Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu

8-31 I finally have done it - I have given into my love of Muay Thai. I'm not young. I'm 50+ (you would not believe it, but I actually do not know my age...I started calculating it out and got flustered for a minute and just gave up, because it doesn't matter)...but I've finally given into my absolute love of the sport. To talk about why it's taken me so long - my Lord, I've lived here in Thailand the motherland of the art, for 5 years! - borders on criminal, if you could commit crimes against yourself, but it's an intricate weave of problems and carefulness that is telling in its own right. What this really is about, what it has to be about, is my weight. For these 5 years I've lived an almost complete and total expat's life, locked in rooms with a keyboard, making sure that we can survive financially, with clients, and with Sylvie's own social media roots growing, just pushing for new vistas in that draining world, my mental acuity, my attention span, the circuit of my creativity growing tighter and tighter, living on refresh cycles and experimentation as a consultant, all as my body ballooned, and I lost awareness of my flesh. All while I watched one of the most incredible devotions to the sport that is possible, my 100 lb wife beat her way towards 200 fights. Jesus. It's incredible. At first I cocooned myself in the apartment because I just did not want to impact Sylvie's training experiences in a Thai gym. The trainers would speak to me, not to her, when I was around. And honestly I was a very harsh influence on Sylvie herself, as she attempted to ascend in her art. It felt best that I stayed away, and let the culture of the gym, the constellation of trainers just make the most of what her heart was. I did pad Muay Thai work maybe 3 or 4 times in our first 2 years at Lanna. I took maybe a month of boxing lessons, scheduled when the gym was empty and full of heat, in the early afternoons. But mostly I just languished, and grew more and more stagnant. More and more unhealthy. Examining a digital world, as westerners feasted on the beautiful training that was only 5 minutes walk from my door. When we moved to Pattaya, it was more of the same. It just seemed best that I let Sylvie evolve in the cultures of her gyms. I'm a strong force, I send things into orbit, so largely I have just stayed away. And cost too was a reason/excuse. I didn't want to upset the delicate balance of friendship that long term stays, and what money can mean for Thais, by including myself in that relationship. And in truth, I just became frozen. I say it was my weight, which had swelled to an incredible 278 lbs (126 kg) in these 5 years, that drove me to finally give in. But it really was my health. There is a saying: You don't see many seriously overweight old people. In the last 6 months my eyesight began to dim. My circulation grew sluggish. The climb up the stairs to our 4th floor left me breathing hard for 10 minutes or more. I was literally starting to fall apart. It could see the future. I could see that as Sylvie just now is breaking into truly uncharted territory, as a human being and a fighter, as she was poised to just rocket ship to a level that people can't even see, the foundation of these 5 years of self discovery having been laid...I simply was not going to be alive to see it. I wasn't going to be there. I wasn't going to see the person I love really doing the thing she loved, at an incredibly high level. All the excuses (nerve damage in my leg), all the reasons (what would it cost!?) they just suddenly melted away. They were but whiffs of thoughts, not even real thoughts. I was going to die, and probably sooner than anyone else thought. It was time. 278 lb ginormous me, with my lovely, incredible wife Sylvie, first day in the gym on Monday, above I'm going to say this. The first day in the gym, just standing there in the weight room, kind of milling back and forth waiting for Pi Nu get his things together for my first pad work with him, I started to cry. The tears came, exactly as they are coming as I am writing this in recollection, out of happiness. I was finally there. I was finally going to touch Muay Thai myself, seriously. The stated aim really was to lose weight, to save myself and by time, maybe even decades, to be with my wife, but right then and there it felt like something else. The real reason I'm doing this felt like it was because I love Muay Thai, and I was finally giving myself permission to touch it myself. With my own hand. It didn't matter if I was good, if I ever was going to be good. But I was going to walk up and touch it, like how you've seen an elephant 1,000 times, images of elephants, but it isn't until you touch that dusty, leathery, hair-prickle of skin, you don't know what an elephant is, or feels like. My tears maybe would make more sense if you knew that for these 5 years I've projected myself, physically ---- I say "physically", but I really mean affectively ---- into an incredible amount of Muay Thai. Not only have I been ringside for Sylvie 190 or so fights, and seen all the associated fights surrounding those events, and all the tv and youtube we have watched, so the two of us could get a handle on this incredible art, I also have affectively imagined, and recorded, endless virtual movements, affectively, in my heart, watching all of that, so I could feel my way closer to it. I've been with Sylvie when she has been with the incredible legends she has been filming with, one of a kind human beings and fighters, and I have been silently, and adoringly been downloading the shapes and forms of everything I witnessed. I put it in me. Now, this is going to sound perhaps a little strange, but despite being a very verbal, abstract philosophical, systems oriented person, everything starts for me with the body. So while I've been putting on the endless pounds, stuck behind screens, I've also been processing everything affectively....physically. Ostensibly, I've been doing this for Sylvie's good, so to find out innovative ways around the unique roadblocks she's encountered, but viscerally, and honestly, I've been doing it for love...a love of Muay Thai. I've been kind of locked away, by a screen of sorts, from something I really loved, and which I've seen my wife love, first hand. So I cried, just a few joyous sobs, before that pad work would begin. And the pad work is amazing. Pi Nu is incredibly patient, incredibly intelligent as he starts to build you, and with me he was working with a body that was badly broken, like an old pick up totally rusted out in the field with the grass growing 6 ft in all directions. But, because my mind was so attuned to everything Sylvie had been learning, and doing, and watched the legends of her instruction so closely myself, I had and have a kind of deep understanding of what the art is supposed to be, or can be. A virtual understanding. So, here I was, a non-functioning body, a very active mind, being escorted through the powers of the art, through their forms...the very BASIC forms, seeking balance like a ship taking on water and that wants to turn and sink, the captain carefully turning its wheel to keep the course, letting the steel work its structural magic. And that was the first day. Fuck. It was unbelievable. And still is. I'm actually touching the thing I love. First week is over and my mind is blowing up. It's just the mornings, I'm making sure I don't injure myself and set myself back, but I'm moving through the gym, as a person. As a human being. Not only as a mind. All the parts are there. And it means a terrible lot. above, a little video essay on the upper corner of the gym So, there's a just elating romance about this. The Petchrungruang Gym is...it's hard to describe...it's just about the truest "Thai" gym that there is, that fundamentally allows and includes westerners. But, I think you'd have to know Thailand, and Thai gyms, to see why that's the case. The video above, from this morning, maybe gives a clue to how I think about the gym, this beautiful ad hoc architectures that physically grow out of a house, a family, to explode (the opposite of 'implode') in the slowest of motions around the possibilities that Thai boys might one day be stadium fighters. And, I'm in this space, right in the middle of it. I feel like as I've finally made a motion toward saving my life, I've gifted myself something unexpected. The indulgence and necessity that I touch this art. And I wish I could send it to you, whatever reader who may find this, this bottled emotion that is come from now many years of neglect, an elixir of belief, that makes the art, any art, possible. And I truly feel I could not have done this at any time prior. The stagnation, the stasis really, was a part of the love, as I just watched on, projecting myself into it. Not that what I chose was right, but it was right for this path, this creation, this possibility. Let's see what happens...

