Cut men still carry bottles of adrenalin solution in their kits. They have more effective medical tools to work with now, but the good ones know how to use adrenalin. This first appeared in the Boxing Issue of Stop Smiling Magazine, 2005.
Skin rips. It tears. It flakes and scrapes and splits and peels. For all its flexible, stretchable, washable, self-healing glory, human skin—this largest bodily organ, the sewer and ventilator, layered silken insulator, symptom gauge, pain and pleasure sensor, shield and flag of its bearer—is thin. It rips. And when it rips it bleeds. The head bleeds most of all. Those delicate instruments the eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and the silent radiant brain, are fed by a dense net of high-pressure blood vessels that cushion and fuel the central command post of the body politic. A nick above the neck is worth a slash on the chest or arm. Still in the ancient anarchy of the boxing ring, mere blood is nothing. A split lip, a scraped ear or a bloody nose doesn’t count. These are aesthetic issues, laundry problems. A spray of wine that stains the referee’s white shirt, slimes the opponents’ gloves, disgusts the ticket holder, and punctuates the notebooks of the ringside reporters with beading droplets.
The cut that counts in boxing is anywhere in the broad expanse above and around the eyes. The smallest slit in the brow hairs is a crisis. If the blood runs into a boxer’s eye he can’t see the punches coming. The ref will stop the fight and the bleeder will lose for a reason unconnected to his skill or stamina, his brains or strength or heart. He will lose because he can’t see to defend himself.
A fair fight that is stopped by cuts is undecided, as unsatisfying to fans and participants as if lightning or a meteor had struck the ring. This blend of circumstance is the organizing principle for a cult of specialists known as cut men. The cut man is the guy in the fighter’s corner who is hired to stop the bleeding during the 60-second rest periods between the rounds. They are sometimes called Minute Men but they will explain that 40 seconds is all they actually have. When the bell ends the round the fighter walks to his corner, sits down, get his mouthpiece out, takes a sip of water, and only then can they go to work on the cut until the ten-second warning sounds and they have to leave the ring.
Cut men rarely have medical credentials. They are former boxers or trainers who make their living elsewhere, driving cabs or bulldozers, teaching fourth grade or repairing gas mains. But this is their real life. They are the shamans and witch doctors of boxing. Broadcasters call them all “the best in the business” and give them monikers like “The Clot,” “Zipper,” or “Stitch.” If they are skilled and don’t wheeze of booze in the corner, they are respected by fighters and trainers, managers and reporters. They are proud and secretive about the potions and techniques they use to stop the blood. They claim to possess mysterious clotters that no one else uses, miracle vessel constrictors that nobody else understands. Maybe they do. Or maybe they all use the same arsenal, which is whatever the boxing commission says they can use, but some of them use it better.
Trainers who learn the tricks can take care of their own fighters but they are just “working cuts.” True cut men are freelancers, hired to work the corner one match at a time. They may work half a dozen bouts on the same evening. Some fighters never cut and some cut every time. Maybe one in five or ten bouts will produce any blood at all but when they’re needed, it’s a desperate need and woe for the frail-skinned fighter whose manager was too cheap to spring for a cut man. Their success is not gauged by whether the fighter wins, but whether it was blood that stopped him.
In boxing as in auto repair and politics, far more harm seems to be done by ignorance and stupidity than by informed greed or malice. Take the case of a young light heavyweight who bears a vague resemblance to Rocky Marciano. For the sake of avoiding lawsuits call him Zevedo. Now, this Zevedo is managed by two well-meaning businessmen from a small farming town. Call these gentlemen Mr. Grocery and Mr. Seed & Feed. They are staking money on the idea that Zevedo’s left hook is superior to other weapons in the 175-pound division.
They’d known his family for generations and watched him grow up. He’d worked weekends and after school at Mr. Feed & Seed’s place of business but when he failed to get a football scholarship out of high school he decided he wanted to box. The two gentlemen pooled money to buy equipment, and set up a gym in Mr. Grocery’s storeroom. Mr. Seed & Feed cut back on the boxer’s work hours so he could train, but kept his pay the same.
The tutor chosen to hone Zevedo’s technique is Mr. Hardware. Mr. Hardware is reputed to have won a Tough Guy fight some twenty-eight years ago, and was known to be a heller in a bar brawl until he settled down in the family store. No question, these three were as sweet as you’ll ever meet and they loved the kid like a son. Zevedo’s last ring appearance was one July, when he went up against wily C.Q. Williams in the packed ballroom of a casino hotel. Zevedo was 8-1 against dreamy mini-mart clerks and desperate bus boys. He should never have set foot in the same ring with a craftsman like Williams, who has more than thirty professional bouts, including respectable showings against world-ranked competition. Of course, it’s hard to get fights out of small towns. Maybe his managers thought he was better off losing than sitting idle. Maybe they figured his strength and gumption gave him a chance at an upset. Or maybe they didn’t realize that Zevedo was in too tough.
