The art and the craft of the cutman, an unsung hero of the fight game

Two minutes into their fight at UFC on ESPN 3, Jussier Formiga reached out with a looping right hand and caught Joseph Benavidez cleanly on the left eye. At cageside in Minneapolis, Rob Monroe perked up.

It was something about the way Benavidez reached up right away to paw at his own eye. The fighters in this co-main event bout moved quickly, the way flyweights often do, and Monroe had to crane his neck to see around both human and non-human obstacles for a clear view into the cage. When he got a good look at Benavidez moments later, his suspicions were confirmed: His fighter, which is to say the fighter to whose corner he’d been assigned by the UFC, was cut.

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Blood shrouded his left eye. Benavidez kept wiping at it, trying to clear his vision, but by then Monroe wasn’t looking at him anymore. By then he had moved on to checking the miniature utility belt strapped to his wrist, making sure he had what he needed to do his job.

The seconds ticked down. Seconds were about to become very valuable now. Towel in hand, Monroe readied himself for the end of the round, when the cage door would swing open. It was almost his time, and there wasn’t a moment to waste. The cutman was ready to go to work.

Cutman isn’t the type of job you end up with on purpose. Nobody sets out with this as his sole focus. It is, after all, a mostly thankless job. You work in 60-second bursts, repairing (at least temporarily) the faces of people who look right past you and often never even remember to thank you, and for the most part the only time anyone even notices you is when you screw up.

It’s not a medical job in the strictest sense. It’s not even really first aid. It’s more like basic triage, keeping the worst of the damage at bay for just long enough to finish the fight.

“We’re kind of like the long-snappers in football,” said Monroe, a broad-shouldered man in his late 50s with salt-and-pepper hair. “It’s kind of a specialized job, and most people don’t even think about it unless something goes wrong.”

The way Don House got into it was through boxing. He fought as an amateur and in the military, had dreams of boxing in the Olympics, but eight knee surgeries later, he resigned himself to the role of trainer. He worked with champion boxers, and also with a Las Vegas fight manager by the name of Dana White. Before he was the president of the UFC, White was representing fighters in the organization. One day he asked House if he’d be willing to help train a fighter he referred to simply as Tito.

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“I told him absolutely I would, just tell me when I leave for Puerto Rico,” House said. It was a reasonable question as far as he was concerned. In the world of boxing at the time, there was only one Tito, and it was Felix Trinidad. White had to tell him, no, not that Tito. He meant Tito Ortiz. House had just one question.

“I said, ‘Who the fuck is Tito Ortiz?’”

By way of explanation, White retrieved a VHS tape of Ortiz fighting in the UFC’s octagon and played it for House, who watched the nascent sport and saw what looked like a ruleless brawl of punching, kicking, scratching and biting.

“Dana was telling me that this sport was going to be huge,” House said. “I told him, man, I don’t know about this shit. He said, ‘We’ll give you $1,000 a week to go to Huntington Beach and work with Tito Ortiz.’ And there I went.”

But you know how one thing leads to another. First you’re sharing your boxing expertise with a UFC fighter. Then you’re with him on fight night, wrapping his hands. Then you’re wrapping other fighters’ hands. Then the guy who hired you ends up running the whole company and, somehow, the organization has been getting by with just one cutman. That’s fine until one night when both fighters return to their respective corners between rounds with visible, problematic cuts. Then suddenly people want to know if you can do that job too.

“I’ve been in the game long enough that I’ve seen how it was done, but I had never done it before,” House said. “I had 15 world champions, so I’d seen what the cutmen do. I thought, shit, it can’t be that hard. As the UFC learned, I learned.”

House got some help from more experienced minds. The late Leon Tabbs, who served as the UFC’s first cutman, pulled him aside and offered some tips from time to time. So did Jacob “Stitch” Duran, an experienced cutman whom the UFC famously severed ties with after he publicly criticized the company’s exclusive apparel deal with Reebok.

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But mostly, House said, how he learned to do the job was by actually doing it. And MMA fights, with their elbow strikes and knees from the clinch, provided plenty of opportunities to work on cuts.

It was the same for Monroe, who went from training in martial arts himself to training and cornering fighters on the regional scene long before he became a cutman. He’d show up to some local MMA event at the fairgrounds, a show so small that there was no hope of the promoter hiring an experienced cutman to work the corners, and he knew that the best chance his fighters had was if he learned how to do it for them.

“I figured, I’ve got to be better than nothing, right?” Monroe said. “And I ended up getting pretty good at it. Eventually it turned into a job, oddly enough.”

In the UFC, cutmen work for the promotion itself. They’re paid per event, as independent contractors (though both Monroe and House declined to disclose how much they get paid), and they show up when and where the UFC tells them to and work whatever corners they’re assigned. It’s different from the boxing model, where cutmen are typically a more entrenched part of a specific fighter’s team. Most nights, the UFC cutmen hardly even speak to the fighters.

“We just do our jobs, man,” House said. “I don’t know if we get too much recognition from other people. Every once in a while, a fighter will come and thank us. But really, it’s your fellow cutmen who know and understand. We’ll say to each other, ‘Hey, great fucking job on that one.’ We see what each other are doing right, and also when you see someone doing it wrong.”

At cageside in Minneapolis, Monroe was ready. The horn sounded to end the round, the cage door swung open, Monroe rushed in ahead of Benavidez’s coaches and intercepted the fighter on the way to his corner, clamping a dry towel to his eye as he steered the fighter toward his stool.