WMC Champion Ticha (TH) vs RENA (all around Japanese superstar) in I think Shootbox Rules:

https://www.facebook.com/sylviemuaythai/videos/1715088295191960/ Fahseetong vs Mesa for a WPMF title 147 lb. From a live stream, with me and Sylvie commenting. (August 11, 2017 - QB fights)

7/24 I'm particularly fascinated with the MMA story of Kadyrov, the brutal dictator, Islamic ideologue, war-crime-ish cuddly Instagrammer who has embraced MMA for what it really seems to be, in the form of an absolute purity as extreme. I first ran into the story on Sherdog and here is a cleaner presentation of it on MMAfighting.com or on Deadspin. I remember my mother, who was a Philosophy major before she became a prosecuting attorney, giving the advisement: If you want to understand the verity of an argument take it to its extreme. I was pretty young then and I wrestled with whether or not this was indeed true. I'm much older now and can see something of that taken up in this example. MMA - not the sport, but perhaps we could say the cultural phenomena - is largely revealed in its purity in Kadyrov. The outlandish fantasy of underground brutal fighting tournaments in martial arts cinema, some of my favorite films, paired with ethnic rage (it's dignity) and ultra-Nationalism, and vast resources of wealth (likely derived from elicit, widespread money-laundering activities) becomes acme'd in the arch-warrior type. Coupled to a carefully sculpted social media persona, and the west finds itself staring into a mirror reflection of itself: "Who is the fairest in all the land....?" It is mind-boggling how many threads of MMA absolutism are drawn together and amplified in Kadyrov who is simultaneously Bond villain and Mixed Martial Artist everyman, seemingly straddling the complete spectrum of the male possible. If I thought Trump was the grotesque but still utterly transfigured apogee of Capital, he is but a demi-urge to this example of manly racial rage and its proposed redemption. And what is even more incredible, the ideology of MMA (beknighted UFC fighters of the commercialized west) will be facing Kadyrov's fighter/warriors, their own hypostasis, in a real cage, in real fights. Not since Jessie Owens torched the field in the Berlin Olympics will there be such a meeting of ideology, political brutality and fantasy as athletic contest. But in this case there is no opposition, there is no nemesis. There is only a question: How deep will you go? This is the fascinating thing. As Kadyrov harnesses the image and ethos of MMA to fuel the warrior caste fantasy, and thus his own political objectives -- and he is not the only power in the world doing so, perhaps most notably the recent rise of fighting spectacle in China, seeking a performance counterpart to real world potency - what it makes clear is that sports matter...that what is being done in the ring, the cage, the field, is not just distraction or pastime, but it draws on and banks affective powers and meanings for change. As otherwise fairly sage observers have wrongly guessed, they are not just bread and circus designed to keep the eyes of the People off of the real mechanisms of power. They are also the stuff of political meaning. It is theatricized but socially proven Good. And the Good is always tested withing the agora, both by speech and by price. To switch gears just a bit this is, in my view, what makes what Sylvie is doing in Muay Thai far more combustive than many if not all realize. There is a groundwork here, a bedrock built in gym spaces, in rings across Thailand, in digital sedimentation that goes very deep, that supposes a possibility far beyond sport in the typical sense. Fighting is where art meets flesh. And in the case of gender - and let's not lose track of how the greatest recent western outcry against Kadyrov has not been against the wider spread accusations of human atrocities, but rather specifically against his anti-gay "purifications" and denials of sexuality - fighting is where art meets flesh meets caste. Values are fighting. Here is a good Vox video piece on Kadyrov: The HBO experience of covering his story. A very good 20+ minute radio interview of the Kadyrov MMA story, Karim Zidan: And a 20+ minute radio interview of the Kadyrov MMA story, David Scott:

Sylvie's definitely a no-eye contact person, so this is a thing that she's wrestled with as well. Hopefully she's hop on and talk about it. But til then I'll just note that last week Chartchai, former WBC World Champion boxer, and former Muay Thai fighter told a friend of ours that best is to look right below the chin, maybe the throat or collarbone area. He said that a lot of fighters look at the eyes and end up with their punches floating up, missing high. If you look here though they land right on target. Believe me, he said.

