Brash?
“Yeah, he’s loud with his plans,” a University of Miami athletic official says.
Bold?
“He always thinks big,” says a businessman who has worked with him for years.
A Hurricane?
“I’m as frustrated as any other Canes fan,” John Ruiz says. “Very frustrated. Not just football. Baseball, too.”
Everyone has been frustrated for years around the University of Miami athletics program, but how many do something about it? Ruiz pledged $500 million to build a football stadium now discussed for Tropical Park in west Miami-Dade. He’s promised to buy any unused tickets to UM’s home baseball opener Feb. 12 and football opener Sept. 3 against Bethune-Cookman.
He also announced name, image and likeness deals with 20 college players this past week, including nine UM football players for between $40,000 and $50,000 a year. On Friday night, these athletes were at a coming-out party at his $25 million mansion in Coral Gables along with the agents representing them, Drew Rosenhaus, Peter Ariz and Malki Kawa.
It’s a new and unfamiliar world of college players allowed to get paid, agents representing them, a UM booster writing checks, its football program swimming in money — and what’s the general reaction by Miami fans?
Fear. Distrust. Uncertainty. Is Ruiz too good to be true? Too much in the mold of Neville Shapiro, who paid players in a different NCAA era, ushered them to South Beach fun and ultimately sank the program?
Ruiz said the NIL contracts were run by UM officials as required. Two school officials confirmed that. Ruiz said everything he’s done complies with NCAA rules. The Miami officials confirm that, too.
Are Ruiz’s plans over the top? Absolutely.
Is his money welcome at Miami? It’s a godsend, if it keeps coming.
“A few years ago, if you bought a player a cheeseburger, it was a violation,” Ruiz said. “Now you can give a quarterback a contract for thousands of dollars.”
He gave Miami quarterback Tyler Van Dyke a $50,000 deal to represent LifeWallet. He’s given 17 Miami football contracts in all.
Ruiz says it’s a perfect storm of opportunity that put him in this spotlight. He went to Miami, his three children went to Miami — and two sons played baseball. So he’s a lifelong Hurricane. Ruiz’s health-care data tech company, MSP Recovery, has announced a SPAC merger with Lionheart Acquisition Corp., at a value of $32.6 billion, the second-largest in U.S. history.
The NCAA also changed its rules by allowing players to receive NIL dollars after losing a court battle.
“Let me talk about the law, because that’s what I know,” Ruiz says before launching into a talk about a Supreme Court ruling granting NILs, the state’s overlapping laws and the Florida High School Athletic Association’s constraints.
Ruiz sued the NCAA and FHSAA recently because the, “interplay of the different rules versus the laws,” appear in conflict with each other, he said. He hired an outside law firm to review the conclusion his law firm made.
“It’s not the Wild, Wild West the way some people make this out to be,” he said of this new landscape in college sports. “I think as with anything else, as the laws settle in people will understand the playing field.”
Miami already flexed its moneybags bringing coach Mario Cristobal from Oregon. Ruiz has a tangential connection to him, his wife’s father is a distant relative to Cristobal’s family — “like a second cousin,” Ruiz said. But it’s with the NILs and stadium Ruiz can make a larger mark.
His story isn’t all good money and happy endings. He has string of legal squabbles with banks that led to foreclosure on a home over principles, his people say, and another on a business he started a decade ago. He also bought, then vacated the dilapidated Homestead baseball stadium after failing to pay rent.
His first thought was to explore putting a stadium next to Coral Gables High School. Now he’s exploring Tropical Park, among others.
“It’s going to happen,” he said.
You don’t have to give up a show-me attitude in a South Florida full of fly-by-night characters. But Ruiz is checking boxes by writing good-sized checks to Miami players, by having contracts checked by Miami officials. We’ll see where it all goes.
The school has embraced him in the manner it would most open checkbooks. It knows the impact of individual boosters from Nike founder Phil Knight at Oregon and oilman T. Boone Pickens at Oklahoma State. It suddenly has someone saying he’ll write big checks. and sounding like a humanitarian in doing so.
“We’ve been narrowly focusing on the drawbacks of compensation for a student-athlete while in college because it can affect education,” he said. He asks: “How can you focus on education when worried about clothing, about getting fed?”
It’s a new world in college and Ruiz, Miami class of ‘87, is the local face of it. Bold? Brash? Doesn’t that define the best of the Hurricanes? As long as his checks keep cashing, he’s what Miami needs in this new world.
