By: Rich Bergeron
Jerry Colton has been a full-time cutman for the past year, but he in addition to closing physical cuts on the faces of boxers and MMA fighters, he’s also making a serious effort to revolutionize the sport of boxing and improve the image of the sport. “Irish” Micky Ward has joined forces with Colton to promote a national registry for professional boxers.
Prior to his cutman career he managed and trained fighters out of Lowell, Massachusetts. He soon realized that the gig wasn’t very appealing. “It’s a real drag when you’re managing and training fighters, because their headaches become your own,” he said. “You do all that work finding fights for ’em. Then after the fight you end up in the hole about 400 bucks.”
So, instead of trying to fight the forever uphill battle, he fell back on one of his old talents. “I was an EMT when I was a firefighter for eleven years, so nothing bothers me,” he said. “I like being a cutman, and I’m good at it. I’m really comfortable doing it, I don’t get nervous at all.”
When he started working the new gig he quickly found himself becoming a fixture in the New England fight game. He recalls getting off the ground with “Micky [Ward] and his boys.” From there he wound up crossing over to MMA cut work.
“I’ve worked with a lot of New England guys around here,” he said. “Probably the most popular one is Jeff Fraza. He’s a real good kid, and his dad manages other fighters I worked with. I also picked up some work for UFC and MMA guys. There’s a lot of shows going on around here.”
The transition to the new sport gave him a new challenge. “A cut is a cut,” he said, “But a cut in MMA is a different animal than one in boxing. When it comes to that whole scene I tend to keep my mouth shut. I don’t know anything about arm bars or over the shoulder leg holds. It’s a really strange sport to me, but it’s getting big.”
Still, no matter what kind of cut he’s tasked with closing up, he’s always confident he can take care of it. “With the right equipment and tools I can fix just about anything,” he said. “Unless a cut is through the eyelid and the eyeball is exposed through it, or if it’s so serious it’s right down to bone. Other than that you can take care of anything with the right stuff.”
The two major substances he and other cutmen swear by are: Adrenaline 1:1000 and Avitene, which is a white cottony-looking substance. “They use it when they do all kinds of surgery, even brain surgery,” said Colton. “It’s so powerful you could stop a gash in someone’s wrist on an artery. It’s really potent stuff.”
Though Colton has never worked with any seriously famous fighters, he finds work with plenty of average Joes. “I go to fights and end up getting hired by people, sometimes even the main event guy might need a cut man,” he said. “I just work with a lot of the guys from New England, upstate New York, New York City, and New Jersey.”
Colton first became involved in boxing because his brother George was a pro fighter. “I remember going to Boston Garden when I was seven,” he said. “I watched his fights there, and I remember him holding my hand while walking up the stairs to the Garden gym, which was five flights straight up.”
He hung around plenty of old gyms and said he saw Joe Denucci (now the State Auditor of Massachusetts) fight along with some other old time fighters from Boston. Tommy Collins and Jimmy Connors were some other great fighters he witnessed in action. “I saw a lot of the big guys that turned out to be big names,” he said. “I just don’t remember them all because I was so young.”
Looking back at the history of boxing in New England, Colton sees Marvin Hagler and Rocky Marciano as the major standout names among the greatest fighters of all time. He also sees a few new fighters vying for their own spot in the limelight. “Peter Manfredo’s definitely in the top 10,” he said. “Maybe even the top five. Jose Rivera from Worcester is another one. He’s a former world champ.”
Colton boxed himself for a short time. ” I was an amateur in the Silver Mittens,” he said. “I had three fights. I realized at that point I wasn’t gonna make a living being a boxer, but I loved the sport. In 1982 I opened my first gym with my brother. I just followed his lead and we started training guys. I’ve been at it ever since. We closed the gym five years later, and I work at other gyms now.”
It’s “the characters in the sport” and being able to travel so much that keeps Colton involved. He’s always enjoyed making new friends and meeting new people.
Colton insists that it’s better to have a decent cutman and not need him than to need a cutman and not have one. “A cutman is an important part of the team,” he said. “It can mean the difference in a fighter winning or losing a fight. If you get cut from a punch and you’re winning the fight, if the cut gets so bad that it’s out of control and the fight gets stopped, you lose.”
