Andy Ruiz Jr. is the brand-new four-belt-holding heavyweight on the block. His workmanlike dethroning of near-certain favorite Anthony Joshua last night in Madison Square Garden will go down in history. Here’s how the Southern Californian did it.
Extraordinary athletes come in all shapes and sizes. The top of Andy Ruiz’s buzzcut head would barely graze Anthony Joshua’s chin, but his furious hands definitely did reach Joshua’s head on Saturday night, bringing the former three-belt champion to the mat four times in rounds three and seven, until, incredibly, the TKO simply had to be called. The sleepwalking former champion Joshua, who had retreated to his corner and removed his mouthpiece after the last of the knockdowns, could not muster the answers to the referee’s questions.
In a stroke, or more accurately, with the brutal, cumulative effect of his four knockdowns that completely unmanned Joshua, Ruiz provided the heavyweight division with a revolution in the form of a massive, fresh straight-out-of-Southern California breeze of uncertainty. The four belts will have a new custodian 7000 miles west of London. What will happen in the heavyweight division after the Ruiz Revolution will be anybody’s guess, but Joshua’s promoter, Edward “Fast Eddie” Hearn, was characteristically swift on the uptake at the Garden. A rematch in November or December, according to Hearn.
For his part, in the runup to the fight, Joshua limned all that a young Achilles could do, trained to a fare-the-well, confident in his skills and certain about the upcoming battle. To his credit, he did admire Ruiz for stepping into the breach and taking the fight quickly, and to Joshua’s further credit, once in the ring, the then-still-nominal champion did brush Ruiz to the mat early in the third. To Joshua, and certainly to his thousands of British fans who crossed the Atlantic to taste the near-certain victory with him, that knockdown may have seemed like the proper beginning of a proper end for Ruiz.
Ruiz had very different picture in mind for the remainder of the third round. The knockdown, the first in his career, did not wound him so much as it stung him. He waded out and proceeded to launch a flurry of jabs and swings that, ultimately, brought Joshua to his knees. There was a moment when it was thought, fair enough, they’ve traded, now Joshua can get back to his rightful business of dismantling Ruiz.
