A Fighter's Heart: One Man's Journey Through the World of Fighting (31 page)

There was a certain amount of inevitability to the conversation. Gabe had made telling the story a part of his life—it was part of his identity now, thrust upon him by the circumstances of the world. He and Jimmy were tied together forever; he would never be free from the onus. He knew that everyone knew, that they were thinking about it when they looked at him, and they had questions, even though some were too polite to ask. They came like me and Don, under the guise of being journalists. Gabe explained it this way: “In order for me to move on, I had to make it part of my life—I thought maybe I could get away and put it behind me, but I can’t. So I say to people, ‘Don’t worry about it, it’s okay,’ when I see them bump their friends to tell them not to talk…. Sometimes peopleare rude, they ask, ‘Are you the one who killed that guy?’ and if they are very uneducated, they say to me, ‘How does it feel to kill a man?’ But they are just uneducated, you can’t get mad.”

It was an interesting choice of words, as Ruelas was from a part of Mexico in the mountains near Guadalajara where there was nothing, no stores, no roads—“If you ate it, you either caught it or grew it”—and Gabe grew up uneducated in a way that few in the world still do. There were no clocks; he used the sun to tell time. “We didn’t know any better, so it was great, we were beautiful. I learned to appreciate everything. We were illegals, crossing the border without green cards, and a guard stopped me, but he had just seen me fight and asked for my autograph…. We made something of ourselves, my brother and me.” He and his brother both had excellent careers with the Goossens. They had been dirt-poor boys selling candy before they found boxing, and they were called the “Candy Kids.”

Gabe looked at me across the table, his eyes soft and large behind his glasses, his voice quiet. Boxing writers never want to write about someone being punchy. Listen to Joe Frazier talk, to Thomas Hearns talk. Young fighters whisper it. Andre muttered it to me about Gabriel: “He ain’t right.” It’s a scientific fact but one that everyone in the game wants to avoid thinking about: the price of fighting. The slurred speech, called cotton mouth, the slow encroachment of dementia pugilistica. Writers avoid it when talking about their heroes. (I smoothed out Gabe’s dialogue here, granted him an eloquence and clarity that perhaps he didn’t have.) It can happen from one fight, from one concussion, maybe from just one punch. Professional soccer players are getting it from heading the ball. Gabe’s speech was ever so slightly slurred; he was a tiny bit slow and stuttered. When given the time to speak uninterrupted, he was eloquent. But when he had to drive us to the workout, dealing with conflicting directions in an unfamiliar city, he got lost and flustered. Virgil took over and said to him lightly, “Relax, champ, you don’t need to be doing this,” and there was a sense that fighters have given so much to us, they have sacrificed everything for us, and that they should never have to give again, everything should be given to them. Gabriel is still paying the price of all those wars he fought in the ring. Andre has seen it and knows about it. It’s what he was talking about when he said the winner still has to go home and look in the mirror, to look his kids in the eye and wonder if he’s still right.

“The reason I’m still in boxing is because I want to stay as close as I can,” Gabe said, and he meant literally. “I sit where the judges sit, so I am very close, but it’s a two-edged sword, because I’m around what I love, but I can’t really do it. I’m right there but I’m not. It’s rare that I’ll watch a whole fight. I sit there and wish I could be in there, and it’s not the money, forget about the money, it’s love.” His brother is unable to even go to boxing matches. It’s too painful for him, he misses it too much.

Gabe’s voice was soft and high and reedy, and I wondered if he were better and smoother in Spanish—probably. He smiled, and he seemed like the gentlest soul in the world.

“I see older fighters making comebacks, older than me, and it is very tempting. Small promoters are always coming to me with offers, some of my greatness might rub off on them. I do think about it. I’ve even tried it a few times, but you get older and can’t do the job as well as you used to. It’s very frustrating.” I can imagine how addictive that feeling must be, to be the champion in a title fight—to be the center of the universe for a night, bigger than a movie star.

Gabriel, of course, had not known how badly he’d hurt Jimmy, or even that Jimmy was in real trouble until much later that night. He hadn’t meant to kill Jimmy—except of course, that he had, within the constraints of the ring, been trying to kill Jimmy.

