I'm a critic when it comes to fights,
and when it comes to movies, and South Paw,
I'll let you know right off the bat, I told Michael,
Well, he gets a cut right here,
but when you see the cut man working on the cut,
he puts a swab up there.
So he misses a cut about that much.
We in the boxing game, we notice things like that, right?
Didn't happen in Creed.
What's up, GQ?
I'm Stitch Duran, and this is The Breakdown'
[upbeat music]
Creed III.
[Trainer] That was better, stay focused.
[Creed breathes heavily]
You know, having done three
with Michael B. Jordan is priceless.
In the second one, I was telling him
how proud I was of him, and Tessa, and Ryan Coogler,
and Steve Caple that was directing it,
and I'm wrapping his hands, just him and I,
and he looks at me and says,
Stitch, we're from being actors,
to writers, producers, directors,
and he says, I'm directing 'Creed III',
and you're with me as long as you want.
I gotta love Michael.
You know, he's such a good, good kid,
and he respects me enough to use me
as somebody with authenticity.
He'll come up to me and they'll ask me
for the proper things of doing things.
So how many guys could say they've done
three movies with Sylvester Stallone?
I have.
In the script, my name was Marcel.
Well, I don't know anybody named Marcel.
So I was trying to figure out a way of how to do it.
But when it was time for Rocky to introduce us to Adonis,
he says, Oh, this is Stitch,
the best cut man in Philadelphia.
This is Stitch, best cut man in Philadelphia.
What's going on? Hope we don't need him.
From there I said, God, thank you.
You know, the next day I said, Look, I wanna thank you.
He says, No, it has to be authentic.
So, Stitch came out.
Working the corner that I was telling my wife last night
during the fights, you know, I go through all that,
and then I'll pull the cup out so they could breathe.
Michael says, I didn't know you guys did that.
You know, so he picked that up watching fights,
and I did that as the authenticity.
Need to hang on to him.
Wear him out.
Look, boy a punk.
You seem nice.
Yeah, right there I'm pulling on his cup.
That is the KO swell.
My wife named it the KO swell, but, you know,
all the enswells that they have before they're all flat.
I was coming back from a UFC in London years ago,
and I had a water bottle and I put it here,
and it's always contoured like that.
So I went home and I got some clay,
and I made a prototype of that.
Then I had one made.
It's curved because a majority of the swelling
happens here or happens here,
so the theory of a flat iron on something that's curved
didn't make sense to me.
So one side is flat.
Let's say you got swelling here,
you can put the flat side here, but if you swell here,
then that one, and that cold, cold, direct pressure.
Let go of whatever was, and walk into what is.
Go out there and be ferocious!
You hear me? Be ferocious!
Go out there, be Adonis Creed!
Psychology is major.
I mean, it's major, major, major big.
Basically what he's doing,
what I did with Wladimir Klitschko
when he fought Anthony Joshua's last fight
when he lost his world title.
In the dressing room, I put my hand on him.
I said, Look, don't worry about nothing tomorrow.
I'm gonna take care of you like you're my son,
and I leave, 'cause I know the night before
they can't sleep.
I'm putting the final Vaseline on him
before Michael Buffer does the announcements,
and we're this far apart.
He looks at me and says, You could call me son.
Oh my God, that gave me chills,
but I knew I had gotten into his mind.
One of the best fights he ever had in his career.
The importance of this I had seen him like,
three months later in Germany, and I said,
then I remember that moment.
Why?
He says, Stitch, there's very few people
I trust in my life.
You are one of them.
Those are the moments like that that make my whole job fun.
It's not even a job, it's an adventure.
Here Comes The Boom.
You might recognize this guy right here.
Oh God, Stitch.
I can't believe you're working on me, man.
That's so awesome.
You know, I was doing a UFC I think at the Mandalay Bay,
and this one guy says, Hey man, I wanna take a picture.
Come on.
Then he says, Kevin James wants you in the movie.
And of course, you know, I loved it.
As I get the script, I have no lines, right?
And, you know, lines always bring residuals,
so I gotta think of something.
