Everyone knows him, even though many may not know his name. Everyone has seen him, too, either in the corner at major boxing matches or administering to another seemingly impossible situation in the cage, looking down on a fighter busted up over his eyebrow with no hope of continuing. He is usually on the periphery, the bespectacled one with the thick head of black hair and white sidewalls, a Q-tip dangling behind an ear, wearing rubber gloves with a towel in one hand and a wad of sealant goop in the other, pressing it against a fighter’s face.
He has worked with many of the best in combat sports. On the boxing side, you have seen him in the corner of the Klitschko brothers, Andre Ward and most recently Smith, who closed the final chapter of Hopkins’ brilliant career by doing something no one else had done before: He stopped “The Executioner.” On the MMA side, you have seen him at events for virtually every reputable promotion in existence. He has worked with Chuck Liddell, Mirko Filipovic, Lyoto Machida, Forrest Griffin and Cain Velasquez. Duran has even worked fictional corners, as the cutman for character Mason “The Line” Dixon -- he was played by former light heavyweight champion Antonio Tarver -- in “Rocky Balboa” and as Adonis Creed’s cutman in the climatic fight scene at the end of “Creed.” So it seems fair to say Duran has been everywhere, seen everything and worked on everyone this side of Muhammad Ali and Bruce Lee.
His roots emanate from Planada, California, where he was born and raised in a migrant camp. His birth certificate reads CPC Camp No. 12. As a kid, he picked everything from cotton to peaches out in the fields. As soon as he was able to walk, he was doing it. Sun up was his alarm clock and sun down ended days when he was paid three cents a pound. He occupied his mind daydreaming of being a professional baseball player. He still drives by those same fields; they give him energy.
Being a distinguished cutman is light years from where Duran projected himself. He walked on to the baseball team at Merced College, in Merced, California, but when financial resources ran dry, he joined the United States Air Force. In 1974, he was stationed in Thailand, where he was introduced to martial arts. He immediately fell in love with the fighting disciplines, absorbing everything about them. Upon returning to the United States, he opened a local gym using a credit card and also wanted to sharpen his boxing skills. He trained and promoted fights and even managed a few fighters. He then went to Las Vegas to learn how to become a cutman. How does one know if he has the skills to become a cutman?
“I was a trainer and a cutman, but when I moved to Las Vegas, I saw all of these boxing trainers, and being a cutman, I had that extra drive because I felt I was very good at wrapping hands and very good at stopping cuts,” Duran said. “In time, I just floated to the top. I wasn’t a medic in the army. I have a high school diploma; that’s it. My cutman skills came from practice and practice and practice. I would hit the heavy bag to experiment on different ways in taping hands, and finally, I found the formula that I liked. I used that formula for boxing and kickboxing. I got a good reputation, and that evolved into treating cuts.
“I would look at what other cutmen did,” he added. “It’s really on-the-job training. There is no exact training method on how to become a quality cutman. It’s one of those things you have to just keep doing. I would see how some cutmen worked and liked what I saw, and I would see how others worked and learned from them how I would do things differently. I was really blessed with the people that I’ve come across and how I got the reputation. The only way you become good at anything is through repetition, and luckily, I was able to work enough fights and with enough fighters to see just about every cut.”
You close your eyes and listen to him. He says all he has is a high school diploma, yet his wisdom is that of a Ph.D. He has written one book and is in the process of writing another. A documentary is being filmed on him -- probably because they know his face, even though many, except for the fighters, do not know his name. They all do. That is important to “Stitch” Duran.
The Train to Hell
Boxer Beibut Shumenov is a major star in Kazakhstan. He has held multiple titles and was about to fight faded titleholder William Joppy in January 2011. Of course, Shumenov has the utmost respect for Duran, so he was handpicked to be part of his corner. There was just one problem: Where the fight was taking place was enveloped by an overflow fog that blanketed the area. Instead of flying into Shymkent, Kazakhstan, Shumenov’s hometown, “Stitch” and the team were told they had to take a train -- an old, leftover Soviet train from the 1950s, with the hammer and sickle on the front.
“We were 14 hours on the train, and you couldn’t see anything,” Duran said. “We were out in the middle of nowhere. The whole thing made you scratch your head and wonder where anything was going. Every day was below zero, and the restrooms didn’t work, so I took a bottle with me, and that’s where I went to the bathroom. That was actually OK. We used the little areas that they set up for us to sleep. No one spoke English, but there were students there that were learning English, so they practiced on us. There was one time when I was awoken by sparks coming from the train. I thought, ‘This is it. This train is on fire.’ We were right in the middle of the tundra. There is nothing out there but white. Luckily, the sparks I saw were the brakes of the train.
