Issue 065

August 2010

After 17 years as a cutman for the Ultimate Fighting Championship, Leon Tabbs admits that a few details of his career have escaped him. 

He doesn’t remember which UFC took place after the sport was banned in New York (it was UFC 12). He doesn’t remember the name of the red-haired fighter who seems to bleed whenever an elbow touches him (it might be Chris Leben, he says). But Tabbs, a former amateur boxer and trainer, vividly remembers the culture shock of watching Gerard Gordeau’s foot dislodge Teila Tuli’s tooth in the first-ever UFC match. “How do you deal with something like that? Man!” Tabbs says with a laugh. “For 20 years, you’ve seen guys get punched in the face and everything else, but never did a tooth come out!”

At 78 years old, Leon Tabbs has had a cage-side seat to combative sports history. After working that first show in 1993, he has since donned protective gloves and wielded an enswell for hundreds of classic matches – for many of them, he was on his own. Throughout, he has seen MMA shift from a spectacle that he gave no chance of success to a global phenomenon.

Growing up in Atlantic City, New Jersey, Tabbs gravitated to boxing as a teenager. He earned a few amateur titles and won Golden Gloves tournaments before entering the Air Force during the Korean War. In his eight-year military career, he received training as a medic. After returning to the states, he began training and managing fighters such as 1972 Olympic bronze winner Marvin Johnson, Jerry ‘The Bull’ Martin, Jimmy Savage and many more. Here he found a new home for the blood-stanching skills he honed in the military. “Because I was a medic, I could handle the cut action,” he says. 

In 1993, while recuperating from a short-lived bout with prostate cancer, Tabbs was approached by Bob Meyrowitz, founder of Semaphore Entertainment Group. The company was holding a pay-per-view event showcasing a wide range of fighters from various martial arts backgrounds with a paucity of rules, and they needed a cutman. “I couldn’t imagine what this was gonna be all about,” Tabbs says. A few candidates for the cutman position were lined up, Tabbs recalls, and his audition was to be at the first event in Denver that November. 

The live audience at the first Ultimate Fighting Championship looked small, he says, and everyone was crammed together to give the illusion of a packed house for the TV cameras. Tabbs thought the sport to flare up and burn out, or expected someone to die in the cage; in fact, one of his friends told him he was going to end up incarcerated. “I said, ‘That might be, but Meyrowitz as I understand it is a millionaire, so he should be able to get me out of jail,’” Tabbs says with a laugh.

The SEG-era UFC, which earned the wrath of politicians and cable providers, endured the tumult of the 1990s. In the midst of the chaos, Tabbs handled the gore as the promotion’s lone cutman. At the conclusion of Frank Shamrock’s epic title defense over Tito Ortiz at UFC 22, Tabbs found himself standing closer to Shamrock and therefore attended to him first. Ortiz was incensed that he wasn’t treated right away. “Tito – Tito is an angry young man,” Tabbs says through laughter. “He got mad, man. He didn’t speak to me for at least two more years – we’re all right now, though.” 

These days, Tabbs has company in the forms of fellow cutmen Jacob ‘Stitch’ Duran and Don House, and Tabbs is happy to have the help. “Stitch has asked me many times about how I felt when he came in,” Tabbs says. “And I always say, ‘Man, I was so happy to see you, I didn’t know what to do.’”  

After squeezing through the entrance to the cage amid the cornermen and officials, the hardest part of managing a fighter’s cut is getting them under control, Tabbs says. “Sometimes it seems like they think I’m the culprit that caused this problem,” he says. Once they’re settled and seated, the main difference between cuts in MMA versus boxing is quantity – boxers rarely have more than one cut on their faces, Tabbs says. As for the specifics of his trade, Tabbs keeps them secret out of reverence for tradition. “When fellas were trying to learn the game, the old-timers would say, ‘Can’t help you, son – I’m gonna take it to my grave with me,’” he says. “There are some things I probably won’t tell you – it’s just the way I was taught over the years.”  

Though his methods are purely old-school, Tabbs marvels at the growth of mixed martial arts in the modern era. The sport is “wiping out boxing,” he says. Tabbs recently asked someone in the know why the UFC hasn’t returned to Boardwalk Hall in Atlantic City in the years since the venue hosted UFC 53. The answer, he says, is that the venue would reach capacity at around 9,000. In the years since Leon Tabbs got his first glimpse of mixed martial arts, the UFC has grown bigger than that. 

CONFUSION IN THE CAGE

Tabbs was also on hand for the UFC 7 clash between Ken Shamrock and Oleg Taktarov that ended in a draw and with a bloody Taktarov on the edge of consciousness. After ‘Big’ John McCarthy called time and stopped the affair, Tabbs attended to the Russian. “Oleg comes to, he sees me, and he hollers, ‘Leon! Why’d you stop the fight?’ He was damn near out of it,” says Tabbs. “I said, ‘Man, I didn’t do it. That was John, not me!’”