When it was time for me to do my scene with Kevin James,
he pulls me aside and says,
Stitch, we gotta have you say something.
And I'm already, I thought about this two weeks before.
I said, Well, you know, I always tell the guys,
'Welcome to the UFC'.
Ah, I love it. I love it.
As we go through the scene, I walk in and,
Oh, Stitch big fan of yours.
Can't believe you're working on me.
I'm cleaning them up, I'm working 'em,
and at the end I slap 'em.
I'm having a crazy month of meeting people.
All right, welcome to the UFC, huh?
[Kevin] Thank you.
I said, Welcome to the UFC, and then I walk away.
Well, nobody knows I was gonna slap him.
They loved it, it was one take, and it's in the movie.
[blows thudding]
[horn honks]
Yeah, you know, the difference between a MMA fight
and a boxing fight is MMA, their cuts
are usually more multiple cuts,
a little bit deeper in different areas, you know,
on top of the head, eyebrows, and all that.
You know, the knees, the elbows.
Boxing, shoot, if I get one cut,
I could be eating popcorn at the same time
as I'm working on the cut.
If you're a veteran cut man in MMA, you could do boxing.
The Boxer.
[Trainer] We're not ready.
Well, I noticed that the cut man's
using three little skinny swabs on a cut.
The cut's probably about this big, and, you know,
you're trying to stop a dike with a finger.
It's gonna take a little bit more than that.
But the fight scenes were pretty good, man.
It kinda brought back the memories
of Arturo Gotti and Mickey Ward.
Yeah, they did a good job.
Pause.
When you see this type of cut, number one,
my whole time that the fighter's fighting,
my whole focus is on his face, and if there's any damage,
if I could get up in the ring
and work on it within seven seconds, I've done a good job.
First thing you do is you wanna clean it up
with a wet towel, small towel.
Clean it out, put direct pressure on it,
and then put the swabs on there,
and the swabs that I use, I make 'em
to with a cotton swab is a lot bigger.
So I'll soak it into the adrenaline chloride 1:1000,
which is a vasoconstrictor.
I'll put it on the cut.
The little vessels will absorb the adrenaline,
close up the vessels, and then I would close it up
with a mixture of the adrenaline and Vaseline,
and have 'em go out there and go another round.
I'll tell you when I've had enough.
[Trainer] Finish him.
[Interviewer] When is enough enough?
That's a good question.
When is enough is enough?
And I had one fight that I stopped
because I saw that the fighter was taking
what I consider long-term damage.
He's getting hit here and it's coming out here.
I'm working on the fighter, and I asked him,
Look, the doctors are thinking of stopping the fight.
You wanna continue?
And he gives me a real slight no, and boop, stop the fight.
The two trainers, No, no, no, he's okay, one more round.
But once he said no, I'm not gonna let him
go back out there.
The next day, eight o'clock in the morning
him and his wife call me and they thank me,
and he says very simply,
I just didn't have nothing in me.
My job, the eyes and the body structure tells me a lot.
Errol Spence, when he fought Crawford,
after he got dropped the first time,
his whole body language changed completely
where it was more on the negative side
than it was on the positive side,
and that's why it's so important
to have a good team with you.
Rocky IV.
Rocky was doing everything that you should be doing
for that type of fighter.
[horses neighing]
He's out there in the trenches, he's running in the snow,
which makes it difficult for his legs and the thighs,
and believe it or not, the thighs of all the muscles
are probably your most important
because that's where you get your balance point.
[saw rasping]
Guys chop wood.
You know, it's the thing about it,
you're dealing with strength,
and acceleration, and then endurance.
You know, I interviewed Mike Tyson and I said,
Mike, every fighter has that one little thing
that nobody has.
What's that one little thing?
He says, You gotta get your body
in a hundred percent physical condition
because your body tells your mind what to do.
It's a good example right there.
But then he says, You have to take the pain.
You have to take the pain.
Mike is so right because you take a pain in training,
you're taking pain in the fights,
you take pain with your family, you take pain financially,
and then you take pain with long-term injuries.
This movie kinda said it right there.
No pain. No pain.
I notice that they're coming,
they're putting swabs in their mouth.
