Andy Ruiz Jr's Last Stand: Chasing Credibility and Redemption

Andy Ruiz Jr’s last stand begins a short drive from where his life once exploded into chaos.

Seven years on from that wild June night at Madison Square Garden, the “Mexican Rocky” walks into the Prudential Center in Newark on Friday chasing something that might be even harder to win than the heavyweight title he once stole from Anthony Joshua: credibility that lasts.

From Mexican Rocky to cautionary tale

The story is etched into boxing folklore. Five weeks’ notice. An 11-1 underdog. Dropped in the third round, then rising to drop Joshua four times and force the stoppage in the seventh. A doughy, underestimated challenger from Imperial, California, tearing up the script in front of a stunned New York crowd.

Overnight, Ruiz became a symbol. The first heavyweight champion of Mexican descent. A hero on both sides of the border, feted in Imperial, ushered into the office of Mexico’s president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, handed a $10m guarantee when Joshua triggered the rematch. The money came. The cars. The late-night shows. The fame. The women. All of it, all at once.

And then, just as quickly, it went.

Barely six months after his coronation, Ruiz was back where boxing has parked so many one-hit heavyweights: alongside Buster Douglas, Leon Spinks, James J Braddock. In Diriyah’s desert glare he sleepwalked through the rematch, 15lb heavier, three months of partying in his legs, a half-hearted camp in his lungs. Joshua boxed, Ruiz trudged, and the belts slipped away on points.

At a raw 3am press conference, Ruiz didn’t hide. He admitted he’d been overconfident, that he hadn’t trained properly. The regret showed on his marked-up face. The fairytale had turned into a warning.

Lost years and a late gamble

He turns 37 next week. Since losing the belts, he has boxed only three times in more than six years. Weight ballooned, then dropped, then ballooned again. Injuries mounted. Comebacks were announced, delayed, abandoned. That night at the Garden began to feel like grainy archive footage from a different career.

On Friday, in a 12-round non-title fight against 6ft 7in Damian Knyba, Ruiz starts what he openly calls one last run at the summit. It is his first appearance since a majority draw with Jarrell Miller more than two years ago, and the opening bout of a three-fight deal with Eddie Hearn.

There was a time when this second act looked easier to write. Even after losing the WBA, IBF and WBO belts, Ruiz was 30 and still one of the division’s most gifted offensive fighters. His hands were freakishly fast, his combinations blurring out from that soft midsection that fooled so many opponents. He’d been that way since childhood: the chubby kid everyone underestimated until the punches started to fly.

The talent never really left. The discipline did.

Back with the trainer who told him the truth

Now, the man in his corner is the same one who guided him to the title and watched him throw it away: Manny Robles. Their split after the Joshua rematch was messy. Ruiz drifted to Eddy Reynoso for the Chris Arreola fight in 2021, then to Alfredo Osuna for the win over Luis Ortiz in 2022. By the time he scraped past Miller in 2024, he admitted he was essentially training himself, “half-assing” it, as he put it, with “one foot in the water and one foot out”.

The reunion with Robles didn’t begin in a gym. It began over piña coladas in Tulum.

On holiday with his girlfriend, Ruiz scrolled through the heavyweight landscape and saw a division moving on without him. A little drunk, he swallowed his pride and sent Robles a message on Instagram asking if he’d come back. Robles answered quickly: yes, but only if Ruiz listened, focused and gave him “120%” of his time and dedication.

“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.”

Robles believes this time is different. Not a six- or eight-week camp. A year. Day after day in the gym, not just a sprint to a date. “This did not start two months ago or three months ago,” he 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.”

On the scales, there was at least some proof. Ruiz weighed 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 came in at 255.5lb. One pound between them, six inches in height apart.

Surgeries, boredom and a slow-burning resolve

The gaps in Ruiz’s record are not just the product of poor choices. His body has taken a beating. A right knee operation in 2021. Surgery on a torn rotator cuff in 2023. A broken right hand suffered in the Miller fight, which he boxed through for 12 rounds before finally going under the knife.

Those setbacks fed into the 762-day absence that ends on Friday. During that time, he went home. He spent time with his five children. He worked on property developments with his father, a Mexican-born contractor who first dragged him into a boxing gym at five years old to burn off excess energy and spent years driving him across the border to Mexicali for sparring.

Ruiz started going to church. With around $17m banked from the Joshua fights alone, he didn’t need to fight. He could have stayed in real estate, stayed in Imperial, stayed comfortable.

But comfort curdled into something else. He says he “became tired of being tired” and “bored of being bored”. The itch returned.

A fractured division, a wide-open door

If he was ever going to come back, now is the time. The heavyweight division has never been more fragmented. Oleksandr Usyk’s points win over Tyson Fury in May 2024 finally gave the sport an undisputed champion for the first time since Lennox Lewis. Two years later, it was broken apart again.

Usyk, 39, vacated his remaining titles in June. The belts scattered: Murat Gassiev with the WBA, Agit Kabayel with the WBC, Filip Hrgović with the IBF, Daniel Dubois with the WBO. No dominant king. Plenty of routes to a shot.

For a former champion with a famous win and a name that still resonates, one impressive victory can change the conversation overnight. Beat Knyba, and Ruiz is immediately back in the queue. Win well again, and a rubber match with Joshua – once a fantasy – suddenly looks like a very real pay-per-view after Joshua’s expected November meeting with Fury.

Ruiz’s recently released diss track, where he calls out half the heavyweight division by name, makes one thing clear: ambition is not the problem.

The promoter he once ambushed

There is a neat twist to the business side of this comeback. In 2019, it was Ruiz who slid into Eddie Hearn’s messages when Jarrell Miller failed a drug test and was pulled from the Joshua fight. Ruiz begged for the chance, got it, and detonated Hearn’s carefully laid plans in New York.

Now they are partners.

Hearn has been blunt about the deal with Matchroom. “It’s a business decision,” he said. He looks at Ruiz and still sees the hand speed, the punching power, the chin that gave Joshua nightmares. Add the heritage, the underdog story, the viral highlight reel, and the ceiling is obvious.

“If he gets this right and starts going through the division,” Hearn said, “he’s going to be one of the biggest stars in the sport.”

First, he has to get past a giant.

The giant and the giant slayer

Damian Knyba is not a soft landing. At 17-1 with 11 knockouts and an 86in reach, the New Jersey-based Pole is huge even by modern heavyweight standards. He is also coming off the only blemish of his career, a January stoppage defeat to Agit Kabayel in which he had bright spells before being halted in the third.

He insists that loss showed he belongs at this level. At Wednesday’s press conference, Knyba said he expects “the most hungry and best version of Andy Ruiz”. A strong Polish following is expected in Newark, echoing the raucous nights when Tomasz Adamek turned the Prudential Center into a home arena.

For Ruiz, the size difference is familiar. At 6ft 1in, he has spent his career staring up at opponents who look more like the prototypes on heavyweight posters.

“[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 matchup has a clear purpose. There is no point easing Ruiz back with a soft touch who tells him nothing about what remains in the tank. Hearn spelled it out: “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.”

Seven years ago, Ruiz showed what happens when a desperate man seizes his one shot and refuses to blink. Since then, he has learned how quickly those chances disappear when you waste them.

At 36, with the belts scattered and the clock loud in his ears, he walks into Newark knowing this: there are not many tomorrows left. The question now is whether the giant slayer still has one more miracle in his hands.