7/4 This really caught my eye, "Brazilian Jiu Jitsu Ambassador" Anthony Bourdain explaining some months ago that he was relieved to stop pretending he was in a relationship with his wife, throwing out the complaint/explanation in an email about their separation that “She’s an interesting woman. I admire her choices. But I married Sophia Loren. She turned into Jean-Claude Van Damme.” “Date night is pretty much going to a fight,” Bourdain joked to Ottavia in a 2013 column for Vice’s MMA section Fightland. “In between we watch tapes of guys wrestling each other. Romantic? Not.” What is interesting is how softly it was Anthony Bordain who became the "ambassador" of BJJ, and not his wife, though Fightland did a very nice piece on his wife. Notably, she points out that her husband did not like how muscular her body had become: It was Bordain, who I'll admit I'm not a fan of as a food show personality, who received the unofficial ambassadorship honor. He was a famous man, well into his 50s, starting BJJ. In this Charlie Rose segment, he talked about it, briefly: I'm not really to judge the relationship but rather to talk from quite afar. This wasn't a story I was even following closely. It is more that in my media consumption and conversation I was somehow kind of struck by how the aura around Bourdain was of this late-in-life discovered male love of BJJ. Yes, I had heard that his wife had gotten him into it, but what really seemed to resonate with everyone was his story. When Sylvie shot a segment with food maven Andrew Zimmern people would say, wrongly: "Yeah, that BJJ guy." Bourdain's the famous one, the one with his face on television, and the demographic skews way toward the aging Baby Boomer male, but there is something that feels just not right about the "ambassador of BJJ" saying something like: "I married Sophia Loren. She turned into Jean-Claude Van Damme." Just as a story being told, looking back on all his video'd statements about how proud he was that his wife or his daughter (one day) could "kick everyone's ass in a bar they walk into" or "fuck someone up" (sorry, insert my eye-roll here), behind it all it feels like..."not Sophia Loren", a joke he apparently repeats and finds perhaps pleasurable irony or humor in. In her words before their separation: It has been a transformation. My body has changed, dramatically. I have changed. My husband half-jokes that he married Sophia Loren but ended up with Jean-Claude Van Damme. But there's something to that. I'm not the same person. I'm hard now, physically and mentally. The confidence I gained is something I'm proud to share with my daughter, who, like me, has been training jujitsu for some time. This is what I'm interested in. Bourdain was an ambassador because indeed it was a country of men, older men, that perhaps needed an ambassador, someone to translate things to make them understandable, to open up the door to an art and movement. It seems, he wasn't so much an ambassador OF Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, so much as the older "still virile" Man Ambassador TO Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. Yes. And MMA, which seems as if it caught fire in the world because it inexplicably wove artfulness and male rage into a single thing, like a living Kung Fu movie. What I wonder is if the aged powers that found Sophia Lorens growing into JCVDs so interesting (to a degree), with female fighting taking more and more market share and media, will sour on the real powers that female fighting is embodying...the real changes in confidence that reflect that women are not the "same person" they were 15 or 20 years ago, no longer Sophia Lorens. I think my point here is that these are real transformations. It's important to note that in his humor Bourdain is just passing between one fantasy and another. For his generation Sophia Loren was pretty much THE quintessential beautiful woman, exotic enough as European to Americans, full of temper and emotion, and rich romantic love. And JCVD also occupies a powerful pole to that, the man who brings his manliness to exotic lands, learns exotic arts, defeats exotic enemies, dances...exotically. What happens when, lost in your fantasy space the person you grafted your desire fantasy onto (Sophia), starts to effect the fantasy of what you want to be yourself (JCVD)? When speaking of real female power (confidence, capability, vectors of choice), it seems that that power has found a secret crease in the male fantasy space, that it slipped between the allure of Loren, and the elements that surround JCVD. It has taken advantage of the confusion it produces by its juxtaposition. Yes, rightfully women of the arts and fighting complain about the sexualization of their roles, the repeated re-territorialization of their remarkable flights, but it really is in the confusion that is produced by the juxtaposition that inroads were made. All the virtues (Latin, look it up) of the male fighter became detached properties, qualities that could adhere to other things, effecting a displacement. Lorens could suddenly produce virility, almost by its definition. You see this in sci-fi films all the time when the "hot" android suddenly shows inhuman strength...but always with the warning/fear that the android has its own programming, its own mission...almost insect like. It was this crease between Loren and Jean, into which female power began to express itself, taking on more and more of the attributes of Jean, and leaving Loren more and more behind. But it is really into this crease that female fighting still remains. It's con-fusion. What is important here is that the qualities of "Jean" are the attributes of power, or at least of those "in" power. They are necessary to signify and also, importantly, to trigger the experiences of power in its cultural braid of meaning and instinct. They are the vestments that in a certain sense need to be put on. But this is no fantasy experiment. These are a program of affective transformation. The symbols act as vessels for a kind of transport. But you must keep your eye on the real thing. The real power. The real freedoms that are being signified and assembled. Love.

Yeah, Attachai's looks really good. Emma couldn't be more pleased with the gym, and it would seem like a good gym for a first fight (there are local fight shows now...but checking directly with Emma would be best).

So impressed how far you've come in this Nick. Your passion is evident.

This sounds like a pretty nice, and simple idea. The sweat suit (or sauna suit) is common for Thais cutting weight (though you won't have to do this yourself). At the very least it gets you exerting yourself in high humidity, wet heat, taking precautions not to push it too far. Sylvie wrote about how regular suana Hyperthermic Conditioning could have added health benefits, and how training in heat may be something that helps Thais achieve a degree of conditioning others may not - at least along the lines of thinking by Dr. Rhonda Patrick.

Kristen, you are awesome for putting up all those fights. This one, Phetdapee vs Teresa Wintermyr is from a year ago, don't know if it every made it to the thread. Phetdapee has such a balanced, switching style, and a certain spark in her eye.

