Shaking Off a Blow : Stung by a Narrow Loss in WBC Title Bout, Gabriel Ruelas Girds for Another Chance

The human thunder rolled across Azteca Stadium in great, spine-tingling waves, earth-shaking sound blasting into the night as more than 130,000 hysterical fans worked themselves into a frenzy. In the ring, Gabriel Ruelas of Sylmar paced, feet scuffing the new canvas and sweat glistening on his face. As the foul air of Mexico City and the booming sound of the crowd swirled around him, the moment of a lifetime had arrived. And he heard only silence.

Ruelas, a boyish-looking man of 22, began his quest for this moment in the spotlight a decade ago when he and his brother, Rafael, now the top-ranked lightweight in the world, talked their way into the makeshift Ten Goose Boxing Club gym in North Hollywood. Gabriel was a 12-year-old selling candy door-to-door, but when he peered inside the smelly room he immediately saw visions of himself as a fighter in the shadows of the men pounding away at punching bags and each other.

Within a few weeks, after long and hard arguments to persuade trainer Joe Goossen to let him in, Ruelas laced on his first pair of boxing gloves. In the 10 years since, Ruelas has focused on boxing with almost a demonic single-mindedness. Every day, with only a handful of exceptions, he reported to the gym and, under the guidance of Goossen, worked himself to exhaustion while learning the intricacies of the brutal sport, the leverage behind punches and the defensive maneuvers that would keep his handsome face unblemished.

He learned well.

Fighting mostly in a 950-seat nightclub in Reseda called the Country Club, Ruelas started winning. Only once did he take a step back, that coming in April, 1990, in a bout in Las Vegas against veteran Jeff Franklin. Ruelas was fighting with an already injured elbow when, in the seventh round, two bones in his right elbow snapped during a violent clinch. For 13 months, Ruelas wondered if the dream had ended as two operations--the first a failure--to insert metal screws into the bones left him contemplating a return to his birthplace of Yerba Buena, Mexico, for a life on his father’s small farm.

But inside, the fire still smoldered. And so he went back to the gym and punched a bag with his left hand. Over and over until he couldn’t whack the bag even one more time. And when he came back into a ring in 1991, he was better than ever.

Late last year he rose to the top of the International Boxing Federation rankings in the junior-lightweight division. With only the freak loss to Franklin against his 33 victories, he now stood above all others in the division except one: champion Azumah Nelson, a fierce, 34-year-old fighter from Ghana who had achieved the status of a legend in the sport.

As Ruelas paced in the ring, Goossen at his side, the noise of the crowd suddenly vaulted from powerful to deafening , and from a far corner of the stadium Nelson and his entourage surged into view, the proud African garbed in tribal clothing and a thumping drum beat crashing from the giant speakers as he made his way toward the ring. He slipped through the ropes and the sea of people were on their feet now, roaring.

Ruelas stood and stared at Nelson. It was, he recalled, eerily quiet.

In the months preceding the fight, Ruelas received a crash course in public relations from his manager and promoter, Dan Goossen, and others. When Nelson apparently ducked him late last year, fighting instead a much lower ranked junior lightweight named Calvin Grove--and demolishing him--in Reno, Ruelas was at ringside. When that fight was over, he taunted the great Nelson, calling him a coward and, on national television, telling him that when they finally did fight, he would “kick your . . .”

The normally stoic Nelson seethed. Within a week a contract had been signed for Nelson to defend his World Boxing Council junior-lightweight championship against Ruelas. They would meet in Mexico City on Feb. 20. Ruelas, eager to promote the bout, continued challenging Nelson as Goossen and co-promoter Don King brought the fighters from city to city across the country. It was, Ruelas said, a genuine dislike. For about two days.

“After he ducked me and fought Calvin Grove, I felt like he cheated me out of my big night,” Ruelas said. “I was mad. When I said I’d kick his . . . I meant it. But later he smiled at me and then we talked and I knew that I couldn’t dislike the guy. He’s really a nice man.”

A nice man, the experts and others said, who would take Ruelas’ head off when the two fought. Too strong, they said. Too powerful, too much experience. It would be over, most thought, in five or six rounds. Ruelas could handle such talk from the boxing media and oddsmakers. Nelson should be favored, he reasoned. Nelson (35-3-1 at the time) had been through 16 world championship fights.

“I understood how they felt,” Ruelas said. “I’m 22. I hadn’t proven myself against anywhere near the level of opponents Nelson had. So I listened to the experts and just ignored it.”

What he couldn’t ignore were the same words from his friends and family.

“My own brothers said I was crazy for doing this,” Ruelas said. “They told me I’d get hurt, that Nelson was too good, that he’d knock me out. Coming from them, it hurt. We had some big arguments about it.

“But it made me realize something: No one thought I could beat this guy. They all thought it was going to be a mismatch.”

The bell rang and the moment had arrived. Ruelas met Nelson at the center of the ring and , quickly, punches flew from both fighters. Within a minute, a pattern emerged. Despite the power of each fighter (42 knockouts combined), this bout was to feature two of the greatest defensive fighters of this era. Time after time, whistling, lightning-fast punches grazed the top of a head or missed, whipping past a face or being picked off in mid-flight by a glove or forearm.

On into the night they fought, the warrior and the kid, and neither retreated. In the fourth round, Nelson unloaded perhaps two dozen hard punches. And Ruelas ducked every one. A round later, it was Nelson’s turn to frustrate as he avoided nearly every punch from the fast-handed Ruelas.

No knockdowns.

No one shaken .

And then, after 12 rounds, it was over.

Nelson won the fight, taking it on two of the three scorecards--by margins of one and two points--with the third judge calling the bout a draw. The moment Ruelas had dreamed of and furiously pursued for a year had passed in the wink of an eye.

“I couldn’t believe it was over,” Ruelas said. “When Joe had told me there were just two rounds left, I couldn’t believe it. I felt like the fight had just started, like I could have fought 15 more rounds.”

That, perhaps, was the problem. If Ruelas, who clearly had frustrated Nelson throughout the bout, had been more aggressive, had chased down the champion more frantically and had taken more chances, he likely would be lugging the WBC championship belt around with him today.

Instead, he must wait for another chance. It is, however, a chance he knows he will get. “I’m 22,” he said. “I haven’t even started yet. There will be other chances, and what I learned in that fight will make me a champion the next time.”

Perhaps. In the meantime, Ruelas has learned something else. A close loss against a legendary fighter such as Nelson, who has held three world titles in two weight divisions, can mean more than a victory over an average fighter. For despite the loss, Ruelas remained close to the top in the latest rankings. He is the No. 2-ranked contender on the WBC list and ranked No. 4 by the World Boxing Assn., leaving him in position for another chance at a world title, likely tis year.

“The day after I got home, I took my little nephew to a McDonald’s in West L.A.,” Ruelas said. “And right away people started staring at me. The workers, the customers. Finally, someone came over and said, ‘Are you the guy who fought on TV Saturday night?’ When I said I was, they were all over me. Autographs, patting my back, everything. It was the first time anything like that ever happened.”

Ruelas, who grew up in a family of 14 children picking garbanzo beans and doing other farm chores in a remote section of southern Mexico--he and Rafael used to walk and ride mules for miles to get to the house of a man who had a television set--earned more than $150,000 for his battle against Nelson.

That was part of the dream, too.

“To have this kind of money now, and to see what money is still out there for me, is kind of unbelievable,” he said. “I used to think about having money to buy things like a house, to help my family, but it seemed so far out of reach.

“Actually, the whole thing has been kind of unbelievable. I remember being a little kid, an amateur fighter, and Joe Goossen taking me to the Country Club in Reseda to watch the professionals box. He said, ‘Some day, you could be fighting here too.’

“And now look at all we’ve done.”