AndyMaBobs

I'm in Britain, and we're pretty good at it. Not as good as France, but one of the best outside of Thailand. The biggest domestic fight in Britain for Muay Thai was Liam Harrison vs Charlie Peters. It was popular, but not outside the hardcore fight fans, there wasn't anyone really talking about it in the local bars. Liam Harrison is the biggest name for muay thai here and he spends a large amount of his time coaching, it's not really viable to make a living solely off of fighting in the UK. In terms of how 'Thai' the approach is, it looks more like Muay Thai than US-Muay Thai does. A lot of teeps and off balancing. Fights are scored the same way that boxing or MMA would be, in that the fighter who looks like they're landing more will win.

The sense I get form the names at least is that Huafai was certainly ethnically Thai - sounds like a Thai muslim name, although we know that Charan isn't. I think either way though it looks to me that they were at the very least trained through the Thai system. I'd be interested if any footage of Charan's fight comes out, because most of the two fights from that event that we have are the muay thai fighters getting ragdolled. I figure it's the same as far as Charan goes, the lack of real defense to throws was a big problem for these guys. The sense that I get from the article is that it tries to distance the two that lost from the one that won or at the least tries to separate them as not being truly Thai, at least on like you said a social level. It reads to me like Huafai and Charan were thrown under the bus for losing, or at least that's my reading of it.

I think of the fights I've been able to find of the golden age guys, he might be my favourite. I love Sagat too.

Man I love Dieselnoi. There's something about the very awkward way he switch kicks that gives me a smile. I hope I get to train with him, and hopefully not get knee'd one day!

Definitely agree here. Taekwondo is fundamentally identical to sport karate, they've just added some extra rotations in the spins. Ajarn Surat is definitely right. There is a similar thing involved in the absolute nonsense that is Ninjitsu, which is not a real martial art and never was. There are people who very much thing that some high profile Japanese instructors MUST have this lineage - as though being Japanese prevents the ability to lie about such a thing. I imagine the same is true of Muay Boran, we just don't know! A lot likely is reconstruction, but I can see why instructors wouldn't want to admit to it essentially being HEMA. Even in Shaolin, there is a sense that what Shaolin we are seeing from 34th generation disciples, who are passing on knowledge today is removed from what it originally was - and that is within the framework of a martial art and country that rigorously documents. Researching Boran, Bokator etc. really did open my eyes to how much Thailand, Cambodia, Myanmar etc. really is the wild west when it comes to martial arts.

It looks like it was the same set, February 12th 1964, Huafai Lucontai (Thai) lost to Fujihara, Rawee Dechachai (Thai) beat Kurosaki, Tan Charan lost to Nakamura. Tan is the fighter I can't find much on, the closest bit of information I've found today was on a forum that said that Tan Charan was Chinese by heritage, but was born and grew up in Thailand - so presumably in the same boxing camp system. So from best I can gather, 2 of the fighters were Thai, ethnically, but all 3 muay thai fighters were Thai by nationality and I'd be surprised if they weren't all trained through the Thai 'system' of making fighters. You're likely right that these were the best kyokushin fighters, ironically except for the karateka that lost (and in fairness most of the fight is him throwing Rawee around). It's hard to know a lot of this concretely though, how good any of these fighters were, Japanese or Thai, most of the information I've come by is people also talking about this like we are now. I've seen clips of Rawee that were not related to these fights - and from what I gather he was respected at the time, but as to what the actual scene for Muay Thai was like in the 1960s - I don't really know.

