They Ought to Be in Pictures, These Brothers Not So Grim

Once upon a time, there were two boys who lived on a ranch near Guadalajara with nothing on their feet but dirt. They went hunting with slingshots for birds and rabbits, stepped through fields of chickpea and corn and walked mile upon mile without shoes, their toes frozen. One morning when a neighbor boy came by, Gabriel called out to his big brother, Rafael: “Mira, tiene calcetines!”

(“Look! He’s got socks!”)

Actor Gene Hackman believes the true story of the Ruelas brothers would make a hell of a movie--sort of pulp nonfiction. Fifteen years have passed for the barefoot boys. From a plush sofa in a rented 5,000-square-foot home near the ski slopes of Big Bear, a world apart from the one in Mexico that he and his brother once knew, Gabriel is saying, “Gene Hackman’s wife thinks we should start with my shoes.”

With his shoes.

“Go on. Tell him,” says Joe Goossen, trainer to the Ruelas brothers and good friend to Hackman.

“I’ve got, like, 1,000 pairs of shoes,” Gabriel says.

“Tell him what I call you.”

“He calls me Imelda Marcos.”

“Because you’ve got more shoes than her.”

“And I call him Julia Child, because he does the cooking.”

“Gabe, just tell him about the shoes.”

“OK, OK. So anyway, when we were little, we had nothing. No electricity. No TV. No phone. No nothing. The closest TV was some guy’s who lived 75 miles away. Sometimes we would go that far just so we could see something on TV.”

Rafael says, “‘The Lone Ranger.”’

“Something. Anything. As long as it was TV,” his brother continues. “But wherever we went, we would walk. And our feet would just freeze! My toes, they were so numb, I thought they would break off. They were like little icicles. Our father, once or twice he would slaughter a cow, just for the hide. Just so he could make a pair of shoes for one of us. Those leather things, those open sandals. . . .”

“Huaraches.”

“Yeah. And I would go to sleep at night and I would think to myself, ‘One day I am going to have a whole bunch of shoes. As many shoes as there are!’ Which is why now, no matter where I am, the first place I go is the shoe store. All I do is buy shoes. And now they’re everywhere! There are shoes in my son’s crib. There are shoes in the trunk of my car. Boxes of shoes. Shoes I’ve never worn. Sometimes I have to give them away--shoes nobody’s worn! Just because I used to dream about shoes.”

Later, they would dream of belts.

Shiny belts, encrusted with jewels. Championship belts. Born 10 months apart--”Catholic twins,” as siblings born in the same year sometimes are called--Rafael Ruelas is International Boxing Federation lightweight champion and Gabriel Ruelas is World Boxing Council super-featherweight champion. Two sweet kids in a violent occupation, fighting their way out of Los Angeles with a unique bond of brotherly love.

Hackman has been in their corner practically from the beginning. He explains, “I’ve been close to the Goossen brothers for a number of years and have followed all of their fighters closely. But the reason I’m so taken with the Ruelas brothers is that they possess so many wonderful virtues. They have all the courage in the world and they’re the nicest kids in the world.”

Unaware that their fists would make their fortune, the boys came to the United States as pre-adolescents in 1979. Rafael made straight A’s in school. Gabriel made a fool of himself in school. Rafael did what his teachers said. Gabe’s teacher threatened to break every bone in his body. Rafael one summer found work in a lawyer’s office. Gabe was on his way to needing a lawyer.

He hated school and he loved to fight.

“I don’t know what was wrong with me. I’d tell my friends, ‘Any time there’s a fight, give me a call.’ ”

Rafael tried to steer his brother right. One was the sensible one, one the irresponsible one. Gabe played class clown. About all he did at North Hollywood High was drop out of it. Nothing much interested him except a class in cartooning. He was aimless and wayward, and the only reason Gabe had any spending money at all was because Rafael had spotted a leaflet pinned to a tree. It read: YOU CAN EARN $75 A WEEK AND MORE.

Selling candy.

Around and around the neighborhood they went, selling Rothschild’s confections. Rafael would knock on a door and politely launch into his speech. The company would pay a sales-kid $15 simply for memorizing it. Rafael got the patter down pat, just like that. It took Gabe a year. Neither boy spoke English all that well, yet that never stopped Rafael. He applied himself. He had persistence and he had patience, particularly with the customers.

“Hello,” he would say. “I’m working for Junior Careers and I’m selling. . . .”

No thanks, people would snap. Or just plain no.

Gabe would give up. No meant no. Or he would see homes with no lights on, assume no one was home and not knock. Or he would try to con people. Say he was working to earn a free day at Disneyland and only needed to sell a couple more boxes, so please, please, please. Or he would see a Mercedes parked in front of an expensive house, rap on the door, be rejected by the person who answered, then stand on the sidewalk, yelling, “You cheapskate!”

Unlike his brother.

“Rafael would at least ring the bell, even if the house was dark. And someone might answer. Then he would do his speech and maybe the guy or the woman would say, ‘No, I’m on a diet.’ But my brother would say, very nicely, ‘OK, have a nice day. Or maybe you might like to buy a box for someone else--for a friend, or for a gift?’ And they’d stand there and keep listening. Man, I would have been long gone. But Rafael would make a sale.”

“Because that’s how you sell,” his brother says.

