The greatest thing about writing about fights and those involved in them for nearly three decades are the wonderful people you meet along the way.

Men, for example, like Stitch Duran and Burt Watson. Duran and Watson are UFC workers who did jobs that are so anonymous and so dreary so well that they became minor celebrities.

Duran is one of the finest cut men in boxing and mixed martial arts. People have been fighting each other for money for more than 100 years, and almost from the time they began, there was someone alongside to tend to them when, inevitably, they were cut.

Until Duran came along, these cut men were virtually anonymous. A few had a bit of notoriety within the tightly knit fight community, but it was mostly because of how effective they were at their jobs.

A cut man as a celebrity, though? It was a laughable notion. And then Jacob “Stitch” Duran came along and, sure enough, he became a celebrity.

View photos Urijah Faber (L) gets his hands wrapped by cutman Jacob 'Stitch' Duran inside the locker room at UFC 175 at the Mandalay Bay Events Center. (Photo by Esther Lin/Getty Images) More

The guy wrote a book on his life that has played to rave reviews on Amazon. He’s hounded for photos in Germany, where he’s nearly as big of a star as the fighters he helps.

At the Philadelphia Airport, he was signing so many autographs the day after an event that it caught the notice of a 50-something married couple.

“Who’s he?” the man asked his wife.

“Oh, you know,” she said. “I can’t think of his name. He’s that actor. He’s on TV a lot. You know him.”

He was the UFC’s cut man, until he spoke his mind and lost his job.

Duran, who was personally hired by UFC president Dana White in the early days of Zuffa’s ownership of the UFC, made public comments on Twitter and in an interview with the website Bloody Elbow regarding the company’s new uniform deal with Reebok. On Tuesday, Duran announced he’d been fired by the UFC.

@daej81 You will be the first to know that the UFC just let me go because I spoke out about the Reebok deal. Got to look for a new job! — Jacob Stitch Duran (@StitchDuran) July 21, 2015

White declined to comment about Duran when asked by Yahoo Sports, so the exact reason for his dismissal is unknown.

What’s disturbing about it, though, is that if Duran were indeed fired for his comments about Reebok, nothing he said was particularly inflammatory.

In the interview with Bloody Elbow, the most significant point he made was that he would lose a lot of sponsorship money under the new deal.

Fighters are paid to wear the Reebok gear during UFC fights and the associated pre- and post-fight activities, but no one else is. Duran said in the interview that the cut men were informed that once the Reebok deal went through, they would have to remove all of the other sponsors from their clothing during the events.

That, he said, would hurt his bank account.

“I made really good money on that sponsorship,” Duran told the site.

Nowhere in the piece did he criticize the UFC, Reebok or the new uniforms. He even said of UFC officials, “I don’t think they did this out of malice,” in regard to the cut men losing their sponsorship opportunities.

In an interview with MMA Junkie Radio, Duran said he didn’t like the design of the vest he was given to wear because it didn’t have a place for all the equipment he carried with him into the cage.

It should be noted that UFC 189 at the MGM Grand Garden in Las Vegas was the first show in which the Reebok deal was in effect. Blood flowed freely during the epic fight card, and Duran and Mike Afanasiev did a terrific job on the cuts. So, the design of their new outfits weren’t really a hindrance to them doing their jobs.

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