’s reactions whenever both land stiff shots. Joshua admires his work and expects to be left in a quiet, happy place while he does so. Ruiz leaps at his opponent with another combination and keeps punching till the ref makes him stop. Ruiz expects to be struck and hard, and if he didn’t quite expect to be nearly decapitated by Joshua’s round 3 combination, 6-3, uppercut-hook, boxing’s purest combo according to Joe Frazier (if you land the 6 then you cannot miss with the 3), he knew exactly how to behave after it came.
Meanwhile it was amateur (half)hour for Joshua thereafter. He got inside his opponent’s comparatively tiny range, got slapped silly by a balance shot, and never recovered at all. And when he pleaded with his corner for a tip, he was told “lefts and rights” – which, as this column goes to print, exhaust the options in boxing’s lexicon; all that was missing from that show was a waterfilled latex glove playing enswell.
Today Joshua says all the right things, just like yesterday and yesteryear – back to basics, trust his intuition, go with what got him there, a brand new fitness regimen. None of these things fixes the technical flaws Ruiz brought to light, much less the mental weakness Ruiz amplified by contrast, much less the experience of Joshua’s public emasculation.
What hope does Joshua have in Saturday’s rematch? He retains a ridiculous size advantage, excellent power, and every sanctioning body’s and broadcaster’s rooting interest. Ruiz went for the money and conceded most everything else, because why not? Ruiz’s former promoter, Bob Arum, in an interview with The Ring mischievously alluded to Joshua’s preference for host countries with lax testing protocols, too, and Saudi Arabia’s probably couldn’t be looser.
None of those things, though, makes a Joshua rematch victory probable. Joshua cannot outbox Ruiz and would be foolish to try. He cannot throw more fluidly in combination than Ruiz. A chin is not something one acquires in his 24th professional fight. And that’s before one considers Joshua’s evident conditioning issues. Well before spazzing hither and yon against Ruiz, Joshua showed selfdoubt against under-40 athletes; he knew better than to think carrying so much muscle in the ring makes for finessed, lateround showings.
Jester or otherwise, Andy Ruiz knows exactly what he is when he looks in the mirror. Anthony Joshua does not any longer, if he ever did. He knows his career’s greatest advocates either overestimated him or lied about it.
If Joshua takes an honest inventory of what mountains of selfdoubt now enclose him and uses that inventory to create desperation enough to fuel a savage firstround blitzing of Ruiz, Joshua may well prevail. Or he may get stretched again. But if he cautiously wades in and lets Ruiz warm, he’ll enroll himself in a game of keepaway he’s too robotic to win.
I’ll take Ruiz, KO-6.
Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry
