Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu

8-1a Today Sylvie went to go see Rambaa. He has a little gym next to Sor. Klinmee, about 15 minutes on the motorbike from Petchrungruang, and Sylvie has filmed a Nak Muay Nation private with him. The idea was to do something very concentrated with him, in preparation for the Loma fight. This is our way. Anytime it feels like there is potential for a shift in development we look for something new, a different way of doing things, something to trigger growth. In this case Rambaa seemed a great opportunity for clinch. He's "around" Sylvie's size in frame, though surely at least 10-12 kgs bigger, and vastly superior in technique. What we really were hoping for is that he'd just toss Sylvie around for 45 minutes and get her acclimated to falling, building up tolerances and awareness for tipping points, something Loma is very good at in the clinch. We wanted to do this for 10 days leading up to the fight and see what came of it, just adding it on top of her other training. What happened was something entirely different. And it was incredible. Incredible and horrible. Rambaa locked up with Sylvie and really felt how strong she was physically and clinched for a short time with her, but then he just backed off and started brutalizing her legs. No matter the distance Sylvie took he would just whack her legs. When back in the clinch he would knee her thighs from every angle, and when there was any space he would more or less bludgeon/slap her at will, stinging her over and over. It was a complete beatdown, from the waist down. He was trying to make her quit. And when Sylvie instinctively backed off he would just escalate, tagging her over and over until she crumpled over. She has an upper limit pain tolerance and he was pushing her way past it. But more than this, he was beating her down emotionally, never letting her "back out" into a "time out". There was very little clinch going on (and when they did clinch he would crush her in a lock). Sylvie would stand up again, straighten herself, and resolve herself to attack. She would teep, teep and whack his legs, and he would come back harder, punishing any audacious attack. It was basically damned if you do, damned if you don't. You choose. But Sylvie kept steeling herself, straightening herself, fighting for clinch proximity, and on and on it went, Sylvie crumpling, Sylvie getting up. It was intense. I could tell he was trying to make her quit, maybe make her quit the whole idea of doing this for 10 days, but he was doing something else. You want to play with the big boys? This is what it is. My guess is that this is going to go like this for 3 days, and if Sylvie survives it the rest of the work might look different. But there really is the chance that this could go on like this for 10 days, right up to the fight. She said she could feel all the ways in which she responded that were weak. Dieselnoi complained that she had weakness in the clinch below, what Sylvie now calls "fish body", when changing position. She said she could feel that. For about 45 seconds she managed to summon "Karuhat" fight energy, and this seemed to change the dynamic for a moment, but he then beat that out of her. I asked her what she thought Rambaa wanted, and she said: "the energy". I'll tell you, I've watched a lot of training in Thailand, I've never seen anything like this. Nothing was calculated to damage her, but it was about delivering a lot of pain. And it never stopped. Well...it did stop for about a minute, after about 20 minutes of onslaught, and Rambaa explained to her that he's waiting for her leg to land, and as soon as it touches ground he whacks it. It helped a tiny bit with the last ten minutes, but this was really more of a test of her mind and ultimately her heart, putting it through fire. There is no way Sylvie makes it through this 6 months ago. She has grown that much. She has changed that much. Rambaa himself is such a light person, full of laughter, a huge smile. But his mascot animal is the bee. It was like being stung by a bee 1,000s of times, in the journey to become immune to bee poison, and to learn perhaps how to be a bee yourself. Sylvie says: This is what happens when I tell him that I've lost to this person 3 times. No more bullshit.

