Unlucky Jones suffers unkindest cut of all

AMERICA AT LARGE:IN THE seventh round of last Saturday night's light-heavyweight fight at Madison Square Garden, Joe Calzaghe cut loose with a left hand aimed at the middle of Roy Jones's face.

Although he could not avoid it altogether, Jones instinctively spun his head away, and instead of taking it on the nose, the punch caught him in the left eye.

Blood spurted forth from a gash along Jones's eyelid, and five rounds later it was still flowing freely. To give Calzaghe his due, it isn't at all clear that the cut was a factor in what had already become a one-sided rout, and even in its absence Jones might well have lost every ensuing round.

What we do know is that the blood pouring unchecked into Jones's eye for the balance of the evening removed all doubt from the issue. Half-blinded, Jones was forced to box with his head tilted at odd angles, and he became so preoccupied with avoiding further damage that he was unable to mount any attack of his own.

The soon-to-be 40-year-old legend had floored Calzaghe in the opening stanza by landing both ends of a left-right combination. Jones won that round, but he didn't win another on the scorecards of any of the three judges.

Dr Richard Lucey is in his day job a family practitioner in Jones's home town of Pensacola, Florida. He settled there three decades ago after completing his service as a US Navy Flight Surgeon. He is Roy Jones's personal physician, and over the past 16 years he has been in the boxer's corner as his designated cut man.

This had been heretofore a largely honorific position, since in 56 professional fights Jones had never before sustained a significant cut.

One couldn't help but recall the experience of Yogi Berra, the Hall of Fame catcher for the New York Yankees, who for years badgered manager Casey Stengel for a chance to demonstrate his versatility by playing third base.

One afternoon in the 1950s with his infield corps depleted by injury, Stengel put Berra at third for the second game of a double-header. Over the course of nine innings, not a single ball was hit or thrown in Yogi's direction.

"See," Berra told Stengel afterward. "I told you I could play third base." It is the lot of the cut man that his presence usually goes unnoticed until his services are required.

"My job is to stop blood so the fighter can see enough to keep on fighting," wrote the cut man-turned-author Jerry Boyd (under his Nom de Plume, FX Toole) in Rope Burns. I do that one little thing, and I'm worth every cent they pay me."

This isn't like, say, fixing a boo-boo on a kid who has taken a tumble off his bicycle. Repairing a cut, and doing so in the allotted space of 60 seconds between one round and the next, is a demanding speciality, and whether a more experienced cut man might have been able to staunch Jones's wound is something we'll never know. What we do know is Dr Lucey couldn't, and that, probably as a direct result, Calzaghe was able to hit Jones with more punches - 344 of them, to be exact - than any previous opponent had ever landed.

The regulations of the New York State Athletic Commission permit only three substances to be used in administering to cuts: 1/1000 adrenaline solution, Avetine, and Thrombine. Dr Lucey had all of these in his medical kit, and before the evening was over he had tried them all, to no avail.

With eight supporting bouts on that evening's card, there was no dearth of experienced cut men available at the Garden that night. Jimmy Glenn, for instance, was watching at ringside, as was George Mitchell, whose emergency repairs on John Duddy has preserved the Derry middleweight's unbeaten record on more than one occasion. But once the game is on, substitutions aren't allowed.

Over the last couple of rounds, Jones' trainer Alton Merkerson took over administering to the cut himself, but had no better luck than Lucey.

Historically, some boxing trainers have doubled as cut men. Marvin Hagler's career-long trainer Goody Petronelli, for instance, had trained as a Navy medical corpsman, and so confident of his own abilities that he chose not to hire the position out to a specialist.

Although an ability to work quickly and under extraordinary pressure would be considered a prerequisite for the job, sometimes the cut man can save his fighter before the fight even starts.

The old British trainer George Francis could be a magician tending to cuts in the corner, but his career masterpiece came in the run-up to John Conteh's 1973 European title fight against Tom Bogs.

A gash to Conteh's forehead incurred in training had imperilled the scheduled bout at the Wembley Pool. Francis wasn't worried that it might become a factor in the bout itself, but he was afraid that if the medical authorities took note of it, his man might never get to the starting line.

Francis spent days mixing a special plaster, which through a process of trial and error he managed to precisely match to the rich tan tones of Conteh's pigmentation. Francis' handiwork would have made the best Hollywood make-up man envious, and when the boxer reported for his pre-fight physical, he was cleared to fight.

No one noticed anything amiss until fight night. Then, not long after the opening bell, the Dane landed a glancing blow to Conteh's head, and the whole plaster fell off in one lump and landed on the canvas.

At that point there wasn't much the startled referee could do other than to pick up the coffee-coloured disc and sail it out of the ring like a miniature frisbee. Conteh stopped Bogs in seven rounds that night, and a few years later would win the world light-heavyweight title.

Whether a George Francis could have succeeded where a doctor failed last Saturday night remains unknown, but I can promise you this much: he'd have tried. (Think Burgess Meredith in Stallone's corner in Rocky I here.) Once it became apparent that the adrenaline and avetine and thrombine weren't doing the job, an old-school cut man unbound by the Hyppocratic Oath might have invoked more drastic measures.

"I'll always try to stop a cut using the legal stuff," Goody Petronelli once told me. "But if it don't work, I've got stuff in my bag that would stop a bullet hole."