“The trip back was even crazier,” he added. “The fight was held in an ice rink -- the coldest place I ever worked a fight -- but we had to take an 18-hour trip back on this raggedy bus. The main opponent fell out, and Joppy stepped in and saved the whole card. The same fog we took the train in was there when we left on the bus. I was OK with it, but there were some of the passengers that wondered if they were going to get home alive. I laughed.”
It Looked Like a Shark Bite
Stefan Struve was in some trouble. The 7-foot monolith was fighting Christian Morecraft at UFC 117, under the Anderson Silva-Chael Sonnen main event, on Aug. 7, 2010 at Oracle Arena, in Oakland, California. Struve returned to his corner after the first round with his lower lip torn. Duran never saw anything like it before.
“Stefan’s lower lip was shredded to the point where it looked like a shark just took a bite out of it,” Duran said. “The ringside doctor came in and was looking closely at the lip to evaluate him. The reason they stop fights is because some cuts put fighters at a disadvantage. Even though Stefan’s lower lip really looked bad, he wasn’t at a disadvantage.
“I went to work on his lip, and the doctor wanted to stop the fight,” he added. “The doctor asked me what I thought. From a psychological aspect, if you have a good plastic surgeon, he’ll be fine. The thing was, all of the guys listening to my comment in the TV production truck all started laughing, but the doctor let the fight continue.”
Struve won the fight, as he knocked out Morecraft in the second round.
“That was a very harrowing moment on my part,” Duran said.
The Cut of All Cuts
Duran could hear the fans’ oohs and aahs during the course of the Marvin Eastman-Vitor Belfort fight at UFC 43 “Meltdown” on June 6, 2003. Belfort had slammed a knee into Eastman’s skull. It resulted in a massive gash, with a flapping piece of skin moving back and forth.
“One of the fans told me afterward, it looked like a filleted piece of shrimp, because the skin was flopped over,” Duran said. “Eastman took the knee from Vitor, [and] it knocked him out, really. They stopped the fight, and working on the cut, I can hear the fans; and the psychology of the cutman is extremely important. The cameras were on us and the cut was being shown on the big screen, but I really didn’t know how Marvin was.
“Psychology is important and has to be used at certain times, like in getting a reaction from Marvin,” he added. “As I was working on Marvin’s cut, I told him, ‘This is the biggest [expletive] cut I’ve ever seen in my life. Marvin started turning around, and I could see a big smile on his face. He started laughing, and that let me know that he was OK and aware. That was the reason why I said that. I saw Marvin recently and we laughed about that story, but it was a really dep cut. You could see down to the bone.”
Psychology, Duran found through the years, works as much as a panacea as gauze and sealant. He says he does it on a case-by-case basis, taking in the situation and the fighter involved.
“By no means am I a psychologist,” Duran said, “but when you’ve been in the business for a while, you’ve seen the shots these guys have taken and cleaned up those shots; you know what they’re going through when their mind is discombobulated. You figure out a dispassionate way to have them respond to you and to have them respect you. A good example of that was when Peter ‘Drago’ Sell got knocked out by Matt Brown.
“Sell was still fighting Brown and going crazy -- and everyone was trying to calm him down,” he added. “The referee and the doctors were telling him he got knocked out. He didn’t believe it. He was fighting with them going crazy, and I pulled Pete’s head over and told him, ‘Hey, Pete, look at me. You got knocked out.’ He turned and told the doctors and referee, ‘Stitch, I believe.’ That’s the trust that the fighters have in me. There has to be truth to my message to every fighter.”
Get Out of My Light
Duran has worked with some of the best and some of the wackiest fighters on earth. One of the most disrespectful moments involved Jason Miller after his decision loss to Georges St. Pierre at UFC 52 on April 16, 2005. At first, Duran was not sure what “Mayhem” said when he tried cleaning his face.
“I’m working with him, I’m helping him and he cussed me out,” Duran said with a laugh. “That dude was wacky as s---. Jason Miller just lost to Georges, and I remember him from being on ‘Bully Beatdown.’ I was working his corner, and after the fight, we wanted to clean him up after the judges made their decision. I was working on him, and he told me, ‘Get the [expletive] out my light,’ so I stepped away and got out of his light. I saw him two months later and asked him why he treated me like that. He said he was joking, but I made him apologize to me. He was wacky as hell. When he told me to get the [expletive] out of his light, I got the [expletive] out of his light.”
One wild tale -- in an extremely positive way -- still echoes with Duran. It involves the late Corey Hill and his ill-fated fight with Dale Hartt at UFC Fight Night 16 on Dec. 10, 2008 in Fayetteville, North Carolina.
