Andy Ruiz Jr's Comeback: The Giant Slayer Returns to the Ring
Andy Ruiz Jr walks back into the fire on Friday night, seven years after he turned Madison Square Garden into a monument to shock.
Back then he was the late stand‑in, the soft‑looking underdog with the fast hands and the 11-1 odds against him. Anthony Joshua was the unbeaten champion, the polished superstar. Ruiz climbed off the canvas in the third round, then tore Joshua apart with four knockdowns in seven brutal, bewildering rounds. The referee waved it off and the heavyweight division had a new ruler – the first of Mexican descent, crowned in the sport’s most famous arena.
The “Mexican Rocky” label stuck. So did the whirlwind. Imperial, his dusty hometown in California’s south‑eastern desert, treated him like a conquering hero. He met Mexico’s president Andrés Manuel López Obrador. He signed a rematch deal worth $10m. The money, the cars, the nights out, the attention – it all hit at once.
And it all went just as fast.
From empire to exile
Barely six months after that night in New York, Ruiz was an ex‑champion, another name in heavyweight boxing’s one‑and‑done club alongside Buster Douglas, Leon Spinks and James J Braddock.
In Diriyah, under Saudi Arabian skies and sand‑blown winds, he turned up 15lb heavier than for the first Joshua fight and fought like it. Joshua boxed safely, Ruiz trudged after him, and the belts slipped away on the scorecards. The reign had lasted 190 days.
At a 3am press conference that felt like a confession, Ruiz admitted what everyone had seen: he’d partied, he’d cut corners, he’d taken the rematch lightly. The regret was written across his bruised face.
Since then, his career has drifted. Three fights in more than six years. Weight up, weight down. Injuries. Long silences. Enough false starts that his greatest night has started to feel like something that happened to another man.
On Friday at the Prudential Center in Newark, 10 miles from the Garden where his life changed, Ruiz tries again. One more campaign. One more climb. One more test of how many chances boxing is willing to give.
Across from him stands Damian Knyba, a 6ft 7in heavyweight with an 86in reach and ambition of his own. It’s a 12‑round non‑title fight, but for Ruiz it functions as something far more serious: the first step of a three‑fight deal with Eddie Hearn, and probably his last real push at the summit.
The old contradiction
There was a time when another title run felt logical. Even after losing the WBA, IBF and WBO belts to Joshua, Ruiz was only 30 and still one of the division’s most gifted offensive fighters. The frame was soft, the hands were not. His combinations came in blurs, his timing and ring IQ sharper than his silhouette ever suggested.
That contradiction has followed him since he was a kid. Opponents saw the chubby boy and relaxed. They stopped relaxing once the punches started to fly.
To tap back into that version of Ruiz, one thing had to change. Or rather, return.
Manny Robles, the trainer who guided him through both Joshua fights, is back in his corner after their bitter split in the aftermath of the rematch. Ruiz had bounced from Eddy Reynoso for the Chris Arreola comeback in 2021 to Alfredo Osuna for the Luis Ortiz win in 2022. By the time he fought Jarrell Miller in 2024, he admitted he was essentially training himself, “half‑assing” it, “one foot in the water and one foot out”.
The reset started in a bar in Tulum.
On holiday with his girlfriend, piña colada in hand, Ruiz stared at a heavyweight division moving on without him and decided pride was a luxury he could no longer afford. Slightly buzzed, he sent Robles a message on Instagram asking if he would take him back.
Robles didn’t hesitate. He would, he replied – 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 in slogans or promises. It’s in hours.
Robles says they’ve effectively lived in the gym together all year. No short camps, no crash conditioning.
“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 under the 283.7lb he carried into that fateful Joshua rematch. Knyba weighed 255.5lb. Six inches taller, one pound heavier. The visual gap will be obvious. The physical gap may not be.
Broken body, restless mind
The gaps in Ruiz’s record haven’t just been about discipline. His body has taken a pounding.
He underwent surgery on his right knee in 2021. A torn rotator cuff needed repairing in 2023. He broke his right hand during the Miller fight and boxed on through all 12 rounds. He hoped rest would fix it. It didn’t. Another operation, another long layoff. By the time he walks to the ring on Friday, 762 days will have passed since he last fought.
He filled some of that time deliberately. He slowed down. He saw more of his five children. He worked on property developments with his father, a Mexican‑born contractor who first dragged a hyperactive five‑year‑old Andy into a boxing gym and spent years driving him across the border to Mexicali. He started going to church.
The Joshua fights alone brought in around $17m. Ruiz didn’t need to fight. He chose to.
Eventually the quiet got too loud. He says he “became tired of being tired” and “bored of being bored”. The ring, with all its chaos and danger, started to look like home again.
A fractured throne and an open road
If you’re going to come back as a heavyweight, this is the moment to do it.
For 25 years, the division waited for another undisputed champion after Lennox Lewis. Oleksandr Usyk finally unified the WBA, WBC, IBF and WBO titles by outpointing Tyson Fury in May 2024. Two years later, the whole thing has splintered again.
Usyk, now 39, vacated his remaining belts in June. The titles are scattered: Murat Gassiev holds the WBA strap, Agit Kabayel the WBC, Filip Hrgović the IBF, Daniel Dubois the WBO. No clear king, no closed doors. Just a maze of opportunities.
For a former champion with a famous win and a name casual fans still recognise, one convincing performance can change everything. Beat Knyba and Ruiz is right back in the conversation – for eliminators, for title shots, for pay‑per‑view nights.
Even a trilogy with Joshua, once a fantasy, no longer feels outlandish. If Joshua comes through his expected November clash with Fury, the commercial logic is obvious. Ruiz has already released a diss track that name‑checks half the division. The ambition is not subtle.
There’s symmetry in his alliance with Hearn. In 2019, Ruiz slid into Hearn’s messages, asking for the chance to replace Miller after the American failed a drugs test. Hearn took the gamble. Ruiz blew up the plan and Joshua’s aura in one savage New York night.
Now they’re partners.
“It’s a business decision,” Hearn said of the new deal with Matchroom. He’s betting that the hand speed, power and chin that tormented Joshua are still there – and that Ruiz’s story, heritage and history give him a ceiling few modern heavyweights can touch.
“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 get past Knyba.
The New Jersey‑based Pole, 17-1 with 11 knockouts, is huge even by heavyweight standards. He’s coming off the only defeat of his professional career, a January stoppage loss to Kabayel in which he had his moments before the fight was halted in the third.
He insists that night proved he can operate at elite level, not that he can’t. In Newark he expects, as he put it, “the most hungry and best version of Andy Ruiz”. A large Polish crowd is expected, echoing the nights when Tomasz Adamek turned the Prudential Center into a raucous outpost of Warsaw.
For Ruiz (35-2-1, 22 KOs), the size gap is familiar. At 6ft 1in he has spent his life looking up at giants.
“[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 isn’t a soft landing. It’s not meant to be. At 36, with time no longer on his side, there’s little sense in tune‑ups that tell him nothing.
“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,” Hearn said.
Seven years ago, Ruiz showed how quickly a life can change when a heavyweight refuses to waste tomorrow. He’s burned through a few of those tomorrows since. On Friday in Newark, he finds out how many are left.