One of the most interesting differences between Thai and western imitation of Thai techniques I think comes in clinch. Westerners often seem to feel that "Thai Clinch" is essentially a kind of continuous "swimming" for position, coupled with elevated knees (sometimes with an overriding directive: Get to the double neck plum!). This kind of continuous swimming, hopping, skipping clinch could be seen in classic Greg Nelson's clinch DVD, which by the way, is excellent in so many ways...despite the fact that no Thai I've ever seen actually clinches quite like that. The larger issue is that the are many styles and modes of clinch fighting, and the swimming/leaping style isn't often used in stadium fighting unless in dominant moments - constant swims leave you open to throw counters, leaps result in being thrown. This is kind of "practice" clinch. Different from swimming clinch is Lock Clinching, where there is much less movement, and a fighter will work to a dominant lock. Yodwicha fights like this. Sylvie and I laugh over and over again at what Yodwicha said to Sylvie when she trained with him and told him: I like to lock. His eyes opened wide: You like to lock!? I like to lock!, as if he had found a simpatico friend. Yeah, you like to lock, you are one of the best in Thailand at it dude. In any case, there can be a spectrum maybe, from very serpentine clinching, to dominant lock clinching. And all the variations in between. I remember watching the clinch practice video of Sataanmuanglek, with spectacular trips and off balances, leaping knees, but then was struck how so much of this was countered by the lock power of Tanadet when they fought, so much so that in some of his fights against him he kinda stopped clinching all together. It was a case of rock, paper scissors. Sylvie broke down some of his spectacular clinch sparring here: You can see one of their instructive fights here: This end of the spectrum, Lock Clinch fighting, is I believe underdevelped or suffers from lack of awareness in parts of the west, but it is a big part of stadium, Muay Khao attacks. It can and does using swimming, trips and other elements, but largely it is about catching the slippery fish, and establishing dominance. If there is any doubt about the variation in clinch technique, check out this video of Sinbi coach Kru Pot, who specializes in clinch knee fighting, completely overwhelming Saenchai with knees. Pot isn't even locking. He's just controlling, and abusing with incredibly fast, direct knees. This is perhaps the most striking clinch video I've ever seen in Thailand. There is a lot going on there - I believe I read that Saenchai had just been dominating a few fellows in clinch, so it seems that Pot is coming in to master him, and put him in his place. He just does not relent. But Saenchai is a pretty decent clinch fighter. Not great, but very good against certain opponents. Look at how incredibly strained, stiff and stagnant he becomes. He's almost paralyzed. This is what the Lock fighter is trying to do. Kru Pot's size and strength advantage has a lot to do with this too. Saenchai can't really afford to take risks, he ends up just trying to fight him off. Sidenote: This is one of the interesting things about Sylvie's clinch style. It's a locking style. Several fighters coming out of Petchrungruang have this slow, methodical locking style. That is the style of her gym. Yet she uses it against fighters usually with 3-6 kgs on her, which is a very steep hill to climb. It also is why she has had such trouble against Loma in the past. Loma's a timing throw clinch fighter. She doesn't lock. It's a counter clinch style, and has been learned since Loma was a little girl. A locking fighter has to become quite dominant to beat a counter clincher like that, otherwise they will just be thrown. In a sense, they have to be 1.5x or 2x as good, with counters to counters.

5/30 Foreign gods. I think a great deal about the gods and dieties of Thailand. Not only do they multiple and crest across every commercial incrustation, appearing like ghosts to offerings to every Capital manifestation, from 7-11s (which can have both sleeping dogs in doorways, and food notables to the invisible on the corner) to enormous banks. There is something special about this complete and every expanding panoply. And there is something to bowing to it. Worship to a foreign god invites the foreign within you, it cracks open the hard shell of self-conception, and it also puts you in metronomic tune with the affective consciousness of so many others, with whom you do not share a language, at least to a degree. But there is a shell to these beings, a difficult lacquer to get through. Does one have to dig deep, or skate faster on the surface? They are silent, somewhat cartooned or exaggerated. They contain scripts and turns that have embedded themselves in the minds of childhood, the childhoods of others who are not foreign to them. I cannot - yet - permeate myself to their degree. There is something to the Thai mind that takes on the surface reflection, not as a superficiality, but along the lines of the comic book silhouette test. A super hero or villain has to pass the recognition by readers, even if no light is shining upon them, revealing all the internal detail. The gods and dieties of Thailand are like this. Much of social discourse is like this. It is two dimensional truth telling. We of our excited 3D mappables are missing something in this. And I suspect that I'm missing something here too. It's what keeps the lacquer, lacquer. We must flatten ourselves out for these gods.