“After Jimmy died, my killer instinct was gone; I would get a guy in trouble and back off him—I thought nobody could see it. I thought I was fooling them, but my wife and corner could see it. The instinct every fighter must have—your life is at stake—I never got back. My biggest loss was that win. I lost boxing.”

There was an easy familiarity to Gabe’s speech. This was a speech he had given a thousand times and one he would continue to give for the rest of his life, in some form or other. When he began to warm to a topic or train of thought, his speech cleared and flowed.

“The next year I fought Arturo Gatti, and I had him out on his feet. I was putting the final touch on him, and I couldn’t close the deal. That was it. I was trying to force myself to get it back, and either you have it or you don’t. This sport isn’t for everyone.” I heard the echo of Pat Miletich.

“You have it or you don’t in this business, it’s serious. People don’t realize how serious,” Gabe said.

Don said quietly, “I saw you dominating at the end of every round, and you were hurting him at the end of every round, but his corner wouldn’t stop the fight. Do you blame them?”

Gabe was quick to shake his head. “As a fighter, you want someone like that, who will get the best out of you, and let you fight. But blame…at first, of course I blamed myself, but then I realized, if I had to point the finger, I could point it at so many of us—you are watching, you want to see us trading punches and knockouts, and we’ll give you what you want. This is not a game. I blamed myself, and then you, because without fans we wouldn’t be here. But did Jimmy train like he was supposed to? This is not a game. Your trainer has to do his job and get you ready for war.”

Gabe looked at Don carefully, meaningfully. “You haven’t been in deep waters yet,” he said. He knew Don was Andre’s corner. “The further Andre advances, the more costly mistakes become. You never want to think fatal, but this is the only sport where you can take a man’s life and walk free.” He broke off, and then muttered, “I never want to say that, I feel bad when I say that. You never know enough. You never know which way the fight is going to go until you are there. A learning experience can be very costly.”

I asked about Jimmy cutting weight and being dehydrated, as I had heard that dehydration plays a role in ring deaths. Gabe was dismissive.

“Yeah, he cut weight, but I used to cut twenty-five to thirty pounds over a month, twenty pounds in two weeks, and like Gatti come in twenty pounds over. Did Jimmy do it right?”

Gabe looked at us, from one to the other, and said, “How safe can you make a sport that’s about hurting other people?”

Jimmy lingered for three weeks in a coma, and then he died. He had been a national hero in Colombia and the country plunged into mourning. The media was outside Gabe’s house every day with reporters knocking on his door at all hours. Gabe talked to everyone and did hundreds of interviews. There were death threats against his father and brother, who had cornered Jimmy, and Gabriel went on the radio and begged for the family to be left alone.

“I’m a mama’s boy, I’m proud to say it. I take her to the fights with me in Vegas, and she plays the slots. I met Jimmy’s mom, and the worst thing I ever saw was her face. I could see my mom there, and that was what did it—she killed me. I think I could have kept on fighting if I had never met his mom…. I wanted to hug her, and she pulled back. She said, ‘I can’t, I’m sorry.’ She bowed her head down. She was looking at my hands, and I wished I had no hands. She said, ‘I cannot touch the hands that killed my son.’ The way she was looking at my hands—that killed me, because my ma had made everything possible.”

Gabe was shaking his head and nearly laughing in a sad, dry way. “She killed me. Had she known what that was going to do to me, she might not have done that. She would never have done it. She didn’t know what she did. She took my life away from me.”

He paused for a while, and we all sipped our coffee.

“Once you get in the ring, you have to make that change that everyone is supposed to, you go in there to take care of business. I couldn’t do it. I kept trying to make it happen, but you can’t make it happen. You either have it or you don’t.”

“I couldn’t turn that switch. Even second-or third-rate fighters can have it. A lot of opponents have it, and they fight their asses off. They have the heart of a fighter. They’re going to go down punching, that’s a fighter’s heart; it’s not about being a world champion, it’s about having a fighter’s heart.”

Gabe hadn’t made money like De La Hoya had (who has?), and he still worked. When he was training kids and back in the gym, being around boxing made him want to come back. He told Joe and Dan Goossen that he wanted to fight again, and they said, “If we see it in you, if we see it in your eyes, and we think you can do it, then we’ll be happy to have you back.” Gabe fought a guy he should have destroyed and had a hard time winning. The Goossens said they didn’t want to be part of the comeback, that they were looking out for him. “I respect them so much for saying that,” he said. “I fought a little more and my wife, my boss, said, ‘Forget it. You look like your old self, but once you get in the ring it’s not you anymore.’

