Ruelas’ Day of Reckoning Approaching : Boxing: Lightweight from Pacoima eager to test elbow broken in bout last April.

Gabriel Ruelas really wants to punch somebody. OK, that doesn’t make him much different than half of the drivers on the Ventura Freeway at any given moment. But this is different. Ruelas really wants to punch somebody. He needs to punch somebody.

Because he needs to know, at that moment when he finally does punch somebody, whether his right elbow will explode.

Ruelas, of Pacoima, was on boxing’s fast track a year ago. A lightweight with a mule-kick punch, he had piled up a sparkling 20-0 record with 14 knockouts and was likely just a handful of wins away from the big time--and a shot at a world championship.

But it all came tumbling down in Las Vegas last April 14 when a bone in his right elbow, a bone already fractured slightly during training a few weeks earlier without anyone’s knowledge, was snapped loudly in two during the seventh round when Ruelas’ opponent, Jeff Franklin, latched onto it and wrenched it violently during a clinch.

Ruelas stumbled backward and sagged to the canvas, the pain overwhelming him, and was unable to continue the bout. It was his first loss as a pro.

Now, 10 months and five metal screws later, doctors say the arm has healed. And Ruelas, 20, has returned to the Ten Goose Boxing Club’s gym in Van Nuys. And there, in the same gym where he once spent all of his days relentlessly pounding sparring partners, he now shadowboxes in front of a mirror. And thumps his fists lightly on delicately suspended, air-filled punching bags. And jumps rope and exercises and spits.

Everything except punch somebody. And not being able to punch anybody gnaws at him.

Because he has to know.

“I know how the elbow feels. It feels fine,” Ruelas said. “But it’s been so long since I’ve really done anything with it, so long since I’ve really used it.”

Used it, in boxing-ese, means used it to whack someone alongside the head with.

But, that day is fast approaching.

Dr. Tony Daly, one of the nation’s most noted orthopedic surgeons, had the task on Nov. 8 of last year--seven months after the injury occurred--of repairing the damage incurred when two of the three metal screws, drilled into the elbow bones at a Las Vegas hospital in the initial operation only hours after the injury, broke. Daly inserted two much larger screws and covered the damaged bone with a bone graft from Ruelas’ hip.

This time, Daly said, the injury has healed properly.

“The bone was very hard, like marble,” Daly said. “So we had trouble drilling it. But this time we inserted two larger screws, and it has healed perfectly. That elbow will not break again.”

With that prognosis, Ruelas came back to the world he had entered as a 12-year-old when he introduced himself--along with his brother Rafael--to Dan Goossen, president of the then North Hollywood-based Ten Goose Boxing Club, and Joe Goossen, the club’s trainer, and begged for a chance to fight.

During the lowest moments of Gabriel’s recovery, he thought it was a world he no longer would be a part of.

He moved with his 13 brothers and sisters and his parents to California from the village of Yerba Buena in the state of Jalisco, Mexico, in 1979, and decided last year that, without boxing, there was nothing left for him in the United States.

“After the first operation, the elbow never felt right,” Ruelas said. “The doctors kept telling me it was OK, but I knew it wasn’t. Sometimes it hurt just to jump rope. I thought that maybe I could box again. But maybe not. Before the second operation, I wasn’t sure that I’d ever get another chance.

“I felt bad, but I kept it to myself. I thought that if I couldn’t box anymore I would probably go back to Mexico, back to the land my father still owns and work the land for him, take care of the house and the property and the cattle. If I couldn’t box, I figured why bother with all of the complicated things in the United States, the taxes and the bills and everything? I really figured I’d just go back to Mexico, back to a simpler life, and forget about boxing. I figured there was nothing left here for me.”

The history of problems with Ruelas’ right elbow dates to his childhood in Mexico. At the age of 8, he was thrown from a horse and landed on the elbow. It had, doctors in the United States determined more than a decade later, been fractured then. But in the more-than-slightly rural setting of Yerba Buena, there did not happen to be an X-ray machine. Or a doctor. The closest facsimile was, well, let’s not use the words “witch doctor.”

Let Ruelas use them.

“She was, I guess, sort of like a witch doctor,” he said. “I would go to her house and she would rub these lotions and potions and sometimes some lard on the elbow every day. Eventually, it healed, but I could never really extend it, straighten it out, like I used to.”

That old fracture had healed improperly. But that was not determined until early last year when the elbow began hurting again during training and the Goossens brought Ruelas to a doctor for X-rays. Those X-rays, taken only weeks before Ruelas’ Las Vegas bout against Franklin, showed the old fracture but not a new fracture, according to the Goossens. And the slight pain Ruelas had mentioned to them was diagnosed as a hyperextension of the elbow, a painful but not serious injury that normally heals with rest.

But in the sixth round of his fight against Franklin, a fight that Ruelas clearly dominated until the moment he was unable to continue, a ripping pain shot through the elbow as his right fist made one of its frequent visits to Franklin’s head. Ruelas grimaced but continued to fight. And, without using his right arm at all, he still won the sixth round.

In his corner after that round, a heated debate raged between trainer Joe Goossen and ringside physicians who wanted to examine the obvious injury. Goossen won the argument, and when the bell sounded to start the seventh round, Ruelas rose from his stool and walked to the center of the ring.

His right arm lay virtually motionless against his side, the red boxing glove dangling below his waist. And even with that pathetic handicap, he still piled up points, using his left jab to pepper Franklin continually. But midway through the round, the fighters clinched, their arms locked together. And as the referee moved in to separate them, Franklin, who had been advised by trainer Johnny Tocco before the round that Ruelas’ right arm was injured, twisted his body violently to the right, locking Ruelas’ dangling arm and then jerking it inward and downward.

The bone snapped.

Ruelas swooned back into his corner and dropped to one knee, his face contorted in pain. The referee immediately halted the fight.

“We obviously did not know the elbow had sustained a minor fracture in training,” Joe Goossen said. “Our doctors told us it was a hyperextension, and we acted accordingly. He wanted to fight, the doctors said he could fight, and so we fought.”

“One thing people sometimes forget,” manager Dan Goossen said, “is that boxers are not like regular people. They are much, much tougher than the guys walking the streets. Guys get their eyes cut and nearly ripped out during a fight, with blood just pouring down, and they never want to quit. They keep fighting in that condition. So when Gabe hurt his arm in training, and we got clearance from doctors to fight two weeks later, we went ahead.

“I wish we had known before the fight how serious an injury he had sustained. Things would have been a lot different.”

Things like the medical nightmare that ensued. Dan Goossen will say only that he is “investigating possible legal action” against the Las Vegas hospital where the initial surgery was performed and against the doctor who operated.

But more important, he said, is that the arm has apparently, finally, healed properly. And Ruelas is ready to continue with his painfully derailed career.

“On the worst days, before the second operation when I thought about going back to Mexico, it would always make me sad,” Ruelas said. “Because as much as I would like that simple life, all I could really think about was how much I was giving up here, how all of my dreams were about to disappear on me.”

A tentative schedule outlined by the doctors has Ruelas graduating to heavier workouts in the next week or two, with the possibility of pounding the heavy bag a week after that. And then, if all goes well and the bone produces no pain and the somewhat shrunken muscles in his right arm continue to be rebuilt with weightlifting, very soon Ruelas will get the chance to do the only thing he really wants to do these days.

He will get to punch somebody.

And he could be back in the ring sometime in the spring, a boxer given another chance to chase a boxer’s dream.