Still, while he sees his job as essential, he doesn’t see it as all that difficult. “This guy, one of the best cutmen in the business, Legendary Cutman Al Gavin, was showing me the ropes once in Worcester. He told me that any job you can do in under a minute can’t be that hard to learn. It’s just a matter of having the right tools and knowing what to do,” said Colton. “The first thing you do is apply direct pressure and stay calm. You just use your Adrenaline or Avitene. Then you use a swab, and it isn’t just Vaseline on there. A lot of times we use a secret mixture to make it thicker and help it adhere better. You also make sure you give your fighter the right advice after he’s been cut to give the medication time to work. It usually takes a minute and a half to two minutes for it to work. He has to go out, stay on the outside and just box a bit. It can mean the difference if you have a cutman that knows what he’s doing.”
Though he’s seen his share of cuts, bumps, and bruises, it is the damage done to the sport itself that he’s most passionate about addressing. “The reputation of boxing is at a point where if you had to measure it on a scale of 1-10, the reputation right now is a five,” he said. “It isn’t gonna change and it hasn’t changed over the years. Boxing is boxing. You always hear people say, ‘There’s another black eye for boxing.’ People in the sport know what’s happening. There’s a negative attitude toward the sport because of individual actions by people. People in baseball and football do the same things, and I don’t know why they single it out so much in boxing, but they do.”
The issues contributing to the deterioration of the sport led Colton to help build what he calls Fighter 411, The National Registry of Professional Boxers. He sees a genuine lack of organization as one of the most significant problems plaguing boxing. Senator John McCain tried to introduce a bill that might have made a difference, but it didn’t pass, Colton said. “Every sport is organized. Even the professional Ping Pong league and horseshoes are organized,” he explained. “In every other sport there’s always a central organization that calls the shots for everybody. Boxing from state to state differs. Boxers get information from their states and surrounding states. From the East Coast to the West Coast, things are all different. Some guys are trying to start unions. Then there’s the Retired Boxers Foundation. They have big fund-raisers with celebrities to bring more of a spotlight, but they’re still not doing anything.”
Colton and Micky Ward decided to approach the problems of the sport in a new way. “We just wanna get a database or membership of people just in one spot where we can say look, we have 30,000 boxers associated with our registry,” said Colton. “We can contact them or mass mail them and get their opinions on this or that. That would pull some weight with any bill going through. 30,000 guys behind me looking for a union or a national commission would be huge. I don’t know if a union’s the answer, though. There might be one national union and all separate locals. Will they all abide by the same rules? Nationally everything has to be the same, so wherever you go you can expect the same setup as far as rules and medical requirements. Now you can go to some states and just show up and fight. Other states make you take an eye exam, EKG, or provide yearly physical results. Until we get things organized, the sport’s not gonna get the respect it deserves.”
Instead of everything being overseen by “alphabet organizations” Colton likes the idea of regions. “The main thing is that the sport be organized. That’s the main role, as it is in any business, family, or job. Everything’s just helter-skelter if it’s not organized,” he said. “The UFC for instance, is well organized. I see a lot of things in the news these days where it’s clear that UFC and MMA are becoming much bigger than boxing. Of course, they’re not paying the MMA guys right, but they are organizing. Promoters, as it is now, can say ‘no, I’m not going along with that.’ With greater numbers, they’ll have to oblige the boxers, if we all stood together. Basically that’s what we’re trying to do. We’re even bringing in lawyers and financial advisors that will help people for free. We’re even going to address retirement, health insurance, and all that stuff. Still, nothing’s gonna happen until the sport gets organized.”
The trash talking in boxing is another thing that Colton sees as going too far sometimes. “It’s okay when you can tell a guy is saying, ‘I respect him, but I’m gonna put him to sleep.’ When it gets personal when they’re at these press conferences and they start fighting, that’s very bad for the sport,” said Colton. “Overall boxing is full of guys with poor sportsmanship and loose cannons. Mickey Ward and Arturo Gatti played golf with each other before their fights. Then they get in there, and they wanna beat the snot out of each other, but they’re best of friends to this day. Those type of guys are great for the sport.”
Colton hopes to someday see another three-fight slugfest that can compare to what Gatti and Ward produced. “After the second fight I was just sitting there in awe. When the fight ended, it actually didn’t matter if Buffer got up and announced the winner,” he said. “No one cared they were so entertained. No one cared who won or lost because there was so much action and heart. You don’t see that too often. Both of them are great ambassadors for the sport.”
To find out more information about Jerry Colton and Fighter 411, go to his profile on www.fightclubonline.com: