Gabriel Ruelas Comes Back to Win

Awakened by being knocked down, Gabriel Ruelas eventually took control of what was supposed to be a meaningless undercard tune-up fight Tuesday night.

In the evening’s main event at the Reseda Country Club, highly-ranked heavyweight Lionel Butler scored a first-round technical knockout over Jerry Jones after opening a cut over Jones’ left eye.

But the most dramatic moment of the night was Ruelas, the World Boxing Council’s No. 1-ranked junior-lightweight awaiting his second title shot, toppling in the second round.

With his right hand dropped low, Ruelas was caught with a long left hook from journeyman Raul Hernandez.

But Ruelas (37-2, 20 knockouts) soon was up and on his way to dominating the rest of the lightweight fight.

But not without a swollen face to remind him of the second round.

“I guess what I learned was you can’t be patient, you can’t let the other guy get off,” Ruelas said with a smile later. “I paid for it.”

The fight was stopped at 1:17 of the seventh when Hernandez’s corner threw in the towel with Hernandez (18-17-2) bleeding heavily from a cut over his right eye.

After a slow first round, Ruelas slowly spun away from a Hernandez charge early in the second, dropped his right hand to throw an uppercut and was immediately caught flush in the face.

Ruelas said it was the second knockdown of his career, and that he wasn’t hurt this time.

“This is how focused I was: First thing I thought about was how scared Joe and Dan must be,” Ruelas said. “It was like, ‘Ooooops, ‘ “ Ruelas said. “But I wasn’t hurt or anything. I was just lazy.”

After fighting off Hernandez for the rest of the round, Ruelas got more aggressive in his counterpunching and began landing hard inside punches. Ruelas lost the first two rounds on the judges’ cards, and, although his nose was bleeding lightly, won every round after that. Trainer Joe Goossen said he thought Ruelas, fighting six pounds over his usual fighting weight, approached this bout too much like a sparring session.

“Gabe has a habit of doing that,” Goossen said. “He stepped back and dropped his hands like nobody was going to do anything about it.”

In the heavyweight bout, the 242-pound Butler, the WBC’s No. 3 challenger, drove the taller, skinnier Jones into the corners and scored with short uppercuts and hooks to the body.

“I expected more out of him,” Butler said. “He’s crafty and he’s a good boxer. But once I found out he couldn’t punch, I decided to just take him out.”

The bout was halted by the attending physician after the first round. “After I felt his punches in the first round, I thought, ‘Is this all he’s got?’ I felt sorry for him,” said Butler, who is 21-10-1 with 16 KOs. Jones, who gave World Boxing Organization champion Michael Bentt the only loss of his career, fell to 9-8.

“I think I hurt him real bad with a left hook early, really early, and he fell out of his game plan.”

In earlier fights, super-middleweight Rodney Toney (11-0-2, 5 KOs) knocked out Ken McCullough (4-4) at 1:43 of the second round, and P.J. Goossen (10-0, 9 KOs) scored a technical knockout against Jerry Rosenberg (8-11-1) at the end of the first round.