Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu

If you've read Sylvie's posts on the Jade Dragon Set, and also about Petchrungruang, you'll know that a big part of the early training isn't about actual "fight knowledge" or good "techniques". It's a slow process of pulling a young boy in line with the culture of the gym, and involves lots of playing, or pseudo-playing, which creates lots of relaxation, but still in the context of hierarchy. This combination of relaxation (playing) and discipline (hierarchy) is what will make them the fighters they will be. In my opinion this is why it's super important to be in a gym like the one that Pi Nu runs. The whole process is guided by a knowledgeable eye, Pi Nu who has help raise some of the best fighters in Thailand, through his pack method. There is no scheduled time for the boy to suddenly enter the big boy process. He's always watching for how they are responding, feeling when things are too much, or two little. When to challenge and when to ease. It, from what I've seen, is a very FEEL thing. And, to complexify things, he isn't just weighing each boy, he's weighing each boy against the other boys, using the group to kind of steer a multi development. There kind of is no replacement for that kind of feel and sensing.

Tyler's post above is pretty damn good. I would just throw in that Chiang Mai is going to be substantially lower cost than Bangkok, Pattaya or Phuket, while still being a major city with all those amenities or conveniences that are probably necessary for a first time visit. Costs can creep high in Chiang Mai of course, if you go an expensive route, and they can be low in BKK or Pattaya if you really know how to pick and choose, but the overall economy in Chiang Mai is just more affordable (and I imagine that if you are very frugal there you can do even better than elsewhere). It's also a burgeoning gym and fight scene, with lots of small stadiums, and new gyms opening up all the time, along with the dependable names.

That whole post was a killer post Tyler.

More from the day.

Incredible. It must be the feeling he has.

The General.

Another beautiful shot of the General. The arc and power of his punches are like nothing else in Thailand that I've seen. Short, explosive.

This was the Black Belt magazine source I had in mind. Note, the described animosity between Thai and Japanese and the Japanese desire to prove the efficacy of Karate. I assumed in reading this that "an Islamic" and "the Chinese" and "the Chinaman" were striking descriptions - I had assumed this emphasis meant that there were not Thais, or at the very least not those that Thailand would choose to defend Muay Thai's honor internationally if this was a substantive event. The author points out that these match ups came after a bit of "searching". Even if the author is only making racialist observations, because this match supposedly was a "Thailand" vs "Japan" match, it seems pretty notable that 2 of the fighters were not ethnically "Thai" (probably a pretty big deal in 1963, and read as non-Thai at least at some social level). The writer is making the distinction boldly. But perhaps they were Thai nationals. But, the article makes the assertion that these were admittedly not particularly strong Thai Muay Thai fighters. Osamu Noguchi, if I recall, is the Japanese promoter who was reportedly run out of town (Bangkok, abandoning his kickboxing gym) after the 1982 World Championships still attempting to assert the worthiness of Japanese fighters vs Thais two decades years later. It appeared to be an enduring preoccupation.

Chances of training with him are pretty limited, generally. But he'll be at Sylvie's gym Petchrungruang from probably July 2019 til January 2020. I urge pretty much anyone who has a passion for him to make the trip out to Pattaya. It's very rare.

We visited the General and Timothy today to drop off a tripod and a phone for hotspotting (with the help of our patrons). A photo taken of the General demonstrating, with Timothy looking on:

Timothy's vlog #1 - First Day, Arrival If you'd like to follow this thread you can click follow at the top and get alerts when Timothy posts.

We may not be referring to the same set of early fights. Honestly, it was a year ago I read up on this. To me it's not even worth thinking about. Japanese fighting at the time was laughably (seriously, humorously) inferior. (The other day we asked Dieselnoi about the World Championship fights he fought in in 1982 in which the Japanese kickboxers (and all the other kickboxers in the world) were overwhelmed, and he just started giggling. He said, "you have to understand, it was all yodmuay. All the fights went very fast." But he really was giggling like a child. He pointed to his knee where he still has a scar from the tooth of a Korean fighter. And this is 20 years after these original bouts.) At the time we are thinking about these are very likely the best Japanese fighters in the country, or at least in the upper percentile. They are not fighting elite Thais. Putting these guys against the best fighters in Thailand at the time, in lots of fights, would have been an endless embarrassment - again, not because Japanese Karate sucks, it's because of the very deep experience in actual fights top Thais had, and the fact that Karate really was not a full contact fighting sport.

