The first time Andy Ruiz Jr walked into heavyweight history, he did it through a side door.
Five weeks’ notice. An 11-1 underdog. A late replacement at Madison Square Garden, expected to make Anthony Joshua look good and little more. Instead, Ruiz climbed off the canvas in the third round, ripped apart the script and the champion, and left Joshua on the floor four times before the referee stepped in.
The “Mexican Rocky” was born that night in New York. Imperial, his dusty hometown in California’s south-eastern corner, treated him like a folk hero. He met Mexico’s president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, toured late-night TV, signed a $10m rematch guarantee and drowned in the sudden rush of money, cars, attention and temptation.
Six months later, it was gone.
In Diriyah’s sand-swept ring, Ruiz turned up 15lb heavier, under-trained and overindulged. Joshua boxed safely, took back the WBA, IBF and WBO belts on points and pushed Ruiz into the same one-hit chapter as Buster Douglas, Leon Spinks and James J Braddock. At a raw 3am press conference, Ruiz admitted he had blown it. Overconfident. Unprepared. The regret was written all over his bruised face.
Since then, his career has felt like a ghost story.
Ruiz, who turns 37 next week, has boxed only three times in more than six years. Injuries, layoffs, fluctuating weight, half-hearted comebacks – the night he shocked the world has started to feel like footage from a different life.
On Friday in Newark, he tries to drag it back into the present.
Ten miles from the Garden, at the Prudential Center, Ruiz begins what he openly calls his final charge at the summit. He meets 6ft 7in Damian Knyba in a 12-round non-title fight, his first outing since a majority draw with Jarrell Miller more than two years ago and the opening act of a three-fight deal with Eddie Hearn.
There was a time when a second reign felt far more realistic. Even after losing the belts to Joshua, Ruiz was just 30, still one of the most naturally gifted offensive heavyweights around. The hands were freakishly fast, the combinations came in blurs that defied his soft midsection and rounded frame. He had been fooling eyes like that since childhood – the chubby kid everyone underestimated until the punches started to fly.
Now, the old team is back together.
Manny Robles, the trainer who steered him through both Joshua fights before an ugly split, is once again in his corner. Ruiz bounced from Eddy Reynoso for the Chris Arreola comeback in 2021 to Alfredo Osuna for the Luis Ortiz win in 2022, then drifted into a strange limbo. By the time he returned to face Miller in 2024, he admitted he was essentially training himself, “half-assing” with “one foot in the water and one foot out”.
The reconnection with Robles started far from any gym – over piña coladas in Tulum. On holiday with his girlfriend, watching the heavyweight division move on without him, Ruiz swallowed his pride and, a little drunk, messaged his old coach on Instagram. Robles replied almost straight away: he would come back, but only if Ruiz listened, focused and gave him “120%” of his time.
“I’m just happy that I reunited with Manny Robles,” Ruiz said in Newark on Wednesday. “Before with the other fights and the other opponents that I had, I wasn’t doing the right things that I was supposed to. [He] kind of woke me up, and that’s why we’re here now.”
This, more than any slogan, is the proof people inside the sport are looking at. Robles says they have practically lived in the gym this year, not dipping in for a standard eight-week camp but grinding through month after month.
“This did not start two months ago or three months ago,” Robles said. “It’s been the entire year and it’s been great to get to this point. I’m glad to say I got the old Andy back, and he’s in great shape mentally, physically, spiritually. He’s in a good place.”
The scales backed him up. At Thursday’s weigh-in, Ruiz came in at 254.3lb – his lightest since beating Kevin Johnson in 2018 and almost 30lb below the career-high 283.7lb he carried into the Joshua rematch. Knyba registered 255.5lb. Just over a pound between them, six inches in height apart.
The road here has not been a simple case of poor discipline. Ruiz has had serious repairs. Surgery on his right knee in 2021. A torn rotator cuff in 2023. A broken right hand suffered during the Miller fight; he boxed all 12 rounds with it, hoping rest would be enough before eventually going under the knife. That sequence of operations and rehab helped turn his layoff into 762 days.
He used the time in ways fighters rarely can. He slowed down. Spent time with his five children. Worked on property developments with his father, a Mexican-born contractor who had first dragged a hyperactive five-year-old Andy into boxing gyms across the border in Mexicali. He started going to church. With around $17m banked from the Joshua saga alone, he did not need to fight.
But boredom is its own kind of pressure. As he puts it, he “became tired of being tired” and “bored of being bored”.
The heavyweight landscape he returns to looks strangely open.
Oleksandr Usyk’s masterclass against Tyson Fury in May 2024 finally produced the first undisputed champion since Lennox Lewis. Within two years, the crown had been broken up again. Usyk, now 39, vacated his remaining titles in June, scattering the belts across four men: Murat Gassiev (WBA), Agit Kabayel (WBC), Filip Hrgović (IBF) and Daniel Dubois (WBO).
For a former champion with a famous win and a name that still resonates, that chaos is opportunity. Beat Knyba, and Ruiz will not be far from the title conversation. Even a third fight with Joshua, once the stuff of wishful thinking, is no longer outlandish with the Englishman expected to face Fury in November. Ruiz has already fired verbal shots in a recently released diss track, rattling off the names of half a dozen heavyweight rivals. Whatever else has faded, the ambition has not.
There is a neat twist to his new alliance with Hearn. In 2019, it was Ruiz who slid into the promoter’s messages when Miller failed a drugs test and was pulled from the Joshua fight. Ruiz begged for the chance. Hearn relented. Ruiz wrecked his plans.
Now they are partners.
“It’s a business decision,” Hearn said of the new Matchroom deal. He is banking on the same traits that once turned a supposed tune-up into a nightmare: the hand speed, the power, the durability. Add in Ruiz’s heritage and history and Hearn sees a ceiling few heavyweights can touch. “If he gets this right and starts going through the division,” he said, “he’s going to be one of the biggest stars in the sport.”
First, though, comes Knyba.
The New Jersey-based Pole, 17-1 with 11 knockouts, is huge even by modern heavyweight standards and owns an 86in reach. He is also coming off the only blemish on his record – a January stoppage defeat to Kabayel in which he had bright moments before the referee intervened in the third. He insists that night showed he belongs at this level and says he expects “the most hungry and best version of Andy Ruiz” in Newark. A loud Polish following is expected, echoing the days when Tomasz Adamek turned the Prudential Center into a home fortress.
For Ruiz, the size gap is familiar. At 6ft 1in, he has spent his entire career punching up at men who look more like the textbook heavyweight.
“[Knyba]’s a giant,” Ruiz said. “That’s why they call me the giant slayer, because I’m always a small guy fighting these big, big guys. But for some reason it works for me.”
This is not a soft landing. Hearn has made that clear. There is little use in easing Ruiz back with a walkover who tells him nothing about what remains in the tank.
“If you’ve got the ambition to really do what you say you want to do, which is to go and win the world heavyweight title again, you have to be beating guys like this,” the promoter said.
Ruiz learned in brutal fashion seven years ago how quickly tomorrows run out in this sport. At 36, with his old trainer back, the weight down and the division wide open, he steps in again on Friday night.
This time, he knows there may not be another chance to get it right.