At one point I was working on a deep dive study into South East Asian martial arts, or Indochinese kickboxing. I was looking at Muay Thai, Muay Laos, Pradal Serey, Lethwei and noticing that they are quite literally the same martial art. There are differences in scoring like Pradal Serey favouring elbows, and Lethwei allowing for headbutts, but in terms of form, this is one martial art that has been spread around a long way. My initial hypothesis was that Bokator, the father art of Pradal Serey was likely to be the progenitor of all of these martial arts. However the more research I did, the more it pushed me to eventually scrap the article altogether. While the Japanese are very good at recording their martial arts history, South East Asia generally is not. It also didn't help that the Khmer Rogue destroyed so much of Cambodia's martial arts culture. While Eskrima/Kali definitely isn't close enough to be considered the same martial art, General Tunwakom's style looks very much like Eskrima. I think that's partly because of the influence that martial art appears to have had on his style, but also because the two martial arts share a lot of ideas to begin with. There's a distinct difference between Muay Thai, Lethwei, Eskrima etc. and Kung Fu/Shuai Jiao rooted martial arts like Karate, Taekwondo and Judo. The emphasis on knees and elbows, and unchambered kicks, give all of those martial arts a slower, more brawly aesthetic to them, when compared to KF/SJ rooted martial arts that have more fluidity and emphasis on iron body conditioning. If I had to really hazard a guess, and this is a stab in the dark, I think that Muay Thai and similar martial arts probably trace their ancestory back to India. I'd be surprised if there wasn't a degree of Kung Fu influence to it, but you're absolutely right. Muay Thai has a lot of similarities to other martial arts, sentiment in Cambodia is that Thailand stole Muay Thai from them. I was speaking to a martial arts historian who's fairly well known in these circles who said to me 'Cambodia says Pradal Serey is older than Muay Thai, and it probably is, but there's no real way of knowing'. The records are just non-existent. If you take a look at this demonstration though, this should seem awfully familiar to people from a lot of different styles.

Those were actually the guys I was talking about in the first post. They weren't 'proper' Muay Thai - but they definitely proved that it was possible for it to do well here - and from there we got actual thai boxers and westerners who trained in Thailand coming home and bringing it here properly.

I've met several types of people over the years. The street fighters are common, you also get the guys who have very clear mental problems training in their jogging bottoms with that weird look in their eye. One guy I met and ended up sparring with was a guy who was new to the gym. He wasn't allowed to spar because he had no gumshield, but I offered to do a few rounds with him light contact. I had a feeling about the dude because he was in baggy jogging bottoms and had thick unkempt stubble going all the way down to his neck - and he'd said he was 'watching the other guys to learn their styles'. For some reason I thought 'lets not judge the guy by his appearance, maybe I'm wrong'. The next thing I know this dude is dancing, trying to fight-dance, has his tongue hanging out of his mouth and when I warn him, he gets annoyed about it. I slap a few kicks on him but the dude is so physically unstable - that I have to call a quit. I say to him, there is literally no way I can spar him without hurting him, because he's messing around with shit that doesn't work. He's swaying so much that if I kick this guy he'll be knocked out. He says his style has worked on the streets, and I inform him that these guys are not guys on the street. They are trained MMA fighters. I talk to the MMA coach about it, and he said he had to warn the dude the day before. He said: 'listen, there are bigger, stronger men in this gym and at the moment they're being nice to you, if you keep acting the way you are then one of them is liable to hit you.' Ended up seeing the same dude the next day, he asked if I'd teach him a switch kick. He was MUCH better behaved. The dude never came back after that little mini lesson I gave him on his kick. I asked our front office lady about him, and she says: 'The lift doesn't go all the way to the top floor with him' and that he'd been homeless. He was an odd dude, I had to warn him not to talk to the kids in the Jr. class - because I knew his energy would freak them out. He wasn't an arsehole by any means but definitely someone I'm glad isn't here now.

Best of luck man just have fun - very few people get a chance to do what you get to do!

From what google-fu I've done (I haven't dug into blackbelt or anything like that) Huafai Lukcontai was indeed a Thai and lost his fight to the Japanese fighter. I haven't found anything on the other guy yet. So at least two of the three muay thai fighters were Thai, 1 with a win, 1 with a loss. Both fights looking pretty similar of getting thrown about the ring, the main difference being that Huafai was not able to properly adjust.

