You Have A Cut Man! Series

Slugfest

Pt. 3 - You Have a Cut Man!

I. Introduction

Ali, Tyson, Lennox, Mayweather, Gracie, Liddell and Silva. You don't even have to be a boxing or mix martial arts fan to know the names. These are fighters who have left a mark on their sport. But what if I said the names Chuck Bodak, Al Gavin, Rafael Garcia, Jacob "Stitch" Duran? Would you recognize those names? Probably not. But these men are indispensable and undeniably responsible for much of the success of the names you did recognize. These are the "cut men" that worked the most important bouts in history. Al Gavin, considered the best of all time, worked over 110 title fights and never had a fighter lose a fight on cuts in over his 40 years career as a cut man. These are the guys that you see prep the fighters to go into the ring by placing Vaseline on the fighters faces before the first round to help them deflect a direct blow from their opponent! These are the guys you see in between rounds working with gauze, q-tips and ice in order to keep swelling down and to keep cuts closed so that the fighter can continue in the match, go more rounds than expected and keep them competitive even though their opponent has marked them. All of the training, prep, meal planning, running, fight planning, strategy, film study can be wasted and lost with a single punch or head butt that produces a cut that impairs the fighter’s vision or causes a doctor to step in and stop the fight early. The cut man is the unsung hero in the corner. Every great fighter needs a great cut man!

Today I want to draw your attention to two great fighters. One in the Old Testament and one in the New. If you will permit me, may I simply reference some of their greatest title bouts.

In Judges 14, our Old Testament Champion kills a young lion with his bare hands. He kills 30 Philistine combatants. In Judges 15, with an improvised weapon from the skull of a dead donkey, our champion single handedly kills 1,000 armed and dangerous Philistine warriors. In Judges 16, our champion visits an enemy city and walks to their gates and rips the gates, posts and bar out of the ground and carries them off on his shoulders.

Our New Testament Champion was perhaps the most accomplished missionary of the early church. Since I have an intimate knowledge of what it takes to start a church from scratch the fact that our champion started close to 20 churches is mind boggling. He mentored ministers. He impacted the entire Roman Empire with his preaching. He left a lasting legacy by authoring 13 of the 27 books of the New Testament. This champion is a real sense responsible for you being able to sit here today because it was his teachings that lead to the Protestant Reformation without which we would all still be Catholic and have little to no access to the Word of God.

Samson and Paul . . . great champions, incredible fighters, heroes! However, this morning I would like to read a couple of passages of Scripture that maybe show us these greats in a different stage of their bout.

TEXT: Judges 16:19-21(TLB)

She lulled him to sleep with his head in her lap, and they brought in a barber and cut off his hair. Delilah began to hit him, but she could see that his strength was leaving him. Then she screamed, “The Philistines are here to capture you, Samson!” And he woke up and thought, “I will do as before; I’ll just shake myself free.” (Don't have time but to many of us who are used to winning rest on our laurels! We won when we were close to God and think . . .) But he didn’t realize that the Lord had left him. So the Philistines captured him and gouged out his eyes and took him to Gaza, where he was bound with bronze chains and made to grind grain in the prison.

2 Corinthians 11:23-27 (MSG)

I’ve worked much harder, been jailed more often, beaten up more times than I can count, and at death’s door time after time. I’ve been flogged five times with the Jews’ thirty-nine lashes, beaten by Roman rods three times, pummeled with rocks once. I’ve been shipwrecked three times, and immersed in the open sea for a night and a day. In hard traveling year in and year out, I’ve had to ford rivers, fend off robbers, struggle with friends, struggle with foes. I’ve been at risk in the city, at risk in the country, endangered by desert sun and sea storm, and betrayed by those I thought were my brothers. I’ve known drudgery and hard labor, many a long and lonely night without sleep, many a missed meal, blasted by the cold, naked to the weather.