Cruel Twist Threatens Career : Promising Lightweight Gabriel Ruelas of Arleta Faces an Uncertain Future After Suffering an Elbow Fracture That His Handlers Claim Was Deliberately Caused During a Recent Fight

Boxing always has been a sport of bad breaks. Gabriel Ruelas, a boxer since the age of 12, knows that. He just didn’t think that he would ever actually hear the bad break when it happened to him.

“It snapped and it was pretty loud,” said Ruelas, an Arleta resident and North Hollywood High graduate. “And then the pain came.”

What snapped was the medial epicondyle bone in Ruelas’ right elbow. It happened April 14 in the seventh round of a fight in Las Vegas against Jeff Franklin, a fight that Ruelas was winning with ease and a fight that was to be the 19-year-old boxer’s springboard to network television matches and big paydays.

The contest turned into a fight-mare for Ruelas with the sickening sound of bone cracking. He underwent emergency surgery that night at Las Vegas’ Valley Hospital. Three screws were inserted to hold the bone in place and a cast was put on the arm to stabilize the damage.

On Thursday the cast came off--several weeks before the bone will be healed--and rehabilitation began. In the next few months, Ruelas, a crushing puncher with the boxing skills of a fighter with far more experience, will find out whether he can get back on the road to a world championship or whether his quest ended that painful night in a ring inside a Las Vegas hotel.

“In all my years of treating boxers, I have never seen anything like this injury,” said orthopedic surgeon Dr. Tony Daly of Los Angeles, who has treated some of the most famous athletes in the nation. “Hand injuries are common in boxing, but never this.

“Any type of elbow fracture is much more than a simple thing for a boxer. The main thing now is whether he will lose any range of motion in the elbow. If he doesn’t, he’ll be fine. But if he does lose some range of motion, well, then we’ll just have to see.”

Daly is optimistic that Ruelas, a lightweight who was 21-0 before the fight against Franklin, will recover sufficiently to continue his career. He warns, however, that the odds might be against him.

“With any elbow fracture, oftentimes you do lose range of motion,” Daly said. “For a boxer, that would be the end of a career. I think Gabriel will be OK, but it is an unusual fracture and you just don’t know what the result will be. But again, with an elbow fracture, a loss of range of motion is common.”

The cast was to come off and gentle rehabilitation was to begin Thursday because, according to Daly, to allow the bones to heal inside the cast would be a virtual guarantee that there would be great loss of motion in the joint. The rehabilitation of the still-healing bone, a process that promises considerable pain, is Ruelas’ only chance of regaining the elbow movement that is required to throw a punch.

The circumstances surrounding the injury and the cause of it are the subject of much debate. Ruelas and his trainer, Joe Goossen of the Van Nuys-based Ten Goose Boxing Club, are firm in their belief that Franklin intentionally wrenched the arm and fractured the bone. Franklin, his trainer and his manager are just as adamant that it was an accident.

In the sixth round of the scheduled 10-round bout, Ruelas, who had pounded Franklin with heavy, thudding punches for five rounds and had knocked Franklin down in the fifth, threw a vicious right that glanced off Franklin’s head.

“Right then, it hurt real bad,” Ruelas said. “I could barely keep my hand up after that. I felt like I wanted to actually hold up my right hand with my left hand. I think at that moment I cracked the bone.”

But he fought on in the sixth and actually won the round, using only his left hand. In the sixth and seventh rounds, Franklin, under instructions from veteran Las Vegas trainer Johnny Tocco, began aiming punches at Ruelas’ injured elbow. With each one that landed, Ruelas would grimace and back away. And yet, Franklin was still unable to dominate the one-armed fighter.

Then, 1 minute 5 seconds into the seventh round, the fighters clinched and referee Richard Steele moved in to separate them. What happened next has fueled great debate. Videotape of the incident clearly shows that as Steele tried to get between the fighters, Franklin pressed his left arm against Ruelas’ right arm and, in a violent twisting motion to his right, forced Ruelas’ elbow grotesquely inward. Ruelas collapsed in agony, clutching the fractured elbow.

Franklin, 27, now with a record of 22-4-2, was ruled the winner by technical knockout.

“The rules of boxing say you must break cleanly and step back when ordered to do so by the referee,” said Goossen. “What the tapes show vividly is that Franklin, instead of trying to break away and step back, spun his left arm against Gabe’s right arm, very forcefully. He tried to break it. There is no other explanation. It was as intentional as anything you could imagine. There could not possibly be any other intent.”

Nine days ago, Dan Goossen--Ruelas’ manager and the president of Ten Goose Boxing--filed an official protest with the Nevada Athletic Commission seeking a reversal of the decision and granting Ruelas the victory.

“The rule says if an accidental foul ends a fight, then you revert to the scorecards to determine the winner,” Dan Goossen said. “Even though we are not saying the foul was accidental, we have asked the commission to reverse the decision based on their own rule. The videotape shows that we are right. What is right and fair is our request.”

Franklin, who works as a bellman at the Mirage Hotel where the fight was held, is respected and well-liked in fighting circles. He said the injury to Ruelas was an accident, although he admitted that he was trying to further damage the elbow with punches in the sixth and seventh rounds.