Yeah there is a lot more competition in kyokushin than kickboxing, I think it's the appeal of karate to kids and parents - and because of knockdown also drawing peopel from kyokushins offshoot styles. Although I wouldn't say we need to reach agreement, because I'm not really disagreeing with you

I asked my friend on this point because he knows more about it than I do. He said that Kurosaki wasn't Oyama's student, they both trained Goju Ryu together. They founded KK together. They had big differences on where they thought karate should go from there, Oyama was a big believer of knockdown rules karate, in his opinion it was more realistic to keep karate bare knuckle and restrict punching to the face - Kurosaki basically wanted kickboxing. Kyokushin competition as itself now is huge, Holland, Japan and Brazil are the big three as far as that's concerned and those fights are brutal. Oyama himself was a lot of hype and marketing (not that he was PURELY that) but fighters that he trained definitely live up to those ideas. Those dudes can walk through anything, their conditioning is that tough.

I think it's a good thing that Sylvie has developed away from that - because there's a lot of idiocy involved in it. I can understand the Thai's feeling that the Japanese stole their art but it's not really true. Japanese kickboxing/kyokushin is still chambered round kicks and low kicks rooted in Okinawan karate, lots of iron body conditioning. I haven't trained in Kyokushin I'll freely admit that, but I'm quite close to that world and have a few friends who are quite deep into the history of it (although they've both moved onto other martial arts now). There are similarities 100%, I think the use of knees definitely has influence from Muay Thai but I think Japan and any other asian culture can lead to some raw nerves, there is so much history out there between Japan and the rest of Asia. It's similar to Germany in Europe in that regard.

Oyama was good at marketing himself, but Kurosaki marketed much of the actual martial art itself. Oyama knew his stuff - but there was a cult of personality surrounding him that you find with most influential martial artists. Jon Bluming talks about it here:

Copied from the above post, it didn't embed at first because it's not plain text. Yeah, it looks more or less the same as the fight with Rawee except this guy wasn't able to get the elbows off later in the fight. He had something going with the knees but he just got thrown about for much of the fight. These are all fight situations that I'd be more interested to see now, because both martial arts have developed more since then.

Should be up there now The Kyokushin youtube channel has at least two of them

oh oh, i think i've found it! Fight 1 on the 1964 kyokushin vs Muay thai challenge card Akio Fujihira (later fighting kickboxing under the fightname Noboru Ozawa) vs Huafai Lukcontai. Im pretty sure this one has already been posted in this thread -but I am honestly to lazy to go trough the whole thread to find it and check that the link is still valid. YouTube - Kyokushin vs Muay Thai in 1964 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zpMAVcvH5Q) Fight 2 Tadashi Nakamura vs Tan Charan. Sadly not available online as far as I know. The result was Win by Nakamure by 1R KO (kick) Fight 3 Kenji Kurosaki (who was there as coach and agreed to figh in the last minute) vs Rawee Dechachai. YouTube - Rawee vs. Kenji Kurosaki (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiKypFdtHH0)

Who were the other two fighters? I don't know their names and its the first time I've heard that they weren't Thai - be curious to know. I've tried to find their fights in 64 before but they don't get circulated around the 'muay-thai-o-sphere' - I don't actually know if the footage is here or lost, so maybe you can help me there. I wouldn't call Kurosaki an elite kyokushin guy either, his focus was mainly with marketing Kyokushin as a martial art, it was Mas Oyama who was really in the technical side of it. On your second reply - I agree with the majority of what you're saying. I think that Muay Thai is structured more like boxing in that it's a ring sport and fully geared towards full contact competition in the ring keeps it from getting bogged down in hypotheticals like other martial arts do. That being said, I don't think that top Lumpinee and Raja champions are necessarily going to have success in kickboxing. Guys like Buakaw and Sittichai did well in K1/Glory because of their explosive styles, but you'll still see a Lumpinee Stadium champ like Aikpracha struggling with a rather old and shopworn fighters like Albert Kraus and Steve Moxon, hardly anyone's idea of elite level kickboxing. As much as I LOVE training and coaching Muay Thai, the elitism you see in discussions about it is sometimes laughable. I can understand their perspective that in kickboxing you're not allowed to elbow or unlimited clinching - but I think that's hair splitting, Sanda guys will just suplex the top Thais on their heads and MMA fighters will tap them out or catch them with blitzes. When it comes down to it, they're all combat sports with different rulesets for different situations, I think if the best Thais in the world were able to dominate kickboxing we would see them doing it, there's certainly more financial incentive there - but we don't. I think it's not as simple as being more limited in weapons - the pace of the fights are different, the type of conditioning you need is different. I think another factor as to why the Thai's never dominated in kickboxing is also likely because the best kickboxers are floating around the 155lb mark. I think that what also doesn't help matters is today is that kickboxing as a sport is becoming a weaker and weaker talent pool. You will occasionally get your Cedric Doumbes, Tenshin Nasukawa and Takeru but they are few and far between. It's not like what it was when you have prime Petrosyan, Buakaw, Kraus, Masato, Kyshenko, etc. It's not like Thailand which benefits from being one of the most popular sports in Thailand, if not the most.