“The first thing is to get the blood cleaned off so you can see what you’re dealing with,” Monroe would explain later. “Then you can decide what you need to do about it.”

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Monroe had his usual arsenal of tools at his disposal. On his wrist, the custom-made tool kit contained Q-tips of varying length and sizes, rolls of gauze that had been soaked in a 1:1,000 adrenaline solution, and above that some Vaseline smeared on the back of one hand, glowing translucent against his black glove.

Monroe also had several different sizes and shapes of endswell – the small pieces of metal kept cold and pressed to fighters’ faces to reduce swelling. His favorite was the flat 5 millimeter stainless steel version, which stayed very cold and typically fit right where it was needed. But the fact that he had such options at all is a testament to how far the cutman’s craft has come since the early days in boxing.

Tabbs, the UFC’s original cutman, used to keep a brass doorknob in a bucket of ice water to use as an endswell, Monroe said. Other guys used cold spoons. As for their Q-tips and gauze, they didn’t have fancy wristbands to store them in, so they tucked them behind their ears or clenched them in their teeth while they worked.

“That doesn’t seem the most sanitary to me,” Monroe said. “It’s like, say you got cut and you went to a doctor and he had the stuff he was going to fix you with just hanging out of his mouth. You might be like, eh, think I’m going to go to a different doctor.”

Once Monroe got the blood cleaned off Benavidez’s face, he quickly assessed the situation. One cut just above the left eye, one cut just below it. They were small cuts, but in tricky places. Often it’s not the worst cuts or the ones that produce the most blood that are the biggest concerns.

“A cut on the top of the forehead or in the scalp, those will bleed a lot, but they won’t usually stop a fight,” Monroe said. “What we worry about more are cuts in the soft tissue around the eye, on the eyelid, stuff like that.”

First Monroe clamped the gauze to the cut above Benavidez’ eye. In boxing, it’s typically these cuts that get priority, since they’re the most likely to drip blood down into a fighter’s eye. In MMA, however, fighters might just as easily end up on their backs as standing and facing their opponents, which means cuts below the eye can also be a problem.

You get 60 seconds to work between rounds. That’s in theory, anyway. In practice, what with the hassle of getting in the cage and being shooed out by the referee, it’s often more like 45 or 50. Monroe was 15 seconds in, pressing the gauze to the upper laceration. He held it there with his right hand, then used his left to remove another roll of adrenaline-soaked gauze from the wristband, applying that to the cut below Benavidez’s eye. The blood from that cut was already soaking the gauze, so he rolled it just slightly, using a clean side to press into the wound.

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“You don’t want to try to put the adrenaline in a cut as there’s blood pouring from it,” Monroe explained later. “It just doesn’t get in there and do any good. That’s one of the ways you can tell a cutman who doesn’t know his stuff, is he tries to shove it in there while it’s still bleeding a lot.”

The adrenaline solution makes the blood vessels at the site of the cut constrict. The diminishes and then stops the flow of blood, but the solution has to be applied correctly, in the right spot, and for long enough to allow it to work.

“Seconds out!”

This means time is almost up. Coaches are called to remove the stool, take their water and ice buckets with them, and leave the fighter to do his work alone. Experienced cutmen like Monroe and House know you can usually squeeze a few more seconds of work in after this point. Sometimes it can make all the difference.

“They’ll be calling my name, saying, ‘House, you got to get out.’ But I’m like, hey, I know I can 10 more seconds,” House said. “Let me work.”

Monroe removed his gauze to examine his work. There they were, two small cuts, barely visible now around Benavidez’s eye, neither leaking blood any longer. Benavidez’s cornermen were shouting their final instructions, but Monroe hadn’t heard a word of it. He couldn’t even tell you much about how the fight had gone up to that point or what Benavidez would likely try to do in the next round.

“You don’t watch the fight the way normal people watch it,” Monroe said. “Sometimes after a close fight, someone will ask me who I think won, and the truth is I don’t know. You’re usually watching your fighter’s face. You’re looking for cuts, or even just minor swelling, because that can become a big issue later if you don’t jump on it, and there’s not a ton of time to work. You have to prioritize because if you try to do too much, then you end up with none of it working.”

Finally forced out the door, Monroe returned to his spot at cageside. Benavidez came to the center of the cage to meet Formiga for the start of Round 2. If Formiga was looking to do more damage to the wound he’d created in the first, he was soon disappointed. There was no sign of the blood now, barely any sign of the cuts that had caused them. Unless you knew right where to look, and had a good, steady view with time to examine it, you might not even know there’d been a cut at all.

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Benavidez certainly wasn’t bothered by it anymore. No more distracted pawing at his eye. No more blood. Now he was free to take over the fight from Formiga. A head kick landed late in the round, Benavidez pounced with punches. Formiga went down and covered up. With 13 seconds to go before the end of Round 2, Benavidez pounded his way to a TKO victory. He even got to celebrate blood-free, his face looking as clean as when he started.

“That’s how it looks when it goes the way it’s supposed to,” House said after the fight, grinning and slapping his friend on the back. They might have been the only two men in the arena at the time who truly appreciated what had just happened.

After the fight, Benavidez would express surprise that there had been any cut at all.

“I didn’t even really know it was blood,” Benavidez said later. “I thought I got poked at first. Then they told me in the corner it was a small cut and I was like, oh, I’m cut?”

He was. Not that it mattered. Not after the cutman did his job. Not that many of the people in Target Center that night or watching at home at TV even noticed. But that’s fine. When it all goes well, that’s the way it’s supposed to be.

(Top photo: Dean Mouhtaropoulos / Zuffa)

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