Swayze Valentine is wrapping hands, patching cuts in male-dominated profession

Here’s one way to spot a career field that tends to be male-dominated: the job title has the word “man” at the end of it.

Congressman. Policeman. And, in the fight business, cutman.

Maybe that’s why Swayze Valentine waffles between a few different terms when trying to describe the role she’s occupied for the past couple years. Sometimes it’s cutperson. Other times it’s cutwoman, or even cutgirl, as she’s known on Twitter.

And then, sometimes it’s still just cutman, only with the emphasis taken off the final syllable (think “yeoman”).

“Different people have different reasons for getting into this,” Valentine told MMAjunkie.com (www.mmajunkie.com). “I honestly feel like it chose me. You don’t wake up one morning and think, I want to be a cutman.”

And yet, here she is. This Friday night in Las Vegas, the 27-year-old Valentine will be wrapping hands and tending to cuts at the World Series of Fighting 3 event at the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino. According to one of her mentors, Jacob “Stitch” Duran, it’s far more than a public relations stunt.

“It’s a testament to her,” said Duran, who’s been a fixture in the corner on UFC broadcasts for years. “I think it’s the first time we’ve seen a female cutperson working a major event in mixed martial arts. She’s 100 percent legit.”

How Valentine got here has at least a little to do with her reluctance to parade around in front of strangers in a bikini. That’s the first job she was offered in MMA, and one she briefly tried shortly after attending her first live MMA event in Anchorage, Alaska, in 2006.

“It was incredible, just this great atmosphere, and I really just wanted to be a part of it,” Valentine said. “So I contacted the promoter, and I asked him how you’d get involved if you didn’t want to be a fighter. He kind of looked at me and said, ‘If you don’t want to be a fighter, how about a ring girl?’”

That wasn’t quite what Valentine had in mind, but she figured she’d give it a shot. As soon as she saw the skimpy bikini they expected her to wear, she knew she should have gone with her first instinct.

“After doing it once, I knew immediately that that wasn’t the part of MMA I wanted to be involved in,” Valentine said. “But when I was in the back[stage area], I saw the coaches wrapping the hands of the fighters, and right then I knew that’s what I wanted to do. I just thought there was no greater honor than wrapping the hands of a fighter.”

It wasn’t until a few years later, while living in Idaho, that Valentine first contacted Duran to ask him a question few people even consider: How does one become a cutman, anyway?

Duran directed her to some books and YouTube videos, but emphasized that there was no substitute for practice on real, live fighters. The best way to start, Duran said, was to find a gym and try to talk the fighters there into letting Valentine wrap their hands before practice. The next day she got in her car and drove the 60 miles to Boise’s Combat Fitness gym.

“I started wrapping some of the guys that day, and it turned into a passion almost immediately,” Valentine said. “I was there five days a week, every single week, wrapping the guys’ hands.”

That was the summer of 2011. Since then, Valentine said, she’s worked MMA events all over the country, slowly building her expertise and her reputation. It’s still primarily a man’s world, but these days the fighters mostly know and trust her, she said, or else they disregard her completely the same way they would with a male cutman.

“By fight day, they’re in their own heads and barely noticing anyone else,” Valentine said. “If I have an issue, it’s usually with the coaches. It starts out really innocent. Coaches will say that, when their fighter walks out, they don’t want me to grease their fighter. I’ve had coaches say they didn’t want me wrapping their fighter. I was even at one fight in Oregon where the doorman refused to let me in the cage to work at all.”

The worst was a few months ago, at an amateur Tuff-N-Uff event in Las Vegas. That’s where a coach shoved Valentine out of the way when she tried to tend to a cut around his fighter’s eye, she said.

Still, petty annoyances such as that one haven’t diminished her passion for the job. In her regular life, Valentine is a stay-at-home mom to two boys, the oldest of whom is nearly 6. They know just enough about the sport and their mother’s role in it that they can put on their MMA gloves and play “knuckles” when they see a fight on TV, then run to their mother for repairs on imaginary cuts between rounds.

But when fight night rolls around, as it will for Valentine on Friday, that’s when it’s time to go to work.

“I’ve dedicated my time to following this dream and achieving this goal,” she said. “I’ve pawned things to get plane ticket money or to get gas to drive eight hours to Vegas, just so I could sit in Randy Couture‘s gym for three days in the hopes that I could wrap a fighter’s hand or help them during sparring. I’ve totally dedicated myself to this, and I love it.”

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