7-31 Dieseloi. Everything worked out yesterday, Sylvie was able to take 3 privates with 3 all-time legends, all in the space of a handful of hours. Pretty insane, slugging it out in Bangkok traffic, trying to get to various gyms across the sprawling city. But for me, everything was Dieselnoi. Karuhat...Hippy, incredible. Karuhat alone is such a pinnacle fighter, nobody moves or thinks like him. It's ridiculous. But every time I see Dieselnoi (and this is the second time he has trained Sylvie), I'm just slammed by the kind of human being he is. YouTube watchers, and other distant experts like to opine about how he was only dominant because of his height. It's not his height. He would have been what he was if he was 4'6". There is just nothing like him, as a man. How can I describe this? We've been here 4+ years now, and met so many interesting Muay Thai men. And more than our share of elite former (and current) fighters. A lot of them have vast a generosity of heart, or a sweet boyishness carefully preserved. Some are sad, beat down by the churning forces of Muay Thai economics, or hierarchies that do not always afford the dignities that were won in the ring. Some have unfortunately been reduced by drug use, or pickled and dazed by alcohol. A very rare few have become egregiously bitter and brittle, authoritarians in their imaginary kingdom or fiefdom. All of them, and I do mean all of them, are remarkable men. If you love Muay Thai, you love the men who have lived through Muay Thai, and what Muay Thai has made of them, one way or another. But none of them are like Dieselnoi. None. When you watch Dieselnoi instruct, moving around the ring, there is an intangible quality about him, something like an electricity. But it is not an electricity of his freedom, his liberty of movement, a sparking of something of grace or memorized muscular accomplishment. It's like an electricity that is actively shocking him. It is stinging him, and he just jolts forward and into the beautiful forms that keep him, with a savageness that comes straight out of that shock. It's how he trained, it's how he fought. His height just made him choose a certain set of strategies and tactics, but this shock, this painful jolt is where it all comes from. It's his engine. And it's like the starter is being turned over and over, while the engine is still running. I tried to talk to Sylvie about it, because I could see that he wants this same thing in her. Some might call it a certain killer instinct, but it isn't an instinct. I called it ultraviolence yesterday. There is what I have to call a desperation to Dieselnoi's Muay Thai. It isn't the desperation of weakness or of self-preservation. It's the desperation of pain, and also I think of love. I think Muay Thai has hurt Dieselnoi. With uncommon openness he sat on the ring the first time he trained Sylvie and he showed her the scars on his arm where he tried to kill himself, he said out of the absolute pain of not having anyone who would fight him once he became undefeatable. He said when his arm was raised in victory, near that time, he knew that meant no more fights. Desperation. It had to be more than this, but Muay Thai is woven in a certain line of pain. Maybe he told this to Sylvie because he saw the scars on her own arm, from so long ago, when she was a sadder person. Perhaps he is just open about that time in his life, and he would tell anyone now. But the desperation, the incredible pain out of which all of it is born, and beautifully born, is still alive, in fact it is as alive as ever. When he grabs the bag he just rips forward with violence, unspeakable desperate violence. When he grabs Sylvie in the clinch, and starts to move into attack he is shaking her: "Wake up!" Sparking. Let the violence spark violence. Fight at this level. Train at this level. There are certain things in this world that hurt. And Muay Thai hurts many people, not always in a good way. But when Dieselnoi took that burning ember in his hand, when it was forced into his hand, he squeezed it. And he has never stopped squeezing it. It's like he had no choice. When something is so hot, so hot that it sears the flesh right off, you either have to fling it away right away, or just clench down. That's what his Muay Thai is like to me. Like a man who clenches down on it with all his might. And he keeps it warm and burning right there in his hand. There is also something about how he trains Sylvie that stuns me. He is not only very generous, open and kind. I can feel a certain communication, a connection between the desperate. There are so many ways to connect to Muay Thai. It is a tremendous art and heritage. It is full culture of becoming, a poem with infinite verses, a home with a thousand doors. But those that connect to it with desperation I think are few. I don't mean the desperation of poverty, or the must of life - these are their own intense road. It's a desperation of pain. For some incredible reason I feel that Dieselnoi sees Sylvie's desperation somehow, the thing beneath all the other very real and largely noble motivations that move her. He sees the desperation and he wants her to harness it, express it, give it form. Wake up. He said to her: "You are strong. BE strong." Referring to the way she stands in the clinch strong up top, but somehow loose in the rest of her body, not on her toes. Every point of contact for Dieselnoi is a point of engagement. "Do not bring your weapons out" he says. "Wait." And then unleash. And you unleash with relentless wave upon wave of perfect, maddening form, incising the air, shredding the space that is trying to keep you. Even though you waited, you now do so with an urgency. You may never have a moment like this again. Dieselnoi's Muay Thai is a painful, unparalleled expression of an internal assault, arched up and out toward an absolute manifestation. It blooms and blooms like a reddening, spike-ridden flower in the soil of Thailand. I've never met anyone like him, in or out of Muay Thai. He is possessed by his art, by whatever desperation that the love of it engenders. What a man. It's hard to say any of this, to speak about the electricity that shocks within, the ultraviolence that is put on anything in front of it, without in the end focusing on his huge heart, the way he opens himself up, and extends his stork reach to surround and include. There is something movingly protective about him. I wish there were words for this, but there is such a nurturing sense in which he approaches Sylvie, moving her towards a completion. In Thailand everything is clannish. Families, gyms, promotions, everything is overlapping clans, people bonded together in a protective circle. Dieselnoi is a living circle in himself, somehow. A circle of Muay Thai.