5/28 I guess this is a strange follow up to the above entry, and I'm hesitant to even bring this forward. But this is my semi-private space where I just get to talk about things that preoccupy or fascinate me, and this is one of those. And really I write this because I care about Muay Thai, the Muay Thai that we all love, the Muay Thai of the big stadia in Thailand, especially those marvelous fighters of the Golden Age. It's already said by many that Lumpinee belts don't mean anything much when compared to the fights of those eras when the best fought the very best, over and over, sometimes even across weight classes. Now Lumpinee belts feel much more arranged or managed, big mega gyms purchasing lots and lots of talent from around the country, and top talent often kept from other top talent. I honestly don't know enough about the history of the sport and the inner machinations of current Thai arrangements to be firm about this, but you do hear legends just shake their head at the current state of top fighting. This could simply be Old School fighters dismissing modern developments, something you always see in sport. But it's enough to say that at the highest level of Muay Thai, the level at which we all aim our eyes, there have been stories of serious and significant slippage. Why does this matter? Well, what I have in mind isn't so much Lumpinee or other Thai belts, but the way that we in the west represent our own Muay Thai development and achievement. I read the achievement list of a very well known YouTube fight technique purveyor who describes himself as an International Pro Muay Thai fighter. I'm not sure about this, but I believe he's had only one Muay Thai fight ever (many years ago), in Thailand against a windmilling Thai opponent of very questionable skill, and that is the anchor of the title: "International Pro Muay Thai Fighter". I'm just shaking my head. Ok, I get it. Everyone has to market themselves. There is a kind of built in bloat to achievement claims, and for people who want to make a living instructing others there is a need to establish authority. I'm sensitive to this. But there has to be a limit. The above is an extreme example. But there are two other conflations that each time I hear them I cringe a little. The first is the claim "Muay Thai at Madison Square Garden". This is such a tricky thing. When Muay Thai fights happen at MSG this really raises the prestige of ALL of American Muay Thai, and maybe a little bit of western Muay Thai. Madison Square Garden is a famed name in the history of western fighting. The greatest of the greats of boxing fought there. This is just hallowed ground. The idea that people are fighting Muay Thai, where the legends of boxing were formed, is just a huge feather in the cap of Muay Thai. But...and everyone who goes to these shows knows, these are not Madison Square Garden fights, in the sense that a casual listener would imagine. These are MSG "Theater" events, in a separate space. Not the Arena. But still they are sometimes billed as "at the Mecca" of fighting. vs I'm not sure why this bothers me. Hype is a big part of the fighting game, and if I were running promotions for a show at MSG Theater I would definitely want to draw heavily on the name, and its history - and even the theater itself is a huge achievement for Muay Thai. It's a big venue right in the middle of Manhattan. But there is something beyond the mere event that sticks in my throat a little. Fighters themselves, and really all of us, try to blur the lines between these kinds of achievements and the hallowed events of the 1960s and 1970s, we participate in the wink and the nod. Something of the same thing was going on when westerners, of almost any skill level, found that they could fight on pre-shows at Lumpinee and Rajadamnern. This is something that still happens, though it seems to a lessor degree in the last year. Fighting at Lumpinnee or Rajadamnern in many of these cases was a bit like having your little league team play at Yankee Stadium in the off-season. These largely were not fights involving ranked fighters. A young western kid from our gym here in Pattaya just fought at Lumpinee, yes Lumpinee, someone with almost no real fighting skill to speak of, in the pre-card. This is not "fought at Lumpinee Stadium" in any real sense of the phrase. Somewhat in the same vein, I've seen Muay Thai fighters I really like, I mean people I really like, winning a WBC belt of some kind. And then the excitement flows naturally into celebration for the "Green Belt", a belt that is famous the world over for how it stands for boxing excellence. Muhammad Ali wore the Green belt in his victory in 1974, the Rumble in the Jungle: I'm just really torn about this. Fighters find themselves such a precarious position. They fight for promotions, and in a certain way when winning belts of any kind they have a responsibility to respect and promote the achievement. And, there is an overall responsibility to Muay Thai itself to represent it as having champions that have achieved something notable, even something great. You have to rise to the hype in a way. But there is just something fundamentally wrong about this. You - or really with perhaps rare exception, most any Muay Thai fighters - don't have The Green Belt even though the WBC itself pushes the "green belt" phrase in its instagram and twitter accounts. I say this as someone who stared at Chatchai Sasakul's WBC belt as he held it in front of me, somewhat in awe. Even though you might be an awesome fighter and human being Muay Thai itself just isn't there. We can't just be