He also said that no one has ever hit him with the force that Ruelas did in the fifth round when a crushing right knocked him down for the first time in his career.

“I think he probably broke the arm when he hit me in the fifth,” Franklin said. “He hit me so damn hard, it wouldn’t surprise me. That was the first time I had ever been down. I’d never been hit like that in my life. It wasn’t a flash knockdown, either. He really cleaned my clock. By the time I got back up and regained my senses, I noticed that his right arm was dangling at his side. At first I thought he was trying to sucker me in with that trick and he’d hit me with the right again. But then I realized it was no act.”

Ruelas said he felt no pain in the elbow until the sixth round. But Franklin said his cornermen noticed the injury immediately after the fifth-round knockdown and advised him to work on it in the sixth round.

“I figured that was my chance,” Franklin said. “I thought to myself, ‘I’ve got to mess up the kid’s arm even more.’ So I started throwing at it. I hit the elbow with two real hard left hooks, both of them right on the elbow, in the sixth. I hit it again in the seventh and then we clinched. I remember twisting to get away, because he was holding my gloves. So I twisted away. But I never thought then about hurting his arm like that.

“Would I purposely try to break someone’s arm? Absolutely not. Anyone who knows me knows I would not and could not even think of doing something like that. But things happen in the ring. It’s a very tough game.”

Tocco, who owns a gym in Las Vegas and has been in the sport for more than four decades, also said the injury was not intentional. But he did confirm that a “desperate” Franklin was told to take aim at Ruelas’ injured arm after the fifth round.

“I know the Goossens say it was intentional, but I don’t think it was,” Tocco said. “Franklin is just too nice of a guy to do something like that. But when we saw that the other guy obviously had a bad arm, I told him to throw punches at that elbow, and Jeff did. After all, all is fair in love and war.”

Franklin had been told by Steele after the sixth round that if he didn’t begin to defend himself better and throw more punches at the dominating Ruelas, the fight would be stopped. That, according to Tocco, made Franklin realize that he had only one more round to change the tide.

“After he was told that, he was desperate,” Tocco said. “I instructed him to hit the kid in that hurt elbow a few times. And when he did hit the elbow, the reaction from Ruelas was that he had obvious pain. I haven’t seen a replay of the injury in the seventh, but after the fight was stopped, Franklin told me he was just trying to break out of the clinch, to jerk his arms free, when it happened. He never said anything about trying to hurt the other kid.

“He yanked on the kid’s arm and the kid held Jeff’s arm and Jeff tried to turn him around and . . . who knows what he was trying to do?”

Wes Wolfe, Franklin’s manager, offered this: “I guarantee the Goossens that Jeff didn’t do it on purpose. Jeff is one helluva nice kid. It was unfortunate and in fact I hated to see it happen because it may hurt their kid’s career. But that’s boxing.”

And that is no consolation to Ruelas, whose career has now, at best, been put on hold for several months.

Ruelas, along with brother, Rafael, who is 16-0 as a pro, approached the Goossens as preteen-agers and persuaded them to allow them the use of the gym and to show them how to box. The Goossens did and were pleasantly surprised as the brothers proceeded to whip anyone they fought.

During an amateur bout at the age of 14, Gabriel sustained major damage to his left shoulder, tearing ligaments from bone after a powerful punch was deflected by his opponent. Surgeons told Joe Goossen that it was a startling injury for such a young boy.

“One of them said to me, ‘This kid must be able to throw some kind of powerful punch,’ ” Goossen said. “They told me that the injury occurred because Gabriel was simply to strong for his age, that his bones and tissue hadn’t developed enough by that point.”

Ruelas broke his right elbow at the age of 6 when he fell from a horse and has experienced occasional problems with it since. He said that two weeks before his fight against Franklin, he experienced more pain in the elbow. But two doctors--a local physician who examined the elbow at the Goossens’ request and a Nevada Athletic Commission doctor--gave Ruelas medical clearance to fight, diagnosing the injury as a slightly hyperextended elbow.

“Before the fight, I was worried about the elbow,” Ruelas said. “The first time I hit him with a right I expected it to hurt. But it didn’t. But every time I threw the right, I anticipated pain. But then, in the sixth round, I hit him hard and it really hurt the elbow.”

Nothing, however, prepared Ruelas for the pain he was to feel in the seventh round.

“It was just a simple clinch,” he said. “Steele came between us and I pulled back but Franklin didn’t. He turned to the side and twisted my arm real hard. He turned his whole body when he did it.

“That’s when I heard it crack. Loud cracks. And pain shot through my whole body. I tried to stay up but I went down on one knee and was holding the arm on my leg. I couldn’t move it at all.”

A few weeks have eased the physical pain for Ruelas as the shattered bone continues its healing. And the momentarily shattered dream seems to be intact once again too.

“At first I thought this might be it,” Ruelas said. “I thought about all the hard work in the gym and all the things I wanted to achieve in boxing, and I thought it was all gone, that the doctors were going to tell me it would take years to get back to where I was. But they told me I might be able to spar and box again in six months, and then I felt much better.

“I feel like I can get over this.”