We also have to, I would STRONGLY suggest, accept the possibility that an almost decimated art would then become cross-influenced by the dominant art of the day. It may very well be it looks like Muay Thai because in attempting to assemble the art into a style, it draws on what it sees as well. This for instance is what supposedly happened when TKD arose in Korea, but almost exclusively as a derivative of Japanese Karate. In fact, it pretty much WAS Japanese Karate. After the war it become imperative for TKD to not be Japanese at all, and so began the long path of creating a supposedly "original" Korean martial art that TKD was derived from. And they found the thinnest little trace of one (nearly extinct at the time of Karate's arrival in Korea). So, the story building began, and that art, apparently called t'aekkyon, came to be claimed as the origin of TKD, something that a study of early TKD martial art manuals suggest isn't the case at all. t'aekkyon then itself gradually began a reconstruction, retroactively, with people claiming to know and teach it. The connective tissue between it and modern TKD came to be grandfathered in. And this had strong ideological motivations. Make TKD Korean in origin, not Japanese. My gut feeling is that something like this is happening in some cases of fragmented SEA martial arts that claim to be older than Muay Thai (an ideological claim). These arts can be reconstructed, from the present, into the past, and give the illusion to be origins. This actually is a problem with many of the Muay Boran claims in Thailand as well. We don't really know if any of these are actual lineages, or how much of them are reconstructions. Arjan Surat, who had a Boran teacher who is up on the wall of his gym, shook his head when talking about Muay Boran masters of today. "If he didn't know (pointing to the photo on the wall), how do they know?". That is one of the special, and indeed remarkable thing about General Tunwakom's Muay Lertrit. It is handed straight down from its creator, who himself was fusing Muay Khorat with other influences (apparently).

It reminds me of cultures that had an architectural history in wood. Almost all lost. Cultures that built in stone, highly favored in the invented histories of the world.

We haven't run into this, though we've only used it a few times in Bangkok. But, it's very funny, there is a condo unit we rent out in Chiang Mai sometimes when we can't find a room and when you park your car and head to the elevator you see LOTS of signs that say: "This is ONLY for residents, no short term stays". What's so hilarious is that almost nobody you run into in the halls, or by the pool, looks like they live there. They put up those signs because the entire place has kind of turned into an AirBnb hotel, I'm guessing. But very interesting that you've had that experience. I suspect that AirBnB has become so prevalent and grown so fast it's basically over run all the customary ways of doing things. Even hotels now are on AirBnB trying to give the impression that they are residences.

Soooo. The kickboxing talent pool is incredibly weak, you say. But the Kyokushin talent pool is amazing. I sense, well, someone who loves Kyokushin, hahaha. No matter this isn't going to reach agreement. I personally am really interested in the heritage and changes of martial arts, but honestly listening to Karate people tug of war over who was an authentic teacher, and who was the fraud is incredible boring. You never get any of this in Muay Thai, why? Because the quality of the Muay Thai is shown in actual, high level fights, fights that become incredibly famous. In actual fighters. It would be like arguing about the greatest baseball players the history of Baseball in America, but then there was an totally different version of the sport in, let's say, Norway, where it was customary to argue about who was the best TEACHER of alter-baseball, and not actual Norwegenian alter-baseball games, actual alter-baseball players. When you say: Wow, Karuhat was as good any fighter Thailand has every produced, you never get "But who was his master? Where did he get his "fight style" from?! What school is he? All these questions really point to nonsense for me. You know where Karuhat got his fighting style when you ask him? He made it up. He made it up because he was forced as a kid to spar and play with lots of other high level fighters, and he was pushed through a beautiful and difficult regime. And he made it up because he had to beat the very best fighters who ever walked, in real fights, with lots of money on the line. Please give me a fighting art that has no "masters", as the definition of its authenticity.