giving out belts left and right, belts with the right letters on them, and pretend that we are simply forwarding Muay Thai by doing so. This is an incredibly inflationary exercise. And it is not just the WBC, its all the sanctioning bodies. Why I'm writing this is that it feels like someone, or some people, have to at least talk about it because sometimes it feels like everyone is forced to be "in" on the deception. We become bad folks who aren't team players, tearing down fighters if we put question marks next to achievement descriptions. We all have to pretend that a "World Title" is because of its name some amazing feat. We all have to pretend that the MSG Theater is more or less where Ali fought. We all have to pretend that fighting at Lumpinee is an epic achievement, no matter your opponent. Everyone in these events, even making these achievements, knows in the back of their mind it isn't the case. Keeping silent creates a kind of group shared guilt I think, which just pushes everyone onto the next hyped up achievement. It's not "The Emperor has No Clothes", it's "We All Have No Clothes". It's only going to stop when fighters themselves speak more soberly about their achievements, for the sake of Muay Thai itself. I think something of this same shared guilt is what kept so much of "fighting in Thailand" under wraps. People would come here and be totally unprepared for how dubious, or how haphazard the fight scene was. Some of them would fight only a few fights (no video) and be kind of embarrassed at their opponent, who perhaps they visibly outweigh. For decades "fighting in Thailand" was the mark of authenticity, but many, many fighters did so under the cloak of "what happens in Thailand stays in Thailand". Much of this was fueled by the Phuket scene (which I have no first hand account of, but which I've read about). Fighters would come back from a handful of fights, several months in Thailand, and open gyms, or become instructors, often with that as the rock of their authority. There would be no talk of the quality of those fights. No video. Instead, everyone kind of shared a group shame or responsibility to the image of fighting in Thailand. You could not speak the truth about it without taking away from your own credibility. It feels like it was a similar dynamic to the one we have with belts and world titles. It's just best not talked about, for everyone. There indeed were very hard fights being fought in the country, but nobody really would speak to the reality that very often there were mismatches. In the last 5 years, or even 10 some of this spell of silence was broken. The image of the "tuk-tuk driver" fight rose up, and in certain sectors fighting in Thailand became quite dubious. People, especially in hearing stories out of Phuket (but also elsewhere), started coming to Thailand fearing a mismatch. We've gotten to I think a mix of feelings about fighting here, especially as fighters have started putting up video of their fights, and western vs Thai matchups have gotten more exposure in the age of social media. This is also why Sylvie has made it a principle to put video of every single fight she's fought. She's had the distinct fortune of being very small, so the usual guilt of being given a big size advantage is something she's very lucky to have not faced. The video is not there to say: "Hey! Look how great I am.", it's to say "Hey, this is what it is really like, fighting a ton in a commercial center like Chiang Mai, or in festival fights, or on tv cards, as a female". All the fight video is deflationary. We have to ground where Muay Thai is, and a lot of what Sylvie has done in her writing and fighting and filming is to sober things up. Sylvie's also been lucky in the sense that she doesn't have to be part of a western fight promotional world, she does not depend on a system of achievement-marking that reinforces itself. She is not fighting for or winning belts in an ecosystem of inter-related events and promoters. She's just flying out on her own arc. This makes the ethics simpler. She also is not an instructor, or a gym owner that needs to qualify her authority. These kinds of pressures are real financial burdens. It is not easy to make a living as an instructor/gym owner, and so inflating or at the very least self-celebrating becomes a real and serious requirement. If you don't celebrate yourself, especially as a woman in sport, no-one will. But what I really call for is that we all try to come together in our appreciation of some sort of real Gold Standard. You can't have everything representing "Gold". It is great for business as people strive for intra-gym prajet, or shorts, or for regional belts of every kind. But ultimately this the slippage of meaning is not good for Muay Thai itself. We cannot be blurring the line so badly that an "International Pro Muay Thai Fighter" (with one fight in Thailand) is the same as a "Lumpinee Fighter" (fighting on pre-cards, sometimes with almost no experience), as a "Madison Square Garden" fighter, as a WBC Champion. We have to create a bottom to all this, otherwise we are just making up and printing money. It becomes meaningless. Right now, in the pro female Muay Thai world, let's just admit that there is no such thing as a World Champion. The reason for this is that there are no rigorous, regularly updated rankings that reflect quality fighters from around the world. It does not exist. World Championship belt fights, at least in Thailand, are pretty much "another hard fight" between two good opponents. Nothing more. And that isn't even always the case. These are really nice