![]() Why not Duel in the Desert? Or Melee in the Middle East? Or even Clash in the Kingdom? Sadly, they have chosen for this event a singularly ungainly name: Clash on the Dunes. The promoters are hoping to evoke the spirit of legendary Muhammad Ali fights from the nineteen-seventies like the Rumble in the Jungle, in Zaire, and the Thrilla in Manila, in the Philippines. This is because of the location: Saudi Arabia, in a town outside of Riyadh, at an arena that was built specifically for this fight. DAZN, which is showing the fight in America, predicts that the main event will start around 3:45 in the afternoon, E.T. Joshua and Ruiz meet again this Saturday. To Joshua’s credit, he moved quickly to get a rematch, which was his contractual right. Joshua had been comprehensively defeated. He told the referee that he wanted to continue, but made no motion to rejoin the fight, and the referee waved his right arm, ending it. After the second one, Joshua got up and stood in the corner, leaning on the ropes, blood flowing from his left nostril. Joshua survived for a few more rounds, but in the seventh Ruiz knocked him down twice more. Joshua got up, but he was staggering near the end of the round, Ruiz knocked him down again. Ruiz swung hard and moved his head artfully, dodging most of Joshua’s punches and repeatedly looping his right fist into Joshua’s skull: knockdown, Ruiz. What we all saw, though, was an extraordinary comeback. ![]() “Anthony Joshua is a composed and ferocious finisher,” he said. He got up, but viewers assumed that the night was pretty much over, and so did Chris Mannix, one of the commentators for the streaming network DAZN, which showed the fight in America. In the beginning of the third round, Joshua hit Ruiz with a straight right hand and then, a moment later, a right uppercut and a left hook Ruiz landed on his backside, looking up at the referee. Ruiz’s victory was unexpected, but it didn’t look like a fluke, or a lucky punch. (Here, sticklers might interrupt once more to note that, because boxing is a disorganized sport, that Ruiz is not the only heavyweight champion: Deontay Wilder, the ludicrously powerful puncher from Alabama, is also a kind of champion so is Tyson Fury, huge and cagy Briton, who is scheduled to fight Wilder on February 22nd.) A few days later, Ruiz added another championship belt to his collection: a novelty Snickers belt, in honor of his favorite snack. (Sticklers might note that Evander Holyfield’s knockout of Tyson, in 1996, was a pretty big upset, too, although perhaps less shocking, because by then we had already seen Tyson knocked out.) Ruiz put his newly acquired championship belts on Kimmel’s desk, and he seemed to enjoy his new reputation as an unlikely celebrity. “They say this is the biggest upset since Buster Douglas,” Kimmel said, referring to Douglas’s shocking knockout of Mike Tyson, in 1990. He strolled onto the set of “ Jimmy Kimmel Live!” as a heavyweight champion and a kind of folk hero. ![]() By the following Tuesday, Ruiz’s life had changed considerably. At the end of the press conference, when the two stood side by side, with Joshua holding four championship belts, Ruiz looked less like Joshua’s opponent and more like a junior member of Joshua’s entourage. Joshua was muscular and confident Ruiz was jiggly and unassuming. Ruiz was a substitute opponent, given the fight after another boxer failed drug tests, and oddsmakers made him as a big underdog: a two-thousand-dollar bet on Joshua would have paid out only twenty-one hundred dollars. He was a competent but rather undistinguished heavyweight boxer, thrown into the biggest fight of his life, at Madison Square Garden, against Anthony Joshua, the imposing and undefeated British star, who held a handful of championship belts. He sounded as if he were only window shopping, and most people thought that was exactly what he was doing. “Those belts look really shiny-really good, man,” Andy Ruiz, Jr., said with a gentle smile, at a press conference on May 30th.
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