Andy Ruiz Jr's Last Chance for Heavyweight Glory

The first time Andy Ruiz Jr walked into heavyweight history, he did it as a late call and a long shot. Five weeks’ notice. An 11-1 underdog. A doughy outsider wheeled in as a replacement at Madison Square Garden, expected to make up the numbers for Anthony Joshua’s American coronation.

Instead, he tore up the script.

Ruiz climbed off the floor in the third round that night, then dropped Joshua four times, swarming him with those improbable, piston-fast hands until the referee stepped in during the seventh. The unbeaten champion was gone, the belts were gone, and boxing had its first heavyweight world champion of Mexican descent. The “Mexican Rocky” was born.

Imperial, his dusty hometown in California’s south-eastern desert, treated him like a folk hero. He shook hands with Mexico’s president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, signed a $10m guarantee for the rematch, and disappeared into a blur of late-night shows, cars, parties and sudden fame. Everything arrived at once. So did the crash.

Six months later, he was an ex-champion.

Ruiz drifted through the rematch with Joshua in Diriyah, Saudi Arabia, heavy in every sense of the word. Fifteen pounds heavier on the scales, miles away in focus. Joshua jabbed, moved, boxed. Ruiz trudged after him and never really got close. At a 3am press conference that felt like a confession, Ruiz admitted he had partied, cut corners, and squandered the chance. The regret was etched across his face.

Since then, the wilderness.

Three fights in more than six years. Weight ballooning, then coming down. Injuries. Cancellations. Promises of comebacks that never quite materialised. The greatest night of his career began to feel like something from a different lifetime, a story people told about a fighter who used to be around.

A final run at the summit

The Prudential Center, 10 miles across the river from the Garden where everything changed, hosts the start of what Ruiz is calling one last push. He turns 37 next week. The sport rarely gives this much rope, even to former champions. Yet here he is again, headlining, with a three-fight deal under Eddie Hearn’s promotional banner.

Standing in front of him is Damian Knyba, a 6ft 7in heavyweight with an 86in reach and something to prove of his own. It’s a 12-round non-title fight, but for Ruiz it’s a referendum on his future. Beat Knyba, and the heavyweight picture, fractured and volatile, opens up. Lose, and the road back probably closes for good.

There was a time when a second reign felt more than just romantic. After the Joshua rematch, Ruiz was 30 and still one of the most gifted offensive heavyweights around. His hands stayed electric, his combinations came in blurs, his ring IQ remained sharp. The contradiction that followed him from childhood – soft around the middle, razor-sharp between the ropes – still unsettled opponents who judged him by his frame.

But talent alone never carried him. Structure did. And for Ruiz, that meant Manny Robles.

Reunited with the man who made him champion

Robles, the 54-year-old trainer who steered Ruiz through both Joshua fights, is back in his corner after a messy split in the aftermath of the rematch. In between, Ruiz tried other directions. He linked up with Eddy Reynoso, the man behind Canelo Álvarez’s rise, for his 2021 win over Chris Arreola. Then he moved to Alfredo Osuna for the 2022 victory over Luis Ortiz. When he finally resurfaced to fight Jarrell Miller in 2024, he admitted he was effectively coaching himself, “half-assing” training, as he put it, with “one foot in the water and one foot out”.

The turnaround started far from any gym. It began over piña coladas in Tulum.

On holiday with his girlfriend, watching the heavyweight division move on without him, Ruiz decided he’d had enough of drifting. A little drunk, a lot reflective, he messaged Robles on Instagram to ask if they could work together again. Robles replied almost immediately. 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.”

This time, the evidence isn’t just talk. Robles says they’ve been in the gym virtually all year, not just for a standard eight or 10-week camp.

“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 that up on Thursday. 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 that ill-fated Joshua rematch. Knyba came in at 255.5lb. Barely a pound between them, separated instead by six inches of height and very different stakes.

Surgeries, silence and a life beyond the ring

The gaps in Ruiz’s career weren’t just self-inflicted. His body broke down. He underwent surgery on his right knee in 2021, then on a torn rotator cuff in 2023. In the Miller fight, he fractured his right hand but fought through all 12 rounds. He hoped it would heal without the knife. It didn’t. Another operation, another pause. The layoff that ends on Friday stretched to 762 days.

In that time, Ruiz stepped away from the noise. He spent time with his five children. He worked on property developments with his father, a Mexican-born contractor who first took him to a boxing gym in Mexicali at five years old to burn off his hyperactive energy. The same father who drove him back and forth across the border for years, chasing sparring and opportunity.

Ruiz started going to church. The urgency to fight faded. Financial pressure wasn’t a factor; the Joshua saga alone brought him around $17m. He could have walked away comfortably. Instead, a different kind of discomfort crept in. He says he “became tired of being tired” and “bored of being bored”.

So he laced the gloves up again.

A fractured division, a familiar promoter

If the heavyweight division ever offered a soft landing, it’s now. The long wait for an undisputed champion ended in May 2024 when Oleksandr Usyk outboxed Tyson Fury to collect all four major belts. The reunion didn’t last. By June, the 39-year-old Ukrainian had vacated his remaining titles and the hardware scattered again.

Today the belts sit with Murat Gassiev (WBA), Agit Kabayel (WBC), Filip Hrgović (IBF) and Daniel Dubois (WBO). No dominant figure. Plenty of routes. For a former champion with a famous upset on his record and a name that still resonates, one statement win can change the conversation overnight.

A victory in Newark would shove Ruiz straight back into that mix. Even a third fight with Joshua, once a fantasy, no longer feels impossible. Joshua is expected to face Fury in November. If he comes through, the commercial logic of a rubber match with the man who shocked him in 2019 is obvious. Ruiz’s recently released diss track, in which he name-checks a string of heavyweight rivals, underlines his appetite for those kinds of nights.

There’s a neat twist in his alliance with Hearn. In 2019, it was Ruiz who messaged the promoter, begging for the chance when Miller failed a drug test and fell out of the Joshua fight. Ruiz seized that opportunity and detonated Hearn’s carefully built plans in New York. Now, after weighing options elsewhere, he has signed a three-fight deal with the same man whose blueprint he wrecked.

Hearn doesn’t hide the business case.

“It’s a business decision,” he said of bringing Ruiz to Matchroom. The hand speed, the punch power, the chin – Hearn believes those weapons remain. Couple that with Ruiz’s heritage and the memory of that night at the Garden, and the ceiling is high.

“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.”

The giant and the “giant slayer”

First, he has to deal with Knyba.

The New Jersey-based Pole, 17-1 with 11 knockouts, is huge even by modern heavyweight standards. He is also coming off the first loss of his professional career, a January stoppage defeat to Kabayel in which he had good moments before the fight was waved off in the third round. He insists that night showed he belongs at the top level, not that he’s out of his depth.

In Newark, he expects the sharpest version of Ruiz.

A large Polish crowd is expected, echoing the days when Tomasz Adamek turned the Prudential Center into a raucous home away from home. Ruiz will walk into that noise as the smaller man again. At 6ft 1in, he has spent his entire career looking up at heavyweights who look more like the textbook model.

“[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.”

The match-up is deliberate. There’s little sense in easing a 36-year-old former champion back with a soft touch. This needs to answer real questions.

As Hearn put it bluntly: “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 how quickly a life can change when a fighter refuses to wait for tomorrow. Now, with fewer tomorrows left, he steps through the ropes in Newark to find out whether that old magic still lives in his hands – or whether his greatest night really does belong to another life.