7-29 Tomorrow we are taking the day "off" to drive up to Bangkok. I love these drives with Sylvie and the dog. For me they are big breaks from the stultifying time I spend in front of the keyboard. We get to stop at Amazon coffee and get something nice for the road, and then the ribbon of concrete and asphalt just pulls the car forward while morlam music croons with the air-conditioner hum. These hours in the car are a kind of hermetic, sarcophagus, time travel for me. We enter in the car in some part of Thailand, and open the door to find another part of Thailand, something so different from where we were. And this time the planned for day is simply incredible. Sylvie's facing the best fighter in the world at 48 kg and under for the 4th time in 2 weeks time and I felt that we just needed something extra in her training, because this is mental challenge, so we decided that a visit to Dieselnoi (who is not always available) would be a huge injection of inspiration and correction that would really give Sylvie a push. She's been drilling herself in Dieselnoi's unique knee style for the two months that have passed since she first trained with him, and had a few knockouts because of it. Amazingly, Dieselnoi himself through some magical connection seemed to be thinking the same thing, and out of the blue wrote to Sylvie telling her to come and train with him before any fight because training with him would make her strong. This is just insane. To have Sylvie be embraced like this - and he was incredible with her the first time she trained with him - is mind-boggling. While internet voices at times try to have at it with Sylvie, people who actually get in the ring with her, train her, put their arms around her. And for the greatest Muay Khao fighter in history to do this while Sylvie is working endlessly on unlocking the Muay Khao fighting style, is like a blessing from the king, the King of Knees. So, because trips like this are expensive we try to train (and possibly film) more than one session when we drive. So I'm like: how about Karuhat? Karuhat is Sylvie's Spirit Animal in Muay Thai. She met him through Kaensak when Kaensak was visiting Thailand and cornered for her, bringing Karuhat along. Frankly, we had no idea who he was at all. A living legend, and no idea at all. He's small (only a little larger than Sylvie), has a kind of sweet smile, and a twinkle in his eye like he might like playing practical jokes. There is just something about Karuhat that triggers Sylvie. He has a certain kind of swagger in the ring, a roll of the shoulders, the corner of his mouth upturned in a smirk, his eyes full of light. Sylvie literally wants to BE Karuhat. Like, no joke. She doesn't want to fight like him, or adopt some qualities. She wants to become Karuhat in the ring. When you see her impersonate him, it's hilarious. But beyond that, he somehow unlocks the nak leng quality for her that is essential to the complete Muay Thai masculinity. So, unbelieveably, after she trains with Dieselnoi tomorrow, we are going to drive over to Chatchai's gym and she'll spend an hour or so with Karuhat. She's trained with Karuhat once, and it was just a beautiful hour of instructional sparring, him moving her through his way around the ring, like being taught to dance by following the lead of a master dancer. And then, out of the blue, two time Lumpinee Champion Hippy Singmanee contacted Sylvie. She had left a message for him about a month ago and somehow he only got it today. He's like: So you want to come and train with me? And Sylvie's like: Yes! So if all goes right...and it seldom does in Thailand, we'll end the day of Holy Mountain training with an hour with Hippy, shooting for Nak Muay Nation. It's an unspeakable day. And it doesn't matter if it even works out. Training with any one of these masters, tremendous fighters in their day, would be a lifetime honor. That Sylvie aims to be training with both Dieselnoi and Karuhat (first a war machine, then a wizard-trickster) a second time is an unbelieveable opportunity. Neither fighter has a gym. Neither are easy to find. Both are geniuses sui generis. That Hippy becomes a hat trick of greatness is almost too much. But this is what I think. Not only is Sylvie doing things that have never been done before in the ring, by western man or woman, and not only is she relentlessly training in the gym like has never been done before, she by virtue of her growing Thai, the way that Muay Thai legends generally respond to her, and just the luck of how things have worked out (which is more than luck, it's the support that so many have extended), she is regularly coming in touch with an entire history of Muay Thai greatness, many of whom are seldom trained with - across gym spaces, across Thai geography. It used to be, and perhaps it still is the case, that if you trained with a single, illustrious name from Thailand's past, you were blessed. There are hundreds and indeed thousands of very fine instructors in Thailand who did not reach the pinnacles of achievement, and in fact, some of Sylvie's very best and informative teachers are unknown Thai krus of this kind. But, coming in touch with the fighters of this other kind, those that scaled very high, does something to you as a fighter I think. There is a kind of transmission that occurs when fighters meet fighters. As I'm standing outside of the ring, leaning on the ropes with camera in hand, and smiling heavily at the opportunity given to Sylvie, seeing her move through the ring space with someone who has made that ring so much their home, since childhood, and hawking every single detail, not wanting to miss anything that is being said, or is happening, there is something I just can't see. Like astronomers who can merely "detect" a star or astronomical body because of its gravitational pull, but not see its light, I can just see the slope of this effect between them. They I think see in her something uncommon, something only they can see because of who they are, beyond the fact that she is a woman (but also because of the fact she is a woman). And she can see into them, something only she can see, because of her 600+ rounds in the fight ring, and her grit in the gym. There is a dialogue between them that is so far below words, it is completely inaudible like a low frequency whale call, designed to travel great distances, across oceans. For all that is visible around Sylvie, a near cacophonous stream of videos, updates, blog posts and endless fight numbers, what it is really about are these long-wave invisible, inaudible things. These deeper communications that leave an imprint, not only on her, but on Muay Thai. We are all too close to see it. I certainly am too close. But no person in history has exposed themselves to this much intensive learning in Thailand, the sheer breadth, quality and variety of experiences, in so short a time. Out of love she has pressed herself right up against the bonfire edge and let its heat and light burn into her, to alter her. It really remains to be seen what the transformation is, the kind of fighter she can become (which really means the kind of person she can become). But there is serious communication and transmission going on. This really is incalculable.

It's been about a year since I brought up this data and I thought I'd take another look: The blue dotted line is the search index Topic trend for all things "Muay Thai" and the red line is the search index for the actual term "Muay Thai", in the world on Google. The bad news, for those of us pulling for Muay Thai, is that the topic line has reached the lowest index mark (June 2016) since June 2004. This means that searches for that topic (using various terms) have reached the lowest percent in 12 years. Ouch. And the search term itself ("Muay Thai") has reached the lowest index point since December 2008. I'm not sure why June was such a terrible month for Muay Thai interest, or that March began a steep decline, but not great news. You can check the data out yourself here.

