Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu

You can read more on the Narrative Structure of Muay Thai scoring and what sets it apart in my thoughts: "The Essence of Muay Thai – 6 Core Aspects That Make it What It Is"

There is a minor story in Philosophy, emphasized by Henri Bergson, that in the West there has been a vast misunderstanding of Time. We, from a very early time, have Spatialized Time, putting it under the auspices of the Kingdom of Space. We take Time - which is a completely other thing - as a series of discrete moments, one after another. This moment, then that moment, then another. Each one, mysteriously and indefinably begins and ends, like points we can draw on a page with a pencil. Bergson insisted that there was another thing. Duration. Duration is a very different thing. In duration the past is bundled up in the present. It literally lives on, in the present, bundled. And, poets & cinematographers might argue, this is everything that our world is made of. It is an entire cascade and weaving of duration...and durations within durations. This is the foundation of the art of Narration. Narration takes as its cornerstone the idea that the past cannot die, it cannot be made to stop, because everything is bundled. Notes played at the beginning of a song do no cease when their physical vibrations have ended (itself a very difficult thing to identify), but persist, bundled, throughout the score...and then, persist in other scores even. Durations within durations. These thoughts came to me, or tied themselves together, after reading Sylvie's new writing Leaving Pain to Weakness, with some other influences...watching Shadow and Bone (which plays with time layers) and listening to a podcast including Bergson. But mostly from reading her piece. A painful thing, as much as we like it to, cannot end. Just as anything cannot end. All of it is bundled. Even if you end the song, it carries on, it carries its force of notes, up into the other songs...all songs. The only way to change the persistence of a note, a memory, a fact of the world...the ONLY way, is by the notes you play after it. Duration. This is the gift, and the burden of duration. We are all faced with difficulties. We are all faced with weaknesses. With sorrows. With great things that we wish that never were. But, these are living notes. They are part, not only of our duration, but the durations of all the others around us. The only redemption of any note played, is the next note played, and the string of notes we are beginning. And, in our lives, we live musically, playing notes that carry forth the past as a living thing, singing it into greater sweetness, capacity and continuity. So, what cares any of this of Muay Thai scoring? Muay Thai is at something of a crisis. The industrial, globalized forces of the world very much want to make of its scoring structure, and its actual dramatic effort, a spatialization, woven of discrete "points" (damage done), whereas the Art of it, what the Muay Thai of Thailand has been woven out of is a Narrative thing. Events in the first round reflect back onto the 4th round, narratively. A Muay Thai fight is a duration. Fighters in Thailiand fight fights as if they are storytellers, not demolition experts. This is a very old way. Why it matters is largely connected to why fighting matters. Fighting is one of the oldest dramas. It is a duration. The art of fighting teaches us all, celebrates for all of us, the power of the story. It is the very way in which the early sorrow, in all our lives, can and should be redeemed...by the next note played. The great fighters of the world are not those who are not touched. Who are not wounded. They are those who have been wounded, have suffered, but have redeemed themselves. Not by erasing their weakness, as if we can turn the pencil upside down and scrub it away, but embracing its duration, its persistence, and weaving it forward into sweeter notes. This is the very fabric of what we are, and in fact this is really how we read sport, and art, and song, no matter how those forms have been distorted towards Space. What is beautiful and worth preserving about Thailand's Muay Thai traditional scoring is that the aesthetic, itself, embodies this Narrative truth. It is meant to turn weakness, into strength, and to teach us how. Instead, stories all over the world are being chopped up into "events", much like dots on a piece of paper. In fighting these events are "clashes", which become exicised from their living material, and exported into highlights, pushed out into feeds, conveyor belts into emotional mouths. Everything is chopped and loaded. Fights exist to produce more and more clashes. We just want men and women to "spark". The bigger the spark, the further it goes into our dark night, echoing into feeds. This is why the knockout is so vital to combat sport. Human beings are mammalian flint, used to start fires to simply draw others into the entertainment form. The art of Narration does persist in all forms of fighting, because we are Duration Beings. This is how we navigate our lives. But fighting itself becomes less enriching, and much more a digital coal furnace, stoking an engine driving a train on tracks we don't even know or care about. Fighting arts become more stupified. 5 round fights become 3. Defensive soft genius is melded hard into wind-milling animus. Everything is bent towards the discrete event. Winners are made up of whoever greedily piled up the most events, as if chips on a table. And all of it is a vast machine of: This terrible photo, and its endless repetition, as these stooges attempt to re-enact it over and over, fight after fight, haunts me.