promotional bobbles. No ranking system, or string of victories has produced this matchup. At least in Thailand "World Champion" among women just means: Is probably a good fighter in the pool of fighters around at the time. It also tends to mean: trains at a gym with strong promotional contacts. Let's start with the sober view. That is the only way to get Muay Thai to actually develop beyond the "let's hype the next promotion as much as we can" stage. If we are representing things in a way that confuses others, and make Muay Thai seem far more progressed than it is, let's try to deflate it a little, just so we keep our feet on the ground. No, the fight was not at the Madison Square Garden Arena where Ali fought, but it was at the Theater which is pretty fucking good! No, this isn't a WBC green strap anywhere near the famed green straps of historic boxing, but it was against a very good opponent at a wonderful WBC promoted event. Hey, it was just a pre-card Lumpinee fight, not a very big deal, but it was super cool to even fight where the best fighters in the world fight. Let's speak our experiences. Why do this? We do this for the next generation of female fighters (and maybe all fighters), and then the generation after that too. By refusing to blur the hype we might get to a point where real and rigorous professional rankings become a marketable, significant thing to create. Only when we start to want, and really need rankings are they going to develop. If we keep over-hyping our achievements then there is no need for rankings, no way to create a landscape for real, generational greatness. It means we are depriving the next ladies (and men) of what they can achieve. Now let me be clear, I'm not calling anyone "out". In fact some of the fighters that triggered this entry are people I really respect, and in fact I have great sensitivity to the pressures or even pleasures that lead to a certain way of talking. It's not even always talk by the fighter, but talk of their passionate supporters, or by earnest promoters. But I also say: Let's be secure in ourselves enough that we can go forward with less a need to hype, or blur the boundary between where we are and where we would dream to be. Let's not make "Gold" every shiny thing. Let's keep it what it is, Gold. Lets keep it remote and seldom reachable. And let's keep our feet on the ground so we can get somewhere. An example from my life. Above are 3 belts that we keep in the apartment. Belts in Thailand, generally, when won are not kept, so you have to pay to have them made for you by official sources, and are pretty expensive. These are a belt given by Master K, Sylvie's original teacher in the US, a belt that he had hung on his wall for many years, representing his gym team, Suriyasak. He had a student bring it to Sylvie, all the way to Thailand, a special moment for her. There is also a Chonburi Buffalo Race annual festival belt, the first "belt" she ever won in Thailand, bench-marking that experience. And then there is the Muay Siam Northern 105 lb belt, which she won, and then was stripped of because she is a westerner, in a bit of politics. The only western fighter to fight for and win such a belt. These are three special belts. Not because they indicate greatness, but rather because they reflect relationships. They are indicators of times in Sylvie's life. They are incredibly valuable, because of all they represent beyond their official titles. Sometimes Sylvie has to send a photo of herself with a belt to a promoter in Thailand because they crave these kinds of images, but mostly these belts just stay hidden. Maybe because they are kind of personal. For me at least there is a slight kind of shame or embarrassment about these belts, because they are somewhat generally shaped like the Lumipnee (or Rajadamnern) belt - a shiny, silver engraved shield with a colorful cloth band. These are NOT Lumpinee or Raja belts. The very proximity to the Lumpinee or Raja belts doesn't really feel right to me somehow. Below is Namphon Nongkipahuyut's Lumpinee belt. We took this photograph of it while visiting Arjan Pramod, Namphon's old coach and kru, a few weeks after Namphon sadly died very likely of tuberculosis. That is a Lumpinee belt. The two should not be confused. The belts above, and this belt. To illustrate the vast distance between the two, consider this: We asked Arjan Pramod "Who is your favorite fighter of today?". He smiled wryly, his lion-face looking off in the distance. "Namkabuan" he said, letting his smile linger. No, he didn't misunderstand. Namphon's younger brother Namkabuan, one of the very best fighters ever, long now retired. In only one word Arjan Pramuk had said: "There are no great fighters anymore, Namkabuan was the last." He was standing there in the Nongkipahuyut "Hall of Fame". The Hall of Fame is really only a largely lost and forgotten room adjacent to the gym that no longer really trains fighters, part of the house where Arjan Pramuk lives. Its glass cases that haven't been dusted in quite a while still hold silent treasures like this belt, with its waist band tucked behind it to protect it from the dust: The distinction I feel must be maintained, even while Sylvie and others strive for historical accomplishments. We must not lose our place on the mountain, if we want to really climb the mountain. It is up to fighters themselves to express the relationships that make make certain belts or events special, but also to constantly set the distinction between what they have achieved and what there is in the world. It is up to fighters, I believe, to maintain "Gold".