This is part of why I fund it funny when you have people, particularly on YouTube and on the few Muay Thai websites out there (in fairness, not this one) talking about how Muay Thai proved itself superior to karate. This has never really been the case - Muay Thai won 1 out of 3 of these fights in 1964 (and the guy who did lose wasn't even meant to be fighting)and showed itself as effective, so long as karateka were not using their throwing techniques. Muay Thai lost to karate, and there isn't any shame in that, Kyokushin is a fantastic, highly effective style of karate that is the backbone of kickboxing as we know it today - the rhythm of kickboxing is very much like kyokushin, which I think is probably why Thais find it so hard to adapt. Those guys were smacking each other with probably the best low kicks of any martial art, from well before they had contact with Muay Thai. I don't know if the intention was to get closer to karate's Okinawan roots, but that is certainly what happened. There's this idea that Muay Thai is the 'best' stand up martial art, and as someone that has only ever trained Muay Thai with dedication as a stand up art - I just don't think that is true. Thai boxers don't dominate in kickboxing like Sherdog would have you believe, Europeans do, and occasionally there is a good Thai who is able to adapt his style and do well in the move set, but that is the minority - really it's only Buakaw and Sittichai. Then you have China and it's Sanda, China seems to be this abyss full of fighters, where the best fighters from all around the world go to lose VIA knockout to Chinese guys that nobody had heard of before that day. I'd say that IMO the most well rounded immediately practical striking arts are Muay Thai and Sanda, but they've all got their strengths in different areas - I don't think any martial art has physical conditioning quite like Kyokushin does.

I've been waiting for this! Looking forward to reading it. Feel free to delete this post if it's only meant for your updates!

It's worth mentioning that the other two of those three fights, the kyokushin fighters beat the Muay Thai fighters. Kurosaki was actually meant to be a coach for that event, he only fought as a last minute deal because the guy who was meant to do the fight had visa trouble where the event was moved twice.

Rambaa's move of bumping the knee in is something that I do quite a lot, it's not so much a judo thing as it is a freestyle wrestling thing - which may be where he picked it up from, that being said though, I've seen other Thai boxers do it, and when Alistair Overeem does it, it's normally considered a muay thai dump. I've spent a decent bit of time dabbling in Sambo - which is my favourite grappling art, and very similar to Judo - and one of the first moves I was taught (incidentally also taught in catch wrestling class too) was to hoist the opponent from behind and knee bump their legs while turning them towards the floor in mid air. I knew it as a muay thai move too - but by coincidence literally this afternoon the group muay thai class was training it!

I can second Vegas Pro. I use 13, and it's been good for me with a lot of things. I'd recommend Da Vinci Resolve too, it's primarily for colour grading but it has decent enough editing tools for a free software (and in colour grading its second to none)

When I first started training there was a big scary guy like that, and I jumped in sparring with him on my second week. He kicked me in the head three times consecutively but didn't hurt me once. Was a cool dude. One time we had a guy who was pretty alright at fighting come in, and he was roughing up the newbies, and the big scary guy kicked the shit out of him for it.