He doesn't really train people, or at a gym, unfortunately.

I'm pretty sure he isn't. I forgot where Sylvie said he was, but it wasn't Thailand.

Here's a graphic of the current WBC rankings, at the time of this writing, and the fighters Sylvie has beaten, and those she's fought, just to give an idea of how far Sylvie has journeyed up in weight. The WBC rankings are at this point approximations of the best Thai fighters in Thailand - there are many good Thai fighters missing from this list - just because the information sources an org can draw on are limited and the Thai female fight scene is fluid, but it does give sense of Sylvie historic reach as a female fighter: WBC rankings - has beaten, has fought.pdf

Look at the size difference. Sylvie fighting for her 1st *World Title*. No fighter in history has had to beat top fighters 3 weight classes up to even be credited as "world class". Sylvie is a 95 lb fighter. That's her cut. This was at 108 lbs. Recognized historical western fighters in Thailand, instead have by-and-large feasted on large weight advantages, allowing them much greater freedom in the ring. It is Herculean to have fought at such a high level, so prolifically, giving up HUGE weight as a handicap. In Thailand it's something to quibble about a lb difference. You give a pound to someone who is at a disadvantage. Two pounds. Three pounds...at about three pounds its beyond the scale. It makes an enormous difference to be fighting opponents way out of your weight class, the things you can do, the things that will show effect, its an entirely different world. It's extremely difficult to know what a fighter is facing big weight disadvantages, especially at the lower end of the weight class scale. Five pounds to a 100 lb fighter isn't the same five pounds to a 130 lb fighter, yet Sylvie gives up 5 lbs, 10 lbs, even 15 lbs regularly, facing the best fighters of Thailand (ie, categorically as a class, the best in the world). It's unheard of. Western fighters are given lopsided weight advantages in the country, left and right, advantages that mostly go unseen. What is really unseen is the Light Under a Bushel of Sylvie as a fighter, the Bushel of enormous weight differences. The fight:

We have a monthly column, free for everyone, on Sylvie's Patreon, discussing the best fights in Bangkok. At the bottom of every article is a "how to watch BKK fights" suggestion, which may help you. You may need to get a VPN though, I'm not sure. Check it out here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/49816347

Well, this is just playing around with the ideas you present. You know you can't turn up the power for obvious reasons, but you can do a lot of things to handicap yourself against smaller fighters. Devote rounds to just teeping (teep the thighs, the waist, the chest), improving your eyes and timing. You can keep the power down and set challenges to yourself like: Only throw in 3s, or if 3s are easy, only throw in 5s (so you can learn to feel the holes in your combination choices). You can eliminate hands, and just work defense and kicks in flow. All these kinds of handicapping will increase your timing and vision which ultimately will give you advantages with opponents at your size. Also, I don't know if you are a patron yet, but there is a new Muay Thai Library session which might really change your game, because you have limited training opportunities. It's an hour session on shadowboxing: https://www.patreon.com/posts/49616909 20 minutes of vigorous, creative shadowboxing can really build your flow and your stamina. Sylvie's one of the best conditioned fighters on the planet, and it wiped her out. It's an approach to shadowboxing that I've never seen before. And, while you are over in the Library there is a really good session by a fellow Big Boy, Kru San: https://www.patreon.com/posts/16912720 It's really inspirational to see how light and smooth he moves, but also the whole session is about ring control, one of the more ignored aspects of Muay Thai basic training. If you can bring ring control to your bigger bodied moves your game can take leaps and bounds of improvement. Hope some of that helps!

