I got the chance to do a quick interview with Namdtan Por. Muangpet (her name means “Sugar”) just after she’d won a WPMF title belt (126 lbs) at the Wan Wai Nai Khanomtom fights in Ayutthaya, March 17th, 2016. Namdtan is a top name among Thai female fighters in Thailand and she’d just beaten another big name, Janice Lyn of Canada, for this belt. It was the third time the two had fought in the past 7 months. Even though I’m not perfectly fluent, and that some of these interviews are short, I really want 8limbs.us to become a site that presents more and more of the Thai female fighter experience, and hopefully these interviews will be more plentiful, and longer as time goes on It’s good to meet the best female fighters in Thailand. The translation is not exact, more a close paraphrase. And a big thank you to Watt Sriboonruang in New York for helping me out in the tough parts.
The Full Namdtan Video Interview
Namdtan is very sweet. She’s 21 years old, confident, incredibly experienced in the ring, and she recently fought and won on TV with a 1 million Baht ($29,000) side bet in the last year against Daoprasuk!; and she’s the “queen bee” of the women fighters of Por. Muangpet Gym, a camp with several very good female fighters, some of whom I face regularly. When I came up and asked if I could interview her, she was nervous. She asked what I wanted to ask her about and I just rattled off a quick, “oh, just what it’s like to fight Thai vs. fighting westerners,” as an example. She said okay and then the moment I introduced her and pointed the camera at her she launched into answering that question with the speed and authority of a news reporter. It was kind of awesome, actually. And very endearing.
So, here’s just a short interview with Namdtan to give an idea of her personality and some insight into her impression of fighting against westerners versus fighting other Thais – she thinks Thais are very skilled and know Muay well, but maybe they remain in their style more whereas she thinks westerners are physically strong and develop over time. And I asked if she’d changed anything in her approach to fighting Janice for the third time, to which she broke down the progression of their three fights and joked that, as a knee fighter (Muay Khao), she doesn’t like 3 round fights.
If you liked this post you may enjoy my interview of another top Thai female fighter: Saifaa
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