“Corey went to throw a kick, and Dale Hartt checked him and literally broke his leg, and Corey was down and out,” Duran said. “I jumped into the cage and was holding him, and he’s screaming in pain. His leg was going one way, and his foot was going the other. He’s screaming, ‘Stitch what happened? What happened?’ I told him he broke his leg and he could scream as loud as he wanted. He was screaming for his father, and Don House was the other cutman. I told him to look for Corey’s father. What makes this story so special is they shot Corey up with morphine and they put him on a gurney to take him out, and he says to me going by, ‘Stitch, I almost had him.’ My first thought was, ‘Wow, what a warrior.’ He came through one of the hardest moments of his life, and he was telling me he almost had him.
“It’s a shame that Corey died at such a young age,” he added. “Something like that rips your heart away. You live and sweat with these guys, and you build a bond with them. There’s a real connection, and it hurt to hear about Corey’s death. That kid was a real warrior, and his fight against Hartt is something that I’ll always remember.”
The Bravehearts
There are a number of fighters who will always resonate with Duran. Wanderlei Silva and Chuck Liddell are among them, which is why it was so hard for him to see them fighting each other at UFC 79 on Dec. 29, 2007 in Las Vegas. Liddell came away with the decision, suffering minor cuts, while Silva came out looking like he had been chewed up in a meat grinder. A small gesture went a very long way with Duran after the fight.
“There are certain guys that you’ll always be close to, and I go way back with Wanderlei and [Mauricio] ‘Shogun’ Rua since their days in Pride [Fighting Championships]; and they’re the ones who gave me the nickname ‘Santana,’” Duran said. “I was working Chuck’s corner, and I remember speaking with Wanderlei a week prior to the fight and told him that [the] fight falls on my birthday. He said he’d send me some good karma. That’s the way we left it.
“It was a brutal, vicious fight with Chuck,” he continued. “These guys were just beating each other. You could hear the punches. At the end of the fight, Chuck had some small cuts, and when the bell rang to end the fight, I went to clean up Chuck; and just as a friend, I went over to see how Wanderlei was doing. He was pretty beat up. I asked him if he was OK, and he told me was. Then he lifted his head, and after one of the toughest fight of his career, he says, ‘Hey Stitch, happy birthday.’ I thought, what courage and what thought that he responded to me like that. That’s what I mean about these guys. They’re all special. Anyone who gets into the ring or climbs into that cage is special. There is a courage there I’ve found that normal people don’t have.”
Duran also sees Josh Barnett as someone who does not receive the credit he deserves for being tough.
“I say Josh Barnett, because I worked with him in the days of Pride and in the first UFC events when he came back,” Duran said. “Talent-wise, I don’t think people gave him the respect he deserved, because he was a master at catch wrestling. Catch wrestling was a style very, very few people knew. I was fortunate enough to watch him train with this grandmaster, Bill Robinson, an old wrestling legend, and seeing those two guys going at it was like watching Mr. Miyagi and The Karate Kid. Josh was probably the most underappreciated hero I know.”
All fighters who enter the ring or the Octagon carry a certain amount of bravery with them, but there are some that possess an extra intangible that allows them to take punishment and rebound.
“I would definitely put Dan Henderson on that list, as I would Chuck,” Duran said. “The way they handle themselves in and out of the cage is completely different. Once you close that gate, they become pit bulls, completely different. Silva is also someone I would put on that list. These guys are gladiators. I mean look at Wanderlei’s fight against Chuck. Look at Dan’s fight with Shogun. Those were special fights by each one of them, win or lose. To me, I sit there at ringside, even now, and this is a brutal business; it makes me wonder how in the world they could take those shots. The funny thing about Shogun’s fight [with Henderson] was it was one of [the] UFC’s first five-round fights.
“It was a brutal fight, and after every round, I went up there to take care of Shogun,” he continued. “After the third round, he asked me if it was the last round and I went up to clean him up because I thought it was. Then I heard the 10-second warning for the next round, and Shogun had to scramble to get back out there. He laughed. I didn’t think it was funny at the time. I blamed myself. I should have known better. Shogun ran out and fought two more hard rounds. I apologized to him, and he’s all battered and says, ‘It’s OK Stitch.’ They got the bonus [for] ‘Fight of the Night.’ It was that great of a fight.
“You hear these guys hitting each other, cracking each other, and I’m glad I’m too old to be doing that,” Duran added. “Then after the fight, they turn into the nicest guys in the world and are ready to hug each other. It’s phenomenal. When you’re in the back and you’re wrapping their hands, it’s like the old gladiator days down in the dungeon. They’re gladiators who don’t go out there and fight to the death, and I know that, but I’m also the one wrapping their hands, tending to their cuts and the one putting an arm around them, win or lose. That’s an honor in itself.”
Joseph Santoliquito is the president of the Boxing Writer's Association of America and a frequent contributor to Sherdog.com's mixed martial arts and boxing coverage. His archive can be found here.