Answering a Redditor question as to why there are no complete and detailed books on Muay Thai history in English, this was my guesstimate: If you dig into some of the English language academic articles on this page, you can find some solid treatments of aspects of Muay Thai history: https://8limbsus.com/muay-thai-thailand/text-academic-articles-muay-thai-masculinity In general though, take with a grain of salt and a critical mind forms of historical knowledge that are not of a direct lineage, or supported by historical documentation, I would suggest. I'm certainly though, no expert in this, just my take.

A conversation over on Reddit lead to me to film the first 40 pages or so from one of the better historical accounts of Muay Thai, from a pretty good book. This stuff isn't easy to come by. You can see it below: You can get the book on Amazon here: https://www.amazon.com/Muay-Thai-Living-Legacy-Vol/dp/9749293703

Just dropping this here: I'm kind of mesmerized by this photo. I knew I had it the moment I hit the shutter. I took several more to be sure, but sometimes the subject and the device just connect. You can see a higher res version of the photo here: https://www.muaynoir.com/Prints/i-z63TzJ3/A What I wanted to think about in this post though was the way that black and white, and that old school luminescence can bring an incredible throwback feeling that feels important with older legends of the sport. Muay Thai is, in the end, in Thailand a performance and capture of masculinity. As Muay Thai changes and bows to the pressures of the the west/global aggro fighting, so does the masculinity being portrayed. This photo just seems to throw me back into another time. Pudpadnoi fought his first fight in 1965. He assumes this aura even at the age of 70. The things we can bring about in our edits have huge aesthetic ramifications, because they help us see things in a different way. The men, the sport.

These are older links, not all of them will be functioning. It is highly unlikely that there will be another Muay Khao Summit. We can never say never, but it just isn't feasible at this point or the foreseeable future, unfortunately. It was a beautiful, one-time thing.

Here is the original Golden Kick edit if you want to compare for yourself:

A very nice, very functional kick, but to my eye if you are chasing the style of the Golden Age, the hip rotation is coming too soon, and maybe too rotated? You want that upward verticality in the beginning that is meant to slip through the opponent's guard, and make the kick a little harder to pick up, then the whip over.

I was going to suggest Kru Pot from the Library when I started reading your question. He just has a great energy, seems to take his fighters seriously. If you enjoy the Muay Khao style he teaches it very well, with a large vocabulary. It's a smallish gym which may add to the feeling of more personal attention. As to Thailand and opening up, there is tremendous pressure within the country to open up to tourism, so it's going to happen more quickly than not. One can never guess accurately though, because if the open up and a variant comes in and sweeps through they will slam the doors shut very fast. The country has a kind of schizophrenic relationship with the West. On the one hand it loves and relies on Western tourism, with large parts of its economy tied to it, but it also has very insular elements, which is why it has been so successful in warding off COVID in the first place. So, it really depends on what happens in the first month or so once they open up the doors to the world.

We've not heard of career ending injuries, actually. I think a large measure of retirement is that these fighters have been fighting for more than a decade, and there is a kind of sense that it is just work that you'd like to quit. Yes, there is fame at the top of the game. but there is also the sense that fighters are kind of low-class workers, grinding. They do not carry esteem across the culture. I think Thais also have a very quick "old man" setting, when viewing fighters. Fighters, after their peak fame often just start training much less rigorously. They start drinking more, feel that they can get along in fights just based on their IQ. Everything just slows down, not just physically, but also emotionally, I suspect. Chamuakpet though fought a LONG time. I think he fought into his 30s, at a very high stadium championship level, if I recall. You can hear a little bit about the slow down in Sylvie's Interview with Namkabuan (turn on English subtitles):