I always tell these young fighters,
I say, Look, if you're looking for a good cut man,
if he puts the swab in his mouth or in his ear,
get another cut man, that's filthy.
That's the old school mentality, right?
Ask your cut man,
what the adrenaline chloride 1:100 does, the medication?
It's a vasoconstrictor.
If the guy says it's a coagulant, get another cut man
'cause that's the wrong information,
and that was in the old school when boxing was boxing.
Everybody followed everybody's example
whether it was right or wrong.
Putting swabs, no gloves in your mouth and ear.
Those are things that I'm working on trying to get rid of.
Ali.
[Ali] My eyes, something in my eyes, I can't see nothing.
We're not programmed to handle those kind of injuries.
You know, the corner man did what he could
under those circ*mstances,
at least try to flush it out with water.
You know, I probably would've tried
to open it up a little bit more,
and just kinda clean it and scrub it.
Those are situations that never happen,
and when they happen, you have to make
your split second decision,
and that's about as best as that guy could do.
All right, just get up, get up.
I can't see, man.
Come on, Cass!
They were using, at that time,
Monsel's solution was a legal application,
but it's a sulfuric base.
I worked with Livingstone Bramble
when he fought this kid in Minnesota or something like that.
The kid ended up with a big old cut, and I'm thinking,
oh yeah, they're gonna stop the fight.
Next thing I know it's not bleeding.
A couple years later,
I saw the kid came into Las Vegas to train,
and I asked him about that cut, and he says,
I literally had to go to the hospital.
They had to cut that dead tissue out 'cause it's burned.
It's a sulfuric base, right?
And it burned the tissue to the point
where he had to cut it off and they had to resew it.
That's probably what happened to Muhammad Ali
as he got that Monsel's solution in the eyes,
and that's what burned.
If Sonny Liston wasn't cut,
why would you use Monsel's solution?
I don't know if it was intended,
or if they used it on the cut.
I don't know.
Warrior.
You go in there, you kick him in the head,
take him down and finish it!
Well, he missed everything.
The cuts up here, number one, he put it down here,
but the enswell, the KO swell as I call it,
is used for swelling.
And what happens when you get swelling
is you get all these little veins that pop,
and then they start accumulating
into a little bubble of blood.
How many times you get cut,
and you put your finger on the cut,
and, you know, a minute later it stops bleeding.
Blood coagulates itself,
but if you help it with a cold, cold compress,
you close those vessels that are underneath there.
A lot of guys will try to move that
into an area that's not damaged,
but then you move it into an area that's damaged,
and it comes right back.
Now it gets a little bit bigger.
So cold, cold, cold, direct pressure.
Yeah, this guy was a good attempt,
but, you know, he was right below the cheekbone.
But now the fight scenes were real, real good.
The excitement of the corner and the audience,
been there and seen it many times.
Pop the shoulder.
Good, okay, I want you to pop his other shoulder.
The head coach was giving him water
and using the enswell, KO swell at the same time.
If you're a coach, be a coach.
Always bring a cut man to come in and do what he does
because his whole focus, my whole focus would be the face.
He's looking at everything, angles,
and techniques, and all that.
So don't distract from what you're doing.
Give that fighter a hundred percent of your knowledge
and don't worry about the cut.
Let somebody else do it.
Million Dollar Baby.
[Interviewer] What was going on there?
Major, major mistakes. [laughs]
You don't use sponges.
That blood gets inside the sponge,
and if you're gonna use on somebody else,
that blood's still gonna be there.
So it's filthy, throw the sponge away.
But even the application, the guy in the green
that's holding the bottle of adrenaline chloride 1:1000,
so the corner man is wasting seconds by dipping it in there,
getting it ready, and then putting it on the cut,
and once again, he has two little swabs working on the cut.
It's not the way boxing should be done.
You pull that crap one more time, you're disqualified.
Ice on the back of the neck, I don't do that.
Some fighters want it just to cool 'em off.
I'll have the other guys do it, I'll have the team do it.
My whole focus is on the face.
Yeah, who wants cold stuff on you?
You know, you got blood around the nose,
you got blood still the side of the head here.
