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Is Somat Hong Sakoun still around at all? I'm sure he doesn't train anyone anymore but the article I saw about jocky gym said he was one of the biggest technicians of the 60's. I don't know how old he is but would probably be really interesting to talk to.

We've seen so many great trainers, he is kind of unparalleled in how and what he teaches, Thanks for sharing your experiences! He is a special Muay Thai mind.

off the cuff, crowd them often so memorized combinations are hard to pull off. Elbow, kickboxers hate it. Clinch, kickboxers hate it. Teep a lot, kickboxers tend not to be super experienced vs teeps.

Really well said. This was really even much more the case in the Golden Age because fighters could do everything. There were very few successful one-dimensional fighters. These days you get much more singular fighting dimensions, it seems. Back in the day all the top fighters had all the skills. You couldn't just take their weapon away and win. I can never get out of my head the fight between Boonlai (a kicker) and Somrak (a few years before he won Gold as an Olympic boxer). Somrak wins without throwing a single meaningful punch (maybe not even a single punch, I can't recall). It's pretty amazing: But so many of the top fighters had just capacities across styles. Chamuekphet was a relentless knee fighter, but could kick with anyone. Weeapol had very heavy hands, but could kick with everyone.

You kind of tend to have two kinds of kickers, if you want to be really generalized. You have southpaw kickers who tend to have big, thunderous kicks (because their kick goes right into the power side of the orthodox fighter), like Yodsanklai and Samkor that you mention, and then you have orthodox fighters who are really more Muay Femeu, artful in scoring points and taking angles. Silapathai was unearthly in this. Check out his fight versus Karuhat were Karuhat, one of the most Muay Femeu fighters ever elected to kick with him: Very few fighters ever could out kick Karuhat. It's best to keep in mind that these "styles" are all just descriptors. If you said someone was Muay Tae, it isn't some kind of club he belongs to, you're mostly just saying "that guy kicks a lot". It's not purely that, but we tend to make a bigger deal of these style types than Thais do. Most kickers of the Golden Age though would consider themselves Muay Femeu. Femeu fighting just means "skilled" and "artful", something pretty much any fighter wouldn't mind being said about themselves. The torso kick was the most dependable highest scoring strike in Muay Thai, so the "art" of the kick was using it repeatedly to just rack up the points and demonstrate your control over the space.

The one to watch is Silapathai, maybe the best Muay Tae fighter ever: https://www.patreon.com/posts/21484000 Also Boonlai was a hell of a kicking fighter: https://www.patreon.com/posts/25122414