Gabriel Ruelas lost his 130-pound crown on a night, he says, he was so weak from the flu that he could barely stand when he entered the ring – let alone when the referee stopped the bout in the fifth round. But he also says that, dazed and beaten, he looked over the referee’s shoulder and saw the fighter Jimmy Garcia glaring back. “He was making fun of me,” recalls Ruelas, “giving me a look I didn’t like.” But Garcia existed only in Ruelas’s fevered imagination. Azumah Nelson was the winning fighter that night. Garcia had died from brain injuries last spring – two weeks after Ruelas had battered him senseless in the ring.
Killing a man in the ring is a terrible shock to boxers; living with the memory can be even worse. Former champ Emil Griffith said he went through a long, private hell after he killed Benny (Kid) Paret in a 1962 fight. Though Griffith remained a stylish boxer, many experts believe he never again fought with the same fury. Boxers train to punch and parry, but nothing prepares them for death. “Anyone in boxing has to like hurting some, but you never think about hurting to that extent,” says Ruelas.
Garcia didn’t die in the ring. He lingered for days, never regaining consciousness. Ruelas visited the hospital twice, holding the comatose fighter’s hand and whispering to him. He consoled Garcia’s mother, telling her how sorry he was and how guilty he felt. He even promised the TV revenues from his next fight to Garcia’s children. “I didn’t do any of that so people would think I’m a great guy,” Gabe says. “I did it because of who I am.” But Ruelas found it far more difficult to comfort himself. “I’m not a religious man, but I prayed that somehow I would just get through it,” he says. It didn’t help that Ruelas was besieged by people – reporters, friends, strangers on the street: “Old ladies who knew nothing about boxing would come up to me and say, “What an awful thing’.” He returned to the ring six months later. But his hapless performance against Nelson only encouraged more talk – and it has resumed as Gabe prepares to return to the ring next month in L.A.
Nobody has a better perspective on Gabriel than his younger brother Rafael, who has fought alongside him throughout their boxing careers. Rafael is also in a comeback mode, having lost his lightweight title to superstar Oscar De La Hoya on the same night Gabe knocked out Garcia. “Sometimes it all seems to go against us,” says Rafael, “but I don’t think there’s anything my brother can’t overcome.”
It doesn’t seem fair that Gabriel should have to overcome anything else in what had been a storybook tale of perseverance and triumph. He was one of 16 children born in Yerbabuena, Mexico, a tiny ranching town in the remote mountains, six hours south of Guadalajara. “No TV, no bathrooms, no nothing,” he recalls. “Not even shoes.” It is the lack of shoes he seems to remember most vividly, the wet and chill on his feet as he performed early-morning chores. Today he buys shoes by the dozens and owns hundreds of pairs, some of which he has never even worn. His trainer Joe Goosen likes to tease him with the nickname “Imelda Marcos.”
When Gabe was 9 and Rafael was 8, older siblings living in L.A. sent for them “to give us a chance for a better future.” The brothers wouldn’t see their parents again for seven years. They moved in with their oldest sister in a tough neighborhood and started school. They also took jobs selling candy door to door to help pay the rent; their days stretched from 5 a.m. to 9 p.m. “We never got in trouble ‘cause we never had any time,” says Gabe. “By the time we got home we were just too tired.” But sometimes at night, Gabe would panic that he would one day forget his mother’s face. So the two boys scrimped to mail her money for a bus to Guadalajara where she could have a picture taken for them.
In school, Rafael was the student; Gabe, who was smaller, learned to be quick with his fists. At work, Rafael also proved to be a smooth-talking salesman; Gabe always took no for an answer. Still, it was Gabe who, at 14, made the most important sale of their lives. On his candy route, he wandered into Ten Goose Boxing, then a converted garage in North Hollywood. Enthralled, he pleaded with Goosen to let him train there. Joe refused. But one of Goosen’s top fighters intervened. “Train him,” he told Joe. “I like what I see in his eyes.”
Goosen relented, figuring he’d drive the kid off within a week. He ordered him to run every single day before he showed up at the gym. “I told him I was already getting up at 5 a.m. to do what I had to,” recalls Gabe. “He said, “That’s not my problem’.” A year later Goosen took on Rafael, too. Gabriel turned pro in 1988, his brother a year later. Dubbed “The Candy Kids,” they soon became big draws in L.A.’s boxing-mad Mexican-American community.
Like many cocky, young fighters, Gabriel expected to be champion someday. He never expected to become a role model. Now he even speaks at schools, though, unlike his brother, he never earned a high-school diploma. “I used to be the one listening to guys like me and saying, “Yeah, right.’ Well, maybe I’m not the guy who can tell them to stay in school,” he says. “But I can tell them the only way to make something of their lives is discipline.”
Now Ruelas must find the discipline to put Jimmy Garcia out of his mind. He’s convinced that he subconsciously created the image of Garcia sneering at him as a way of making himself angry and separating from the dead fighter. “Maybe that is the only way I could really let go – to say my goodbye to him,” he says. “Because I got to get on with my own life.” And, he hopes, never take another one.