7-25 Scene 1: Today we drove over to Rambaa's gym after Sylvie's morning training, hoping to start the first day of an intensive clinch regime with him designed to get Sylvie to the next level. Better balance, better, faster recovery, an overall increase in reaction time - the small things that matter in clinch. All had been agreed upon last week but when we got there two Thai boys told Sylvie that Rambaa was in Japan. Clearly lines got crossed and whatever we thought was happening wasn't happening. This is pretty common in Thailand. Scene 2: Sylvie's sitting on the bench wrapped and ready for her gloves, her fight is up soon. When the gloves come they are incredible...as in not credible in the least. Two soaking leather socks with absolutely no structure to them. Big, wide, floppy gloves, like clown shoes. We remember these gloves, Sylvie broke her hand in gloves like these at this stadium a year ago, these are absolutely beat upon gloves. There are some newer gloves around, but they are all blue corner gloves. It will have to be these. So the plan is to just lace up, tie down, and then adhesive tap these gloves around the wrists. Like you are just binding loose leather to your skin. This is Thailand too. You just take what is there and pound in the ring, and think about ways around it later. Everything is Macgyvered in Thailand. You'd think this is a big complaint, but it's just more of the beauty of the makeshift here. Something about the transposability of every element makes the Eternal show through, as if through the cracks. Atoms are not locked into place by unbendable Laws of physics instead every communication and execution is up for grabs. You're dancing between ice-flows, and it is beautiful. This is not to say that there are not real forces and powers to deal with. There are. These are like forcefields of human aura. One is always moving through or towards a gravitation of personality, of those around which coalesce the material of things - events. Events cannot happen without these persona, these gravities. These are planetary principles. The art of Gravity. The weather is so flat. There is heat and humidity spread in an equality, a breeze running up along the motorbike's momentum. We are buzzing in the day's light, the concrete of shops and choked combustion engines. Sylvie weaves like a ribbon.

This is a difficult question to answer because it's so broad. A lot of it depends on how you fight, how reliant you are on power. But what I will say is that one of the biggest issues with weight disparity in a fight is visual. Aside from whatever imagined power gain from weight advantage (and in one's first few fights the technique is probably not there enough to turn mass into force to make a significant difference), one aspect that very few people think about is that with all other things being equal it is just going to LOOK like the bigger fighter is having a bigger impact on the smaller fighter, as a matter of perception, even if they are hitting each other equally hard. The smaller fighter tends to get swallowed, visually, to some degree. This means that it is the responsibility of the smaller fighter to visibly move the bigger fighter, either physically, or by making them move. It cannot remain at status quo, visually. This is where the tables turn. If a visibly smaller fighter starts to demonstrate the ability to move someone bigger it suddenly looks a bit like a magic trick. This is something Sylvie takes into the ring against bigger fighters, who she fights a lot. She has to move them. Any stalemate ends up looking like the bigger fighter came out on top. This is a pretty esoteric answer to a very concrete problem, but how judges perceive things does matter in judging. Also, this is just your 4th fight. Just go in there and be the underdog. Scrap hard, know that she has this one advantage, so you go and find yours. As it is her first fight she might have problems holding her breath at times, out of nerves. This will lead to her gassing. Late in rounds is your time. Leading up to the fight in your training practice stealing rounds in the final 30 seconds.