“I wish I was back up there before, with the killer instinct. I know that it’s okay to miss it. Dan said to me, ‘You can’t make boxing come out of you—you got to have it in you.’”

The week rolled onward to the fight. There was a big press conference, where all the promoters made endless speeches about the “great city of Memphis” and the quality of their boxers and the entertainment that would be had on the big night. The Rap-a-Lot crew and James Prince were all there. They were big men (although Prince himself was small) and from the hood, with money. They dressed in immaculate Polo and Hilfiger and wore platinum and diamond watches and had platinum teeth. Prince had always loved boxing—he had wanted to be a promoter like Don King before he’d even gotten into music. He told me that he found out that Arum and people like him were taking as much as 25 percent of a fighter’s purse, and he thought he could fix that. He said in his soft voice that he wanted to “protect young fighters from promoters, who will try and exploit them and use them up.” Prince and his crew formed Andre’s legion of protectors, tough black ex-street men with plenty of money now, ghetto fabulous, but still with the hard eyes, the watchfulness. I don’t think you could ask for a better guardian angel than James Prince.

Andre was a little concerned about weight. He was fighting at middleweight, which is 160, and because he was still filling out as a man, middleweight was getting harder to get to, and he was hungry. That afternoon, I jumped rope in the little conference room with the crappy swirly carpets, the room silent except for my skips and Andre’s grunts as he shadowboxed, his little cries,
ut, ut, ut.
Don and Virg sat as still and silent as statues, for fifteen minutes. I stretched and then Andre did some rope work and calisthenics. There was an old balloon from some forgotten party and Virg held it up for Andre to hit, and Andre muttered, “You are one of a kind, my friend.”

Back at the hotel, Virgil and I went to get a big tub of ice for Dre’s bath. Virgil started goofing with the three girls who worked at the restaurant, just talking complete and utter nonsense but so serious that they had no choice but to believe him. He’d been married seven times—he was engaged right now—and they were all wide-eyed and trying not to giggle. Virgil was a big fan of something the English call the “windup.” You play someone very seriously with something you know will make them crazy, just to get them to lose composure. I’ve seen him do it to little boys who come into the gym. “Oh, I heard about you, you were the one crying when that Korean kid stole your bike,” and the little boy will be raging, “That wasn’t me!” Virgil used to do that at the juvenile hall with young toughs in front of their friends.

The girls were all sweet Tennessee girls, soft, big, buxom, black, and braided, incredibly polite and almost absurdly demure.

The next day was the weigh-in, the real one private and underneath the stadium, while a public one would be held later back at the Pepsi Pavilion. Back again through the twisting concrete tunnels underneath the stadium, and it felt just like the UFC, just like Pride had felt, the same kind of concrete and hallways. Andre made 160 and his opponent, Ben Aragon, came in at 159.

Andre had his Endurox shake for right after the weigh-in and some PowerBars and things like that, and immediately his mood began to improve, the gloom that had settled on him lifted, and his natural good humor reasserted itself. The public weigh-in, some hours later, was just for show—everyone could go eat after the official weigh-in. By the time the public weigh-in happened, every fighter had probably put on three or four pounds, just by rehydrating.

That night, back at the airport, we went for our after-dinner stroll underneath that open, pink, burnished Tennessee sky, with the sun slanting and the whole empty landscape swirling around us, and I fell into deep conversation with Andre. The late sunset was becoming early twilight, with the cold deepening gloom of night behind the clouds, and we saw a giant shooting star, a real burner with a smokey trail. Dre and I spoke of the way we both had been blessed, and our responsibilities to that blessing. It is something I feel strongly, a sense of duty to experience life. Dre felt a combination of an opportunity and a mandate from the blessings of his physical and mental gifts. I silently wondered at the hype that was starting to surround him; he was being groomed as the next Roy Jones—it was going to be very hard to live up to the standard he was setting for himself. Was one world title going to be enough? Three? Five? I thought,
It is lucky he is so young that he doesn’t quite feel the enormity of the burden that they are placing on him,
the way everyone was so convinced of his eventual greatness.