Ruelas Is Taught the Golden Rule : Boxing: In virtuoso performance, De La Hoya shows he has plenty of substance with second-round knockout.

It was like a cartoon brawl, only shorter. And more dramatic. And more devastating.

POW! WHAM! BAM! With the scowl and stunning power of a fighter approaching his vast potential, Oscar De La Hoya did not beat Rafael Ruelas on Saturday night so much as he crashed through him on his way toward a higher place. After this broad buildup to the bout, and with all the questions leveled about De La Hoya’s will to stand up under Ruelas’ pressure, the second-round knockout was a career-making kind of performance, with all the dazzling trappings of a superstar-in-waiting.

KA-POW! De La Hoya slipped a Ruelas jab and blasted him with a sizzling left hook to the jaw--which he later called the best punch of his career--about a minute into the second round, sending Ruelas jerking backward through the air and onto the canvas.

De La Hoya, tasting the victory, sneered as Ruelas climbed to one knee during the count, and pounced.

“I caught him flush on the chin, so I was a little shocked he got back up,” De La Hoya said, “but I knew his legs were going to be wobbly. I knew if I feigned him to the body, I’d catch him to the head. And I knew it would just be a matter of time.”

It was a matter of seconds. Quickly after referee Richard Steele resumed the bout, Ruelas was down again, woozily trying to recover from a De La Hoya left jab-straight right-left hook combination to the head.

SLAM! OUCH! Then, finally, De La Hoya, with the International Boxing Federation’s three-knockdown rule on his mind, finished with a burst of pure power, slamming Ruelas against the ropes and causing Steele to jump in and stop the bout 1:43 into the second round before 10,118 at Caesars Palace.

When it was over, De La Hoya threw his arms into the air in joy, ending Ruelas’ year-plus reign as the IBF lightweight champion. De La Hoya (18-0, 16 knockouts) already held the World Boxing Organization belt.

About an hour earlier, Ruelas’ brother, Gabriel, retained his own title, but with a costly aftermath. Challenger Jimmy Garcia underwent brain surgery after the bout was stopped in the 11th round, suffering from a blood clot, and was listed in critical condition.

But, beyond that dark cloud, Saturday night was about De La Hoya and his own destiny.

By the opening of the post-fight news conference, promoter Bob Arum was already calling him, with presumed hyperbole, the “best fighter, pound for pound, in the world.”

But, exaggeration, Pernell Whitaker and Roy Jones Jr. aside, after De La Hoya’s demolition of Ruelas (43-2), nobody could argue that his status in the boxing world has changed for good.

“People have criticized my trainer (Robert Alcazar), people have criticized me for being too young and too inexperienced to beat Ruelas,” De La Hoya said. “But we proved we were ready for this guy.”

From the first seconds of the fight, when De La Hoya flashed away from Ruelas’ opening attempt to win the fight with one wild right, De La Hoya’s agility and newly instilled lateral movement was evident and dominant.

Fighting in his old, straight-up, mechanical style, De La Hoya might have been caught once or twice by Ruelas’ heavy shots. But, twisting at his waist and moving his head, Saturday night he was a different fighter.

And Ruelas, whom De La Hoya counted on duplicating his traditional awkward, stalking style, wasn’t.

“The first punch he threw, he almost fell by himself,” De La Hoya said, “and that’s the way we planned it.”

The crowd was mostly pro-Ruelas, booing loudly during De La Hoya’s introduction, and grew quieter during De La Hoya’s first-round clinic.

As Ruelas chased him, De La Hoya showered him with hard jabs and harder hooks, wobbling Ruelas with a three-punch combination near the end of the round.

“We worked very hard to avoid a situation like this,” said Joe Goossen, Ruelas’ trainer.

Said De La Hoya: “I knew all along he was not smarter than I was.”

Ruelas charged De La Hoya again in the first moments of the second round, and that set up the knockout scenario.

Though the CompuBox Inc. statisticians recorded Ruelas landing 23 punches in the 4:43 of the bout, Ruelas himself admitted he got “only a few scrapes” and landed nothing clean.

“I tried maybe to get things going faster than I normally do,” said Ruelas, calm and poised after the fight despite the several welts on his face, “and he caught me with a good one.

“We knew he was fast and we knew he was strong, and we knew I would be coming at him, which I was doing. I knew I had to get inside. He just caught me with a clean shot before I caught him.”

Said De La Hoya: “I give him credit for getting back up after that punch.”

Ruelas was knocked down twice in the first round of his title-winning bout in February, 1994, over Freddie Pendleton, and came back to win a scintillating unanimous-decision.

But this time, he was facing De La Hoya, who showed once again he is one of the best finishers in the sport.

Steele stepped in after Ruelas had been slapped back into the ropes and was teetering near a third knockdown.

“I would have liked to see it go maybe a few more seconds,” Goossen said, “to see how Rafael would have reacted on the ropes. But Richard Steele made the decision, and we’ll live by that.”