7-24 The video just doesn't show it. Video has a way of flattening some kinds of reality, taking the air and urgency out, making it look like a mosaic, just tiles of dimension moving about. But that last fight was a war. There is something about Grand Boxing Stadium that is very "Fight Club". It's in this big airplane hanger of a space, and all the action is pushed to one end in the back where the ring is. There are folding chairs loosely about on one side and the ceiling is very high, but on one side is a very cramped and stack small "stands" of rising benches which is where all the Thai gamblers crowd in. This is a small venue, but that little one side is everything. Not more than 30 perhaps, but this makes up the Greek Chorus of the Tragedy that is playing out in the ring. I say "Tragedy" in the deepest sense here. Not: a sad story, but a drama that seeks to invoke what is most noble, raw and unnameable in all of us. Not every fight ascends to this level, maybe only a few, a handful, but that is what it is about. In Greek Tragedy the Chorus played a very specific role. It triangulates the action for the audience, it symbolizes, represents, expresses what is human in the face of the divine (and mundane). It performs humanity, juxtaposed, right next to the action, commenting on and living in connection to the action. It allows a neutral audience (objectivity), to see the action, and its consequence side by side. This side of the ring, where all the gamblers sit, is that Chorus. This is why gambling is so important to Muay Thai, from the smallest festival fight in a field to the huge National Stadiums. It creates a triangle. People decry that the gamblers have too much impact on the sport - and with high level mafia surely there are serious distortions - but there at the ring the gamblers are the second voice of the fight, they make it clear through all their bias. And they were going off in this fight. Sylvie's opponent came with ill-intentions in such a beautiful way. I was just amazed by her. You can't see it in the film but she just had incredible spirit of violence about her. You don't always get that in a Thai opponent. Many times it is just about the art, making the art show under duress. That is a significant way in which female Thai fighters fight to win. If you can show the art when inflicted, if you can bring poise and balance, you generally win. But here, Nong Naen, she was fighting another way. Everything about her was about not being intimidated. It was the dignity of space. Every time she got hit, or bettered, she would escalate. Perhaps it the "Tom" sense of identity she was fighting from, but this fight got to a place where it was "who is going to back down". A lot of her elbows were also lost in the film. She let loose over and over. From inside clinch, on approach, at a variety of angles. They were just sudden spasms of violence. What did I feel here? I'm ringside, trying to keep the camera steady for the Live Feed, and my hand is bloody shaking. I'm poking the camera through the ropes so the action does not get blocked, and the default zoom makes all the action very unsteady, squeezed into a tight box. I'm feeling this rush of "bring it bitch" coming at Sylvie in waves, and I'm sensing Sylvie feeding on it, growing bigger in her stance, her shoulders starting to roll, like when she gets serious. And Sylvie just starts pounding the space. The gamblers are on the opposite side of the ring, they are just a cloud of hands and faces and voices, totally incoherent, pulling mostly for the Thai it seems. The ref keeps jumping in to break the clinch every time Sylvie gets an advantage, he's protecting the Thai girl, perhaps unconsciously. Sylvie keeps slamming the space. That's her thing. She's not smashing the opponent, she's smashing the space between them, the force field that defensive Thai fighting is really good at generating, the small bubble of air that allows the fighter to breathe and recover. She just keep smashing it. And then the opponent starts to run. This is the sign that the fight has changed. It's the only tactic left once that air barrier is breached, and you can't keep it up. You go into full retreat and play a game of "catch me if you can". This does not work in many parts of the world, but in Thailand if you can expose your opponent as off balance, or charging out of control, a little bit foolish, you become the puppet master. And Sylvie has to chase. She has to catch and punish her. And she does. What am I feeling? This fight was "Fight Club". We did not know this opponent, we had not heard of her when the fight was arranged. When she was sitting there a few hours before the fight, on a bench just 10 feet from us, and took off her sweatshirt she looked small. "Oh no, they've paired Sylvie with someone small". This hasn't happened for very long time, and even then it was rare - Sylvie's a 100 lb fighter, maybe out of her 140+ fights in Thailand she's faced 5 opponents who are smaller. Instead Sylvie is ever fighting opponents with significant weight on her, and only back when she fought for Frances and the Giatbundit Gym were there a couple of "bad" matchups, completely beyond our control, and then one arranged by Phetjee Jaa's father who was always on the search for the con and easy money. But these spare examples always haunt, there is that fear when an opponent is unknown. She looked kind of frail and sweet, not a lot of muscle in her arms. But then when she stepped into her shorts I saw how strong she was, maybe a kilo or so in advantage. And when she started to move in the ring, she was something else. It was total Fight Club, just a throw down.

Yeah, for me it is really just the Sylvie show. What she is saying and doing is so incredible and unique I don't want to mix it with my voice. I also am a behind the scenes kinda guy, and enjoy the light shining on others.

7-21b There is an intense feature of the Greek epic Iliad, in the telling of what heroism is, that illuminates how karma and performance plays out in the sheen of victory in Muay Thai. The telling of that epic, especially in the action scenes of war, is largely mechanistic. It is of bodyparts moving in conjunction in the theater of war, there is a kind of absence of consciousness, or a disassociation of consciousness that some have made much about. But, what I want to think about here is how the divine impresses itself on a moment, on the battlefield. It shows itself in a glimmer. There is the flash of the eyes that make you realize something divine is happening here, or how holy armor shines on a ridge, catching the light. You see the god out of the corner of your eye, it's not quite a glimpse. It's more a shadow...but a luminous shadow. It is cast from somewhere else, from beyond. But as it falls on a man, on a face, in the midst of epic endeavor, it is startling. It is transcendent. Not as an idea, but as a phenomena. It is oft repeated in these epics that men fight for fame. They fight these terrible wars to be sung by the bard. The body will pass and wither, but if you are sung you have attained a kind of immortality, in that the gods too are sung. You continue to exist in a string of sounds. It is the nature of fight culture, where the body is perishable, and used to exhaustion in agonistic strain that you have this sense of the glimmer, the impression of the divine, as it falls across the body in a moment of victory, or less so, in the sum of one's armor afterwards, the attempt to make an impression of that light. This is something that exists thousands of years apart in the festival fights, in the bug-air swarming in frantic clouds under hanging bare bulbs above rings, as two strive and beat each other, and the gambler's hand is in the air. This is what people may not understand. It is a huge orchestration, a communal ascendency, guided by the gambler's hand, summoning the same sheen that fell across Achilles's arms, the eyes that blazed fire. But whereas those incandescences are reified and frozen into sounds and page-marks, these very same phenomena are summoned fight after fight, ring after ring, odds after odds. It is the pulsebeat of the recreation of the divine, causing it to shine on the body. And after the victor strides out of the ring, pushing through the pressing crowd. People reach out to touch it.

