8 hours Ago By Alex Pattle
“There’s nothing I haven’t seen in a corner,” Frank Greaves says. And it’s hard not to believe the coach, cutman, and hand-wrapper, as he reels off an hour’s worth of anecdotes on torn eyelids, conspiracy theories, and the most audacious interaction with Jake Paul . At The Ring, a historic gym in Southwark, the 47-year-old east Londoner is not only sharing more than a quarter-century’s experience in fighting; he’s also giving The Independent a lesson in hand-wrapping, plus a lesson in boxing .
Thankfully, we don’t end up needing a lesson in treating cuts. As a coach, Greaves has worked with the likes of David Adeleye and Gary Corcoran. As a cutman and hand-wrapper, he has worked with boxers, mixed martial artists and bare-knuckle fighters worldwide.
Now working with a journalist, he (mercifully) abstains from his usual hand-wrapping icebreaker: descending his groin onto the hand of his subject...
Jake Paul, however, was not spared. “I literally dropped my nuts into his hand,” Greaves says, recalling his first meeting with the YouTuber-turned-boxer, ahead of Paul’s bout with Tommy Fury in 2023. Thankfully, it is a liberal use of “literally”; Greaves always remains fully clothed during the tradition.
“There was about 20 people in the room – his parents, brother, training team, social-media crew. The entire time I’m wrapping the first hand, I’m thinking, ‘Do I do it?’ I know his social-media persona can be a bit precious, and I’m getting paid very nice. In the end, I’m like: ‘Just do it, it’s part of what you do.
’ So, ‘wahey!’ I drop my b******s into his hand, and there’s complete silence. “He looks up at me, ‘Dude, what the f*** you doing?’ and starts laughing. And with that, everyone else joined.
I jokingly said, ‘Well, Jake, now we’re close. There’s nothing between us, no secrets.’ If anything goes wrong on fight night, don’t worry; there's a trust bond.
’ He took it really well, was good as gold.” Greaves explains the bizarre tradition: “Fighters are usually a bit tense. [Hand-wrapping] is the first part of the night where you start taking it seriously.
It can be quite intense, and you need that, but if you get too intense too early, you start getting tired. [The icebreaker] is just something stupid, I’m always joking around, but sometimes I’ll get the call to be someone’s cutman or wrap their hands, and I don’t know them. You wanna build a rapport.
When they’re on the stool, cut and bleeding, saying, ‘Am I okay?’, there needs to be trust.” There is also a “duty of care”, which Greaves learned quickly. A former amateur boxer, ironically somewhat perturbed by boxing’s violence, he adopted a slightly more distant role as a coach – to his younger brother, no less.
It’s why Greaves has always put safety first. “Mum and dad knew I had his best interests at heart,” Greaves says, and the same is true of his relationship to other fighters. “I’ve had fighters get knocked out.
It makes you feel sick, literally. You’re absolutely panicked, it’s horrendous.” In fact, those feelings led Greaves to take a break from coaching, when Corcoran sustained a bleed on the brain.
“I knew Gary, his family, his kids,” Greaves reflects. “You question whether you want to be involved, certainly to that degree, when you’re in the hospital and aren’t sure if they’ll be okay.” As Greaves said, he has seen it all.
He describes one cut on Corcoran’s eyelid as so bad that “I was actually worried he might lose a portion of the eyelid”. He pulled Corcoran from a world-title bout, a sometimes controversial move, in the penultimate round. “I wasn’t thinking about other people being able to pat him on the back.
For me, any coach who says, ‘I’ll let my fighter go out on their shield,’ shouldn’t be in there.” Some of these opinions and lessons came from Greaves’s busiest year, when he spent 38 weekends coaching – more than 60 shows, with multiple fighters at each event, meaning over 150 bouts and more than 600 rounds. Yet one of his greatest lessons came in his second-ever fight as a cornerman – his first alone.
Cornering his brother, he was faced with a cut for the first time. “There’s no blood until I wipe his face. I don’t panic, but I say: ‘Oh, f***, you’re cut.
’ My brother said, ‘How bad is it?’ I said, ‘F***ing bad, bruv.’ I remember his exact words: ‘Thanks for that, you could’ve f***ing lied.’” That stuck with Frank, who could not properly treat the cut, as half his items were outside the ring.
Greaves mentions Mike Tyson’s shocking first loss, when his team were so unprepared for their boxer to be hurt by Buster Douglas, they didn’t have the right tools to hand. They held a condom filled with water against Tyson’s head. And what of wrapping hands? Greaves intersperses instructions throughout our chat, as he wraps mine.
Surprisingly, it is not legally required – “spread your fingers” – for boxers to have – “make a fist – their hands wrapped – “turn it over”. The process involves wrapping tape around the wrist, knuckles and fingers, with gauze as a kind of padding on the knuckles. “The wrist should feel nice and supported, without feeling like the blood will be cut off,” Greaves says.
“It’s gonna be compact; when you’re wearing an 8oz glove, you feel like you can tear into a brick wall. You want confidence that your hand will be protected, but I’ve known lots of journeymen who don’t want to pay anyone to do it properly, so they'll pay £50 and a drink.” Such boxers may even re-use wraps.
There can be abuses, though. “Loading”, for example, involves a fighter having extra materials in their wraps to deal greater damage. “I’ve never seen it,” Greaves says, but “you’re supposed to stop the tape an inch behind the knuckle,” and some wrappers try to get away with more.
“And I’ve seen people attempt to ‘stack’; you’re not allowed to use gauze then tape then gauze then tape, because you can pull that next layer of gauze a lot tighter without cutting off blood flow. You can almost create a cast.” So, perhaps loading is the one thing Greaves hasn’t seen in boxing.
“In this day and age, you’d be pretty hard pressed to get to anything [past the commissions]. The whole conspiracy theory about Tyson Fury wearing his glove out in front of him, how would that even work?” Greaves says of claims about Fury’s first knockout of Deontay Wilder. “Beyond stupidity.
” Greaves wouldn’t try anything illegal, but he admits to one trick. “Sergey Kovalev boxed Anthony Yarde, whose team I was with,” Greaves says. “I went to watch [Kovalev’s team] wrap, but they’d started before I got there, which you’re not allowed to do.
I let them finish the first hand, then I made them cut it off – even though I knew there was nothing wrong with the wraps. It was just to get in their heads and p*** them off.” But if Greaves ever saw loading? “I would absolutely pull my fighter out of the bout.
No one wants to be a grass, but no one wants to cause a death.” That is a coach’s duty of care, something Greaves knows well..