A really important passage authored by Sylvie, in an article on the nature of Muay Thai, Buddhism and Masculinity. Sylvie and I both wrote on this article, but the portion was by Sylvie: You can find the full article, including a link to a chapter of Peter Vail's dissertation here: https://8limbsus.com/blog/thai-masculinity-postioning-nak-muay-between-monkhood-and-nak-leng-peter-vail

In adding the above, the topic of the ethics of Child Fighting in Thailand actually brings much more series light onto the pressures from the West (and by Internationalization) to make Thailand's Muay Thai much more aggressive and violent (ie, changing the format, the scoring criteria) to fit in the world wide aggro fighting for commercial viability reasons. What makes Thailand's pedagogy of Muay Thai of value to child fighters, one could substantively argue, is that the principles of traditional Muay Thai are aesthetics of self-restraint. The Muay Thai taught and fought in rural Thailand, and in festival rings around Thailand exactly ISN'T the aggro-Muay Thai that many westerners (and some Thais) are advocating for. Part of the reason why Westerners object to Child Fighting is that fighting in the West is principally seen as a realm of violent emotions. Just the things child should be protected from. As the West pressures Thailand to exhibit more aggressive fighting aesthetics, it is altering the very fabric that makes child fighting have value: the communication and discipline of Buddhistic culture principles. Ironically enough, the West is essentially arguing against itself as it pressures Muay Thai to become more "aggro", but also to exclude Thai children from fighting. It is imposing its own vision of Fighting, and then saying "this is inappropriate for children". What is risked to be lost is that traditional Thai skills and scoring aesthetics have much greater cultural value, both in the National rings, and in festival rings where youth learn to express those forms of masculinity, the cool, jai yen, yen heart, the self control and control over your space, and the priority of defense and composure. Both cultural positions seem to be in agreement. Westerners and Thais believe that children should be protected from "violent emotions". But in traditional Thai fighting aesthetics this is what the art of fighting is. Learning to overcome and insulate oneself against violent emotions, because violent emotions are not what fighting is about.