That should have been cleaned up
before you start working with the medications.
I did a interview with Marco Antonio Barrera.
He's talking about the cuts and he said,
What do you think about those guys
that get the swabs and they rotate it in there?
That's horrible.
You go home and get a Q-tip and rub it in your nose,
it's gonna make you sneeze, number one.
They're creating damage
more than they're helping anything else.
Can I make comment on that sponge?
So when we're filming Creed III, somebody had that idea.
The guy in our corner got the sponge
and he did this not knowing,
I didn't know that he was gonna do that.
He gets water all over my glasses and everything,
and I'm going like this, and the camera guy's laughing.
So that was the only time they did it.
Don't do that, you know?
Eyes are going, boss.
There it is, yeah.
All right, you see how he's moving that enswell?
You see how the tissues being moved and all that?
That's what I'm talking about
going into tissue that's not damaged.
She looks worse than when she first sat down.
Cinderella Man.
[crowd murmuring] [blows thudding]
[Commentator] Smashes him with a big right!
It's a little over exaggerated, right?
And, you know, the guy is down, the guy comes
and he punches him when he is down.
You can't do that.
The referee should normally pick him up,
do the standing eight count,
make sure he's cleared and then let him go out.
But, you know, and I'm looking back at this,
I'm looking at the gloves and, okay,
well those might be the type of gloves
from the '40s or '50s wherever this was shot.
Maybe this is the way that they fought then
when the only rules were there really were no rules, right?
You know, now the standard thing is the eight ounce gloves.
They go from the small weights
up to I think a maximum 154 pounds, some states I think 147.
But then from there it goes to 10 ounce gloves
from let's say 154 to to heavyweight.
You know, there's always been a lot of questions on that
because if you're a heavyweight,
why should you wear a glove designed for a 154 pounder?
Shouldn't you get a bigger glove?
Those are questions with never an answer.
So we'll see, you know?
Raging Bull.
[Announcer] After 10 rounds, Judge Rossi,
eight to two, LaMotta.
Judge Murphy, seven to three, LaMotta.
[Announcer] Lamotta has won the fight!
Raging Bull's a classic movie,
but the scoring system, you know, eight rounds to two,
seven rounds to three.
Here now they use a 10 point must system, right?
So that was then.
[Interviewer] You ever just pour water on a guy
before cleaning him up?
No, I don't. No.
It's funny you say that
because I was working on a cut one time,
and this guy decides to get a towel full of water
and squeeze it all over the guy's head,
and it dilutes my medication.
I jumped on him.
Don't you ever do that again.
They don't know.
You know, that's a good example right there.
The Fighter.
You gotta win a title for you, for me, for Lowell.
This is your time, all right?
You take it.
I had my time, I blew it.
You don't have to, all right?
Yeah, I would've cleaned him up a little bit,
but I love the eye contact.
You know, eye contact is so important
when the coach is talking to the fighter to be focused.
That I gotta give him credit for.
At the same token as he's talking to him,
the cut man should be working on his face.
Well, you take advantage of those seconds.
[Commentator] Again, Ward against the ropes
as Neary is free to attack.
What are you doing?
Come on, Mick!
During the rounds, I'm as quiet as could be.
You know, we always have these discussions.
If I see something, I'll let you know
'cause they know my experience factor.
If I say something, it's the truth, right?
But if a fighter gets cut, then I coordinate it,
I already talked to the corner.
I said, look, let's trade places.
I'm going inside, you stay on the outside.
So we already coordinate that in the dressing room,
but you also talk during the fight.
Basically we have 50 seconds to work with.
10 seconds before the bell rings,
you get the timekeeper that will give you
the warning to get out, and they try to rush you out.
So if you could get up there,
start working on them within seven seconds, you know,
you're maximizing your time.
I told Sylvester Stallone, I said,
Look, I'm typecast as a cut man.
There's nothing wrong with that.
But look, I'd love to do one of your movies,
'The Expendables', or I could be a cop,
I could be a preacher, I could be a teacher,
I could be something outside of being a cut man.
Just gimme one little sign, you know?
So we'll see what happens.