Thanks d. You are a constant positive presence for us. :)

7-21 sylvie is a silver thread. I can't tell you how many times I've seen her glimmer through the light-and-dark of gym spaces, spaces that cut with wide blades of light, young men smashing themselves against the darkness, building sweat. She is faster than all of them, like an element largely unobservable by Muay Thai instruments, a thin, little sliver of metallic ribbon that just cuts and cuts as it sews through the padwork, through the clinch grind, through the heave of diaphrammic desire for air. She is quicksilver. An illusion. It just doesn't stop, just like light doesn't stop. Nothing matters but a supreme arc of desire, an unspoken desire to become. That light at Petchrungruang is incredible. Especially when everything is still, when the boys have long emptied out and gone off to school, and nobody really wants to come to early work in the morning. It comes through enormous slats that are made of the rooves of various levels. This, in Thailand, is tin art. It's a geometry of stabbing incandescence as solar rays cut and cut and cut in huge swathes. It is powerful. You know the nature of the sun in this. Its wisdom is never direct. You can never truly look into the sun, it is always at eclipse. The bag is pounding like a heartbeat. Thud, thud, thud, like an arrhythmia, doctors told her once that she has a hole in her heart, that exercise is a risk, that it can choke on itself. She used to have huge pains that would hit her there, that would cramp her right in the center of her being. She used to run to get aspirin when it happens. It doesn't happen very often anymore. Thud, thud, thud. It's a heartbeat of the gym. The way it knows that it is awake. The wooden post that is made of huge beams that look like they've been hewn for a movie set of the inside of a med-evil boat with oar's men, they shake. The entire space shakes. I used to hear these beats, these incredible thuds, when I would walk down the street up in Chiang Mai, on that little soi that we lived on, when she was early to training. You could hear the heartbeat of the gym right down the street. There is something fantastic about it, like a marriage of mechanism to the organic. Pounding out Spirit. It's enormous. It's very hard to describe if you haven't been here. The way these thuddings of bags cover the whole country, boy after boy after boy, and sometimes a girl, in little makeshift gyms of hanging dust and leather, shake the earth. They have been pounding this way, pounding the Earth, as long as they have been tilling it for rice it seems. There is an incredible humility to it all. Just bodies. No technique. Technique doesn't mean here what it means in the west. Technique just percolates from all the thudding, like an alchemy of what is darkest, most pure. Just bodies. Intent. It's difficult to grasp what the gambler's hand means. To take the gambler's hand. The gambler's hand, half open like a moon, grasps at nothing. It is curled, relaxed, it snatches at nothing. It is covered in darkness...until there are odds. Then it moves. It gestures to the disappearing trace of karma, that golden line that sparkles at the edge of bodies, at the edge of pounding away. The gambler's hand is very patient, like a fish in murky water. It is weightless, and then it snatches at chance. This is the hidden, undefined beauty behind the vast cloth and endeavor of Muay Thai. Each and every fighting body has the gambler's hand lightly brushing at its edge, feeling for the glimmer, the trace of karma, the impression of the divine as it somehow miraculously covers like a dew in beams the aperture of the work...staring at the sun. These are huge machines of effort, the agonistic transformation that comes through the clash with space, and every hand is a gambler's hand, feeling for the edge of the blessed. The Blessed. This is the progeny of the Art. This is the thing that makes its appearance when things are ascending. It comes out of the cataclysm of the effort. It cannot be controlled or even summoned. It can only be stroked by the gambler's hand, as if quietly fanning a flame. This is what Muay Thai is about. And when the shimmer moves off the body that seemed to produce it, catching onto some other darker form, it often leaves the thing where it lived and even seemed to thrive: cold, inert, still-born. It feels capricious. But it isn't. All sorts of mythology arise to explain why it moved, guessing where it might fall again, but these are mythologies, stories. It is not capricious. The gambler's hand knows. The beauty comes from its arc, the way it collaborates with bodies that thud the heartbeats of the spaces. You have to take the wide-view. Muay Thai is enormous. It ascends from the earth and lights upon royal memory. It is a vast tapestry of effort, and the only thing to do is to clan together in its midst, to work in unisons, in walls, in fortified gyms, around the organs of the bags and pads as the dust flies up.

This is going to be a big experiment, but I thought to myself: Isn't this the place to do it? For those that don't know me I kind of keep a low profile. I'm the one holding the camera, the one doing the film editing, or the digital heavylifting so that Sylvie can keep blogging at her crazy rate, and still train and fight full time in Thailand. I'm Sylvie's husband Kevin. I'm 51, and have been living here with my beautiful, brilliant wife in Thailand as she pursues her dream. I do write occasionally for her site, a few articles under A Husband's Point of View, and occasionally I jump into the internet stream to press a point or two on an issue I feel is especially important, but mostly I'm very happy keeping to myself in all this, while I watch with admiration as Sylvie climbs to places nobody really has gone before. But...I am a writer, and in all this time I too have fallen quite in love with the Muay Thai of Thailand. I get to express my thoughts all the time with Sylvie - we think and talk a lot about a number of dimensions of Muay Thai, everything from gender, community, technique, and most importantly it's future. But I don't really give myself permission to just flow in things, to write as I once really did, when I was younger. So, I thought that maybe this is a good space for that, a little corner of this forum where I can journal some of my more loosely connected thoughts, things that arise as I experience this incredible country and culture. Feel free to throw in comments if you like (a comment will automatically subscribe you to the thread, via email - you can all follow this thread by clicking "follow" in the upper right corner), but I'm just going to go ahead without much organization or even intent. You'll see from what follows I write in a unique, not easy to read voice, but hey, that's just me.