Grit and power Zevedo certainly has. He rooted around like a bee-stung rhino whenever he could catch Williams and ram him onto the ropes. But the weird and important stuff of that bout was what went on in Zevedo’s corner. In the third round, Zevedo got a fat cut under the left eye. Apparently this was the first time the cornermen, Hardware and Grocery, had ever seen blood loose on its own. They were clucking over the kid between rounds, but they didn’t do anything for that cut. They dabbed around it nervously with a towel but couldn’t bring themselves to touch it. The ick factor of gushing red seemed to paralyze them. Their hands would twitch and wince anytime they got close to the cut itself. Naturally, the cut kept bleeding down Zevedo’s face and onto his chest.
In the next round, Zevedo’s other eye gave birth to a mouse that immediately developed ambitions to full-blown rathood. By the end of that round the eye was squinting and beginning to close. The common remedy for such a problem is a cold metal endswell or a frozen bean dip can applied with pressure. The corner duo tsk’d over it and twittered for the referee to take a look. “It’s all right!” snapped the ref, meaning the bulge wasn’t bad enough yet for him to stop the bout. The pair were reassured and didn’t do anything for the swelling or the cut.
Williams did his own brand of surgery for a while and temporarily reduced the swelling by slicing it open to let the blood out. With cuts under both eyes, Zevedo’s face was a ketchup race. A fine spray of red droplets caught in the eyebrows of the judges at ringside. The ref’s white shirt looked like he’d been bombarded by paint guns.
The fans hollered practical advice but Zevedo’s cornermen were too flustered to understand it. All they could manage was to dab a towel at the blood with quaking hands. One ringsider sent frantic messages to the pair, advising them to use pressure and Adrenalin solution on the cuts. Another cornerman took pity on Zevedo and loaned them Adrenalin. The brown bottle appeared at the end of the sixth round.
Adrenalin is used as a coagulant in a solution of one part per thousand of saline. Standard procedure is to stop the blood flow with direct pressure on the cut, then shield the eye and press the solution into the cut with a cotton swab. In this case, the trainer grabbed the bottle and upended it over Zevedo’s gushing cuts. The result was dramatic. This stocky, saturnine kid, who stolidly faced the strafing of his opponent, leaned on the ropes and screamed. The idiot had poured the solution into his eyes. The two cornermen were stunned. They stood gaping at the howling kid. The ringsiders shouted, “Sluice his eyes with water!” Dithering and fumbling, the pair finally found their water bottle and poured it over Zevedo’s face. He stopped screeching. Zevedo bled through the seventh round. Both eyes swelled above the cuts. He went down hard in the eighth and the ref stopped the bout.
With the best corner in the world, Zevedo still wouldn’t have whipped C.Q. Williams that night. But those cuts were under his eyes rather than above them. Mediocre corner work could have controlled the bleeding so it didn’t interfere with his ability to defend himself. As it was, Zevedo got as much trouble and pain from his well-meaning, totally incompetent seconds as he did from his opponent. The fact that their seconds’ licenses were not yanked after this fiasco suggests that those licenses, which were issued by the state commission, don’t mean a whole hell of a lot.
A top-notch prizefight second is a psychologist, strategist, boxing wizard, and emergency surgeon. He inspires, advises and succors. He has to know his fighter’s abilities and it’s nice if he’s sufficiently telepathic to read the mind of the opposition. He needs the brain of General Patton and the healing hands of Oral Roberts. These talents can’t be located by a civil service exam, and there are not large flocks of such characters roaming the general population. We can’t expect every corner to boast a genius. But the guys who are responsible for a fighter’s health during the critical moments in the ring should know a little first aid.
Determining the competence of a second is the duty of the boxing commission that issues the licenses. In this and most other boxing jurisdictions across the country, the procedure for procuring a second’s license is to pay a small fee and induce a fighter to name you as his second. A manager’s license just costs a little more. Amateur coaches are required to attend annual classes and pass tests to be certified. Professional referees and judges have varying levels of required education depending on where they work. So why should any yahoo off the street be able to step into a fighter’s corner and take the kid’s life and career in his hands?
Even the seediness of boxing has glamour. It’s a world of romantic baloney where just carrying a spit bucket is a license for bravado. Naturally everybody wants to get in on the act. Ego masquerading as know-how is common to every human endeavor. It’s to be expected that a number of horses’ katoots will always be strutting around pretending expertise they don’t have. But there are also those who, with the best intentions, don’t know that they don’t know. For the athlete dependent on help in his moment of need, good-hearted ignorance is just as dangerous as malice or indifference.
Zevedo knows that his managers and cornermen are not experienced but he sticks by them. “They mean well,” says Zevedo. “They just don’t know.”