“Every other month I’d go to Jersey and I would have half the card because I trained half the card in striking,” he said. “And Leon Tabbs was the only cutman, and I was wrapping my guys’ hands. Then the opponents were complaining because they said my guys had an edge. So Dana said, can you wrap both sides? I said, Dana, we don’t do that. He said, House, you got to stop thinking boxing, man. Okay, so that’s how I got started. I started wrapping both sides.”
Twenty-one years later, he hasn’t looked back. He’s kept his coaching gigs on the boxing side, and when it comes to MMA, he’s working with all the fighters stepping into the Octagon. No regrets.
“Actually, I didn’t like the training side (in MMA) because in the beginning, I’m not sure how it is today, there was no structure. It was just a bunch of guys training sporadically. I guess they had a buddy who was a kickboxing coach, and a jiu-jitsu coach, and everybody thought their discipline was more important. The fighter was all confused and it’s like, I can’t do this because I can’t be a part of it. Boxing is one head trainer and here’s the rules, here’s what we’re going to do. It (MMA) was unorganized, it wasn’t structured.”
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Folks like House did bring structure and professionalism to the sport, along with the street cred that goes along with being a respected figure in combat sports. But part of that respect was earned because House never went into a situation believing he knew it all. And maybe he did, but occasionally there were those situations when he still had to learn on the fly.
“I’ve been in boxing since ‘72 and as a fighter / trainer, you kind of watch what the cutman does,” he said. “And sometimes as a coach in the corner, I had to do both jobs. And you kind of learn on the job, right? There’s no school. You sort of learn on the job and eventually you kind of get good at it. My first cut was with the UFC, and I remember the fighter, Andrei Arlovski. There was one cutman, Leon Tabbs, only both sides got cut.”