Stone gets counted out by Ruiz
It should have ended with a kiss, but in the end there are few lasting love affairs in boxing.
Four days after John Ruiz was dethroned for the third and likely final time as World Boxing Association heavyweight champion, he severed professional ties with longtime manager and surrogate father Norman Stone yesterday, forcing Stone into an unwanted retirement because of growing strife inside the Ruiz camp.
There will be an announcement that Stone has retired to spend more time with his family. The former champion will thank him for all he did and say all the right things. So will Stone and several men inside Ruiz's camp who had grown to be at odds with the colorful character known as ''Stoney," and had tired of the many angry confrontations that seemed to erupt between them more often in recent years.
In the final days leading up to Ruiz's controversial loss by majority decision last Saturday night to Nikolay Valuev in Berlin, there was growing tension and animosity between Stone, Ruiz's attorney, Tony Cardinale, and Ruiz's brother, Eddie. Those problems came to a head during a stormy midweek meeting at the Hotel Maritim between the three that led Ruiz and Cardinale to threaten to pack their bags and return to the United States.
The fighter met with all three individually the next day, according to several sources within the camp, and ordered them to stay in Berlin until after the fight and for a truce to be reached. But simmering rivalries boiled over again after Stone erupted following Ruiz's loss and accused promoters Don King and Wilfried Sauerland of conspiring to steal the title from Ruiz.
Stone also got into a near-brawl after the fight when he returned to the ring and snatched the belt off the shoulder of the 7-foot-2-inch, 323-pound Valuev in front of nearly 10,000 cheering witnesses. One of Valuev's cornermen then attacked Stone but the fight was quickly quelled after heavyweight contender and Ruiz sparring partner Jameel McCline intervened.
But the end of Stone's professional relationship with Ruiz was already well in the works, a fall that began when he was thrown out of Ruiz's corner in New York early in a fight with Andrew Golota in November 2004.
More and more, Stone and Cardinale came into conflict, the final straw coming when Stone claimed he had no knowledge of King having obtained four options on Valuev as well as a 50 percent interest in the fighter as part of the bout agreement for the Ruiz fight, which was a mandatory defense. Cardinale claimed Tuesday they had no alternative if they were to avoid a purse bid that would have led to Ruiz receiving far less than the $1.5 million he did, and that Stone was aware of that situation. Since the substance of that deal had already been reported in the Globe, and King has a long history of seldom making a match in which he doesn't have both sides of the equation, it seemed unlikely all sides didn't understand what that deal was, although Stone may not have known the full extent of it.
Ruiz acknowledged before the Valuev fight he brought in a new trainer, ''Poppa" Ray Drayton, usurping part of the role Stone had been filling since the retirement of trainer Gabe LaMarca following Ruiz's loss to Roy Jones Jr. in March 2003. Ruiz felt he needed to hear a different voice in his corner and to have someone who would push him harder in training. Yet although Drayton did the training, on fight night it was Stone who was doing most of the talking, including an obscenity-laden outburst in the first round directed at referee Stanley Christodoulou that led to Stone immediately being warned.
But for all Stone's bombast, and the occasional problems it caused Ruiz, there would have been no John Ruiz story had it not been authored by Stone, who first met Ruiz when he walked through the doors of the Somerville Boxing Club when he was 14. Stone has been his loyal liege and often only advocate ever since, believing in him when no one else did, and putting his own money and health on the line for him.
Stone mortgaged his house three times to keep Ruiz's career going during the many fallow years before and after his 19-second knockout loss against David Tua in 1996. It was Stone who kept pushing people with little interest in a guy who lost in the Olympic Trials semifinals in Worcester in 1992, as a light heavyweight, and several times after that as a professional, to give him another chance. Stone was bombastic then, too.
Ruiz went through a string of promoters, including Al Valenti, Panos Eliados, Art Pelullo, and finally King, and Stone finally maneuvered Ruiz, with King's assistance, into a title shot against Evander Holyfield. That turned into a three-fight affair that resulted in Ruiz becoming the first Latino heavyweight champion.
But as Ruiz became more successful, all the blind loyalty, fire-and-brimstone rhetoric used by Stone to gain attention for a boxer known as The Quiet Man, as well as his legendary willingness to fight for his man at the drop of a hat, began to conspire against his own efforts. In the highest reaches of the sport, silence and diplomacy are sometimes necessary, and those were never Norman Stone's weapons of choice.
In the end, Stoney fought for his fighter every day in a world stacked against him. That is how they got to the top, but it was not the way to stay there. Stone's blind loyalty led to pointless feuds with HBO's Larry Merchant, various sanctioning bodies, and even King, who at one time Ruiz sued at Cardinale's suggestion. So now that the title is gone, so is Stone, a man left to walk alone into retirement while John Ruiz tries to resurrect his career.
The former champion, and the people left around him, may find that more difficult, and less enjoyable, than they think.