I'm going to manually add some Reddit conversation here that is pretty good: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/23/world/asia/thailand-children-muay-thai.html -- This article also says "By many estimates, more than 200,000 children under 15 regularly compete [in Muay Thai]" though it doesn't say where this estimate came from. Like many camp owners, Pramote Sang-a-roon, the owner of Mor Ratanabandit Boxing Camp and a World University muay thai instructor, is far from happy with the idea and insists that boxers were safe if properly trained.“They’ve learnt how to protect themselves and won’t get hurt so easily if they are physically tough,” said Pramote, who has around 50 boxers at his camp in Nong Chok. Poor children would be affected if they were deprived the boxing stage, he said.“How would they put food on the family table? Remember that these children have difficult lives,” added Pramote. Boxers at his camp are guaranteed a high education with at least a BA degree if they are well disciplined. https://www.nationthailand.com/sports/30357284 This one I found especially cool because it tells the story of Pattana Kitiarsa, a researcher who studies Thai culture and masculinity (and who himself is the son of a former nak muay & referee). [p15] Poor country boys were particularly keen on and fond of muai Thai. They gradually learned through the experience of annual temple fairs that their boxing skills could earn some much-needed cash. If they were brave, not easily frightened by opponents, and trained properly, they too could show off their muai Thai skills in the ring in front of their village neighbours. Most boy fighters have their fathers or male relatives as their amateur coaches and corner men. During my childhood in the mid-1970s, young boy fighters were featured in the ‘pre-game show’ bouts and each one could earn Baht30–50 for his three-round efforts. Of course, if one could not stand a fierce knockout, the fight ended prematurely. My father was very knowledgeable about and well connected in the local world of muai Thai. He earned most of his high school payments from boxing. He even went to fight in Bangkok’s prestigious Ratchadamnoen Boxing Stadium a number of times in the early 1960s. He has been a die-hard follower and enthusiast of the sport throughout his life, and has engaged with his favourite pastime through daily and weekly boxing news reports in the local Thai periodicals and live muai Thai shows on TV over the weekend. When he became a village schoolteacher in 1964, he went on to serve his school and local village committees as a boxing referee, competition organizer and promoter. However, he never taught or encouraged me to pursue a career in muai Thai. He simply said that it was too harmful and dangerous a sport. One could easily become paralysed or disabled from this physical game. It was reserved for those boys from poor families who had real talent and genuine fighting spirit. It is part of some painful reality in the imbalanced socioeconomic development of Thailand that the poor countryside has supplied unskilled and cheap workforces to the urban and industrial sector. This is also true in the Thai boxing industry, where most, if not all, muai Thai boxers come from poor rural or working-class backgrounds ‘Lives of Hunting Dogs’ Muai Thai and the Politics of Thai Masculinities by Pattana Kitiarsa And since we are on the topic about kids fighting, here is another section in the same article. It's the opinion of Choi Phuangthong, a veteran muai Thai camp owner/manager and trainer in Khorat. A twelve-year-old boy is at his best time to begin his muai Thai training. At this age, the boy is obedient. He listens to and remembers by heart whatever we instruct him. If I had to start over my muai Thai camp again, I would not want to train a boy from a well-to-do family background. I want boys from very poor families. I believe poor boys take boxing more seriously than well-to-do boys. They are more perseverant and able to endure hardship and suffering. They see their parents’ difficulties before their eyes, so they will use their parents’ real life lessons as incentives to train themselves harder and make every fight a fight for their lives. I myself did not operate my boxing camp as a business unit. I do really care about all the boys under my supervision. I remembered a poor boy boxer from Buriram. He was exceptionally good. When I ordered him to go jogging or forced him into extra sessions of hard training drills, he obeyed without a second thought. He was twelve–thirteen years old then. When you have many kids under your roof, they will compete against each other to the death in order to be successful. my responses were as follows:

What likely sets these "greatest" apart perhaps is the era in which they arose. Their creations in sport and art expressed something at a time in transition, of social upheaval and burgeoning. Be it race, or politics, or commercial art, these "1sts" told a new story at a time when a new story was needed. And Bangkok Muay Thai just at the time of Samart was in exactly this position. Thailand found itself bursting with economic growth. Rural workers flocked to Bangkok, the city flourished with investment. Thailand itself was under an evolution, and the Muay Thai of the Golden Age which he helped usher forward, into the 1990s (the Asian Financial crisis in 1997), was a new art-form, built on the bedrock of the Tough, Hard men of Cowboy Time, flourishing with the femeu legends of that era.

When you see the first of something, of a kind of movement, a way of being or expressing itself, it sometimes becomes hallowed, and no matter what follows from it after, it can never be surpassed. Like, as mentioned above, how nobody could hit home runs like Babe Ruth. Even if you hit them higher, bigger, more mashy now, he out homered entire teams. Nobody could that that. He invented the Home Run, in his person. Many have dunked, but Dr. J did it at a time when men, mostly white, didn't move like him. And for that reason nobody really has ever moved like him since. He was expressive of something in the 1970s, then into the 80s. And, no matter the behemoth and beautiful CGI creations in the genre of Sci-Fi, the greatest Sci-Fi film will likely remain Kubrick's 2001 a Space Odyssey in 1969, over 50 years ago.