Someone sent this to Sylvie this morning, just watched it, so appreciative that the promotion put it up! It's great to see female fighters doing their thing. Sylvie will probably have a post up on this fight today (she's at training, will watch it when she gets home). Must be so frustrating to Kim. Loma fights the fight in a whole different place. Not striking. Space. It's a very simple approach, but not simplistic in the least. Difficult to crack.

That is a really cool pricelist! But wow, 2,000 baht with Manop?! smh. Might be interesting if Nak Muay Nation wants a Saenchai private, maybe they would spring for it.

lol - yes, not Saenchai's daughter. #braincramp - Though Saenchai's daughter is looking pretty badass herself! Interesting that the top Thai fighters spar with all the westerners very cool. If I remember right you said that a private with Saenchai is 5,000 baht?

I know that Emma Thomas just went to Yokkao and had a very good experience, better than she anticipated. I've also off-handedly heard this from several people. I'm guessing that it is a very expensive, western gym, though Manop (Saenchai's daughter who is 17) trains there, and she's said to be a top female Thai fighter. If you are looking for a much more old fashion style gym and willing to travel a bit (it is NOT central) I'd recommend Dejrat Gym, which is the home of the Thai National Team, and is just amazing. Perhaps it would be worth a visit for a day or two. It's a very small gym attached to the house of Arjan Surat, and several top Thai women train there when they are in Bangkok and getting ready for a fight (Loma, Sawsing). There will not a lot of English spoken, but the Muay Thai there is classic in style, and very fight oriented. It's a gym that is largely unknown to westerners. Here is Sylvie's 1 hr private with Arjan Surat. Here is Sylvie clinching with Sawsing there. Here is Sylvie's interview with former MMA fighter Kaitlin Young who spent a month there, along with video walk through of the gym. It's extremely Old School, but the interesting thing about it is that Old School is often not very pro-female. In this case though Thai women train there sometimes, as did Kaitlin who had a wonderful experience.

The first link doesn't work for me, the second one is a 2013 paper but does not seem to be a study that Jiraporn Laothamatas is associated with. I'm really interested in the presentation that looks like it was given in May of this year by Jiraporn Laothamatas: "Advanced Diagnostic Imaging and fMRI of the Brain in Thai Pediatric Boxers". I suspect that that Symposium presentation is what produced the recent surge in articles. This is the link to the brain images. Brain imaging is also found here in this June 16 (2016) presentation abstract which focuses on memory performance, with Laothamatas listed as an author. Here the control sample is simply described as "age matched".

This of course is the crux of the entire ethical question. How much agency does a child have? How much agency does an economically limited child have? And how do we weigh that choice in the context where children work, in fields, in food stands, as part of the family, and can take pride in their contributions to the family.

I completely agree with this possible IQ testing concern, which is why not being able to read the paper itself, especially on the specified nature of the control groups, makes me worry about the broad conclusions that may be drawn, not only from the study but from article headlines like these. From one excerpt I found this is how the subjects were described: "We performed brain MR imaging with 3.0 T scanner in 323 pediatric boxers and 253 age-matched normal control subjects." - age matched? Were the IQ tested subjects only age matched? Also mentioned were memory performance differences, which seems substantive. What we are really left with mostly are these kinds of highly technical pieces of evidence, without qualitative conclusion:

I've been following this study by Jiraporn Laothamatas for a few years now. The original study, about 4 years ago, seemed to have very few examined young Nak Muay (if I recall, maybe 20, working from my memory) so the results seemed inconclusive when compared to a control of over 200 non-Nak Muay, apparently adjusted for age and socio-economic class. Then from reading various new sources in 2014 she seemed to have more results, and updated her study (I believe with around 100 young Nak Muay). And now in May she seems to have presented a new paper, with over 300 young Nak Muay examined. So while I was predisposed to doubt the application of her original findings, she seems to be on very solid ground here. The problem that I have with the study at this point is that as I can't read the paper itself it's very hard to assess just what she's discovered. The only qualitative conclusions that I've seen drawn are related to IQ tests among the longest range sub-sample (fighting for 5 years). I've seen small excerpts which include brain scans which show neurological changes (including the increase spatio-temporal development), but it is difficult for a layman to judge just what risks are involved, at a qualitative level: ie, what is the Quality of Life (QoL) change reflected in young Nak Muay brain scans? This is a really important lack in the studies, though I understand that this may be the hardest to measure. The ethical issues is essentially one that hinges on of QoL,. I think this is an amazing ethical question because it pulls on so many threads of social judgement: how middle and upper class Thais view lower class Thais (Muay Thai is a sport of the lower classes largely), how westerners view Thais, ideals of childhood and development. As a westerner who has seen a lot of cultural good coming out of the very fabric of Muay Thai how does one weigh the development of children in the art vs the value of the art itself? There is no doubt in my mind that Muay Thai holds its very special place as the supreme combat art, a living martial art, because Muay Thai is fought at a young age, and has been for many decades if not centuries. It allows fighters a very early inoculation against the fear of contact, something that just cannot be mimiced. And it allows the sport itself (all the techniques, both in terms of pedagogy and of fighting) to develop in the real context of fights. The fact is: it is dangerous. And the Thais are the best in the world, raising a sport to the level of art - a living art - because they are exposed to danger early. If we took it in another direction, by analogy: If there was a (mythical) country which 200 years ago had the best sailors in the world, and the art of sailing was raised especially here because high-sea sailing began at a very young age, exposing young boys to many potential hardships, injuries and even deaths, the height of the art of sailing achieved in that country would be through the risk to children. Muay Thai reminds me of this. It has the best fighters in the world because and through this reason of risk. How does one balance the QOL of living within an art, a woven piece of your culture, with real, but unqualified diminishments? As a natural bias, I am suspect of much of the Western ideology of the Innocence of Children which has grown out of it's own unease with 19th century industrialization: The Victorian Cult of the Child. <<<< To understand the full scope of the ethical question, and how we have inherited particular perspectives of childhood (and how it relates to Industrialized Capitalism), do read this piece. Which is not to say that motivations for the protection of children are wrong, but insofar as they come out of pictures of childhood like those of Victorian/Industrial motivations, they should at least be critiqued. There is something about how middle classes everywhere project concern for lower class children that gives me pause. The bottom line for me is ultimately found in meaningfulness. How meaningful is Muay Thai? Unlike just blanket poverty, or disease or lack of education (in the general sense) - all of which tend strongly towards meaninglessness, suffering without redemption, arts like the fighting art of Muay Thai feels meaningful. It's an achievement of a people, a culture, embodying high values, praiseworthy states of mind and body. And largely its an achievement by the less economically advantaged of that culture. It's pretty amazing. This isn't to say that there is nothing worth critiquing or plain worrying about when it comes to young Nak Muay. Surely there is. There no doubt are many situations of great risk and injustice within the ad hoc system of youth fighting as it exists today. There are nefarious, cruel realities within the sport at the local and wide-scale levels, but I resist the sense that just because there is risk, or even in this case documented damage, it is simply judged as "brutal" or "bad". I come from a place where I feel that the fighting arts are noble, and their nobility is born of their engagement and ultimate mastery of risk. I do wonder if Muay Thai for Thai children is getting younger (perhaps there is more organized or prevalent gambling opportunity now?). I have no evidence to support this other than it just a question being raised. I see fighters from the Golden Age say that they began fighting when they were 13 (Karuhat) or 11 (Sagat), but I've never heard of legends say that they began fighting at 8, which seems sometimes the case now. This could of course be a difference in description, when people mark the beginning of their fighting, or anecdotal difference. Only people who have lived through it could say. The problem with this issue I think is that most of those who oppose child fighting in Thailand seem to do so from a very powerful, and emotion place. So it is difficult to come to a point of agreement, or a direction forward. I will say this. The sort of motivated resistance to child fighting seems to resemble the long time resistance to females fighting. This is not to equate the two ethically, there are clearly important differences, but only to diagnosis some of the gut-level judgement that may be involved. I'm not a father of a child, and if I was I may be moved to think differently, but I've often thought that if I did have a kid having him/her be raised in a camp like kaimuay I've seen a few western boys experience, seems like an amazing childhood to have, even if there be risks. Of course being able to pick and choose what camp, or which caretakers to watch over a boy (or girl) is not a luxury that many Thai parents have.

Sylvie just asked Loma. She says the fight is at 51, Loma says she's 47 today.

The idea that Loma has fought only 46 times is pretty funny. But recently Phetjeejaa's record showed "30" on a televised fight, when she in fact has probably over 150 fights already. But yeah, probably a pretty big weight difference. Loma just fought at 45 kg at the IFMAs, while Kim's preferred weight is stated at 53 kg. I'd guess that the big question will be how Kim handles Loma's throws, and how throws will be scored. I pray this one will have video, but I'm guessing not. :sad:

It's hard to overstate how sweet the guy is. It's kind of amazing. And as he's gotten older he's developed some movie star looks, so people are clamoring over the rights to him. The film also was shot and made by a Thai which seems to, at least to me, give it a different feel than very similar films made by western eyes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfnZ-WdK4FI This is just a wonderful short documentary on the Petchrungruang star fighter PTT. It's very hard to encapsulate how sweet and kind a fellow PTT is - hey, he absolutely loves Jaidee - but he has an aura. Sylvie wrote about him and his story that is hinted at in the film - but the film itself in its very simplicity, and in how his words in translation guide the basic themes, I just find very moving. What a cool dude he is. It's only about 8 minutes, give it a watch.

Sounds like such a complete and utter nightmare. Even in just local shows in NY the weirdly cramped aggravations somehow all felt inhuman in fight shows to me - a reason why we really wanted to move to Thailand - this sounds like that x100.