“Tell him about doing your candy speech at the press conference,” Joe Goossen suggests.

“Oh, OK. So I’m making my first defense as world champion,” Gabe obliges, “and I get up there before the microphones and I say: ‘Hello, my name is Gabriel Ruelas and I’m the WBC champion of the world. I just bought a little house and I’m trying to get a bigger house and I’ve got a wife and child to feed, so won’t you buy a ticket to my next fight?”

His next fight is this Saturday, at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas against sixth-ranked Fred Liberatore. His brother’s next fight is on the same card, against second-ranked lightweight Billy Schwer.

“Selling candy, we could never give two boxes for the price of one,” Gabe says. “Now we can give you two boxers for the price of one.”

Into the room runs a dog the size of a mouse.

It is a Mexican Chihuahua with pointy ears and legs like toothpicks. It is a dog that Goossen scoops up and stuffs inside his shirt, like a baby kangaroo in a pouch. The dog’s name is Pippin, he says. “No, it’s not,” Gabe says. “The dog’s name is Junior.”

“Tell him about the dog.”

Gabriel was in Mexico when he found the pup. Upon bringing it back to the States, he decided to stuff it inside his shirt, rather than cage it and check it like cargo. A stewardess caught him with the dog and raised holy hell. She sicked the authorities on him at the airport. Goossen knew nothing of this, so Gabe decided to keep it that way. He hid the dog from Joe once he got it home.

But then the dog nearly died. It grew weaker and weaker and all but collapsed. Gabe finally had to reveal its existence to Goossen, and together they rushed Junior (“Pippin,” Joe says. “Junior!” Gabe says.) to the vet, who pronounced the dog DOA, or virtually. A minute, an hour, no more, the doc diagnosed. But the puppy kept fighting. So small he could sit in your palm, he wouldn’t give up. Sometimes it pays to fight.

“Tell him about Hong Kong,” Joe says.

Sometimes it doesn’t pay to fight. Arrangements were made a few weeks ago for an evening of championship boxing in Hong Kong, and the Ruelases got on a plane for the longest and wildest ride of their lives. First, they were forced to train in a parking garage, full of exhaust fumes and grime. Next, they were fed food they found inedible. Gabe was given one dish, he looked it over and said, “I swear, it was a caterpillar on a fork.”

The card got called off. Nobody got paid. Then the return flight got detoured through Manila. Then authorities from the Philippines held up the plane for several hours and searched it. When it finally took off, Goossen and the Ruelas brothers sang aloud to their fellow passengers, “God Bless America!”

They travel very little now.

“Tell him about Mexico,” Goossen says.

“My wife, she wanted to see where we were from,” says Gabe, ever the storyteller. “So she came down to the Jalisco region to the place where we grew up. She couldn’t believe her eyes. She said, ‘You actually lived here?’ She said it looked like something out of the National Enquirer.”

“National Geographic,” corrects Rafael.

“She couldn’t believe how poor we were.”

“Oh, there are worse places,” says Rafael, ever the practical one. “It wasn’t like we were dying from hunger.”

Gabe’s wife, she got him a gig in a Phil Collins music video. Not singing. Not dancing. Fashion designing. She even sold his line of clothing in Beverly Hills.

Cartooning class paid off in at least one respect. As a lark, Gabriel began doing drawings on fabric, on pants and jackets and such. His work was intricate and colorful. Friends admired it. They began to pay him up to $400 for custom designs. But the work was painstaking and demanded many hours, hours that Gabe needed to devote to the gym.

“My wife said, ‘I can sell these.’ I said, ‘Sell what? Who would buy these?’ But she said, ‘Trust me.’ Because she has excellent taste. So she took my clothing to what’s that street. Rodeo Street?”

“Rodeo Drive,” says Rafael.

“And they bought up everything she had. Do you believe it? And they wanted more. Then there was this other place that had a big display with all of my stuff in the window. Where was that?”

“On Melrose,” says Rafael.

“It was incredible. Two dancers in a Phil Collins video danced in my pants. I just wish I had time to draw more. I even tried paying friends to do my drawings for me. I said, ‘Here. Don’t paint on walls. Paint on these. ‘ So now I’m a fashion designer.”

Goossen says, “The Mexican Calvin Klein.”

If his friends could see him now. Gabriel returned to his old school, just to look around. He approached teachers, even the one who threatened to break his bones. But they weren’t angry. They weren’t happy, either. They didn’t recognize him. Had no idea who he was. That really got to Gabe. Maybe they adored him, maybe they abhorred him, but he never imagined they wouldn’t even remember him.

“I think they must have taken the punches to the head,” he says, laughing. “This one lady, I loved her class. I hated her class, but I loved her class. She said, ‘You were in my class?’ I was like a total stranger to her. That really got to me. I felt like that movie, what’s it called? The one where it’s like he wasn’t ever born?”

“ ‘It’s a Wonderful Life,’ ” says Rafael.

“That was me. It made me regret every stupid thing I ever did or said. I wanted everybody to see that I had made something out of myself. That I had a family now and that I was a world champion. It made me want to go to night school so I could get my diploma. I only need five more hours.”

“Tell him in what,” Goossen says.

The Ruelas boys begin laughing.

“Go on, tell him,” says Rafael.

“Physical education,” says his brother.