What do I mean, Cowboy Time, The Age of Hard Men. This isn't something I could ever be an expert in, something I can only glimpse from a far. But sometimes from afar you can see things. What comes to mind is the legend of Suk, The Giant Ghost, who happens to also be the grandfather of Sagat Petchyindee. Now, don't take this as a verbatim piece of history, but only my lasting impression from essays I read over the years. It all began with Suk: above, a contrast of media image to Suk, Chuchai Prakanchai, peak years 1948-1951 There was apparently a movement within Muay Thai, and in Thai magazines that covered the sport in the 1950s, that moved away from the "handsome" matinee idol type of masculinity that had been favored, toward men like Suk. The powerful and transformative Prime Minister Field Marshal Plaek Phibunsongkhram lead a government that reduced the traditional power and imagery of Thai royalty (again, as I have read), and magazines of the era started celebrating powerful, brutal men like Suk - I'm guessing, not exclusively, but now inclusively. I believe he had been imprisoned for murder at some point, and had an aura of a tough, a nakleng. This move in Muay Thai expressed larger political moves to celebrate the common man, the man of the country. There always has been a tension in Muay Thai, between the courtly, beautiful, artistic muay of Bangkok, and the brute, powerful muay of the men of the fields, up country. It has often played out in urban vs rural, Femeu vs Muay Khao, royal vs worker, dichotomies, and even to this day this is the case. It is only to say that with the rise of Suk Muay Thai began to swing toward that Tough Man side of the pendulum, ideologically. if you want to read about the history of Tough Man Muay, this is the essay to read: Rural Male Leadership, Religion and the Environment in Thailand's Mid-south, 1920s-1960s (PDF attached) Rural_Male_Leadership_Religion_and_the_E.pdf This is enough to say that Bangkok Muay Thai likely came under the sway of a swing toward a more common-man, tough-guy, nakleng muay in the 1950s-1960s, a strong thread of it remaining in the 1970-1980s. You see epic fighters of the late 1970s like Wichannoi, thought by many to be the greatest fighter who ever fought, and you see that they are chiseled out of rock. This is Padejsuek, fighting around the time that Dieselnoi was on the rise: This is Gulapkao's photo along side his hero Wichannoi (below), wearing his 1985 Raja belt, a photo Gulapkao treasures on his phone: Into the 1980s, even though there were artful, elite and celebrated fighters in the 1970s, there had never been a "Samart" through these decades of Hard Men. As Dieselnoi ascended at maybe the most dominant fighter of the physical, relentless kind, Samart had come onto the scene as a fighter who fought so relaxed, so fluid, who danced among the Hard Men. It must have been like he was from outer space. Below, Wichannoi Porntawee who fought from the 1960s -1980s, the ultimate Man's man: If you want clues to how hard men like Wichannoi fought, here is a great article on his style: Vicharnnoi Porntawee: Legacy of The Immortal Boxer

For me one of the most interesting dimensions of fighter photography is found in all the in-between moments. So much is focus on The Clash. These for me, even when executed beautifully, are boring. I've read some photographers feel that when they are photographing a fight they really want to capture that decisive moment, the clash that tips the scales. These are Sweat Spray moments, often. The gunned shutter that blurs through an action peak, and then is edited out. Hey, these can be cool, very cool, but...when taken as a whole, as a genre, they are numbing, at least to me. I'm really interested in the human feeling within fighting, those fallen moments, those re-gathering moments, when duress strips away the pretense, and the fighter calculates up. These compass headings are spiritual. The above really is on reflection on this "Ripley" photo I took last week of Sylvie between rounds going up against the impossible hill of Yodkhunpon: Which called to mind my photo of Sawsing Sor Sopit between rounds in a fight (you can find that photo here: https://www.muaynoir.com/Prints/i-2Nn5Svg/A ): Why are these photos so satisfying? At least to me. They reach into what really matters in fighting, and therefore of fighter photography. I see so much difference in the humanity of these two legendary fighting women, the ways in which they summon themselves, a great reserve truly more beautiful than a perfectly landed cross or head kick. This is what is spectacular in fighting.

There is also a different counter taught by Namsaknoi in the Library, I don't know which of the two sessions. You simply raise the trapped arm into the air, work the shoulder up, and then loop it over.