I would not really recommend the gym based on privates with Arjan Surat. He's an amazing teacher, and Sylvie's private with him was great footage. But I get the very strong sense that he does not "do" privates, and that the private we got was something of a one-off. When we went back to shoot another hour with him, despite having someone in the gym at the gym arranging a private session, when we got there it simply never happened. He's an older Arjan, head coach of the Thai National team, and runs his gym in a very strict and regimented way. I think getting privates with him is pretty difficult.

Another big difference. Most elbows in Thailand, at least classically, are designed to cut and not to knock out. Technique is focused on precision, placing the bone right on the bone to split the skin. It's like the difference between a scalpel and a hammer. In the west it's often all about the thud. These are just very different techniques. Even KO Thai elbows have a precision to them, a focus of attack. Folded into this is how elbow cuts are scored or how they thematically play out in Thai scoring. They can indicate the exposure of the weakness of an opponent. It's not just that there is blood. There are those incredible moments when Karuhat would cut someone, and then step back and point at the cut for all of Lumpinee to see. There is just something very different about that. Among the greats at least, the elbow is almost wielded as a paintbrush.

That's a big point, I would think. But also keep in mind, most elite Thai fighters already have fought a great deal before a westerner has put on gloves. Most of the time years of it, sometimes over 100 fights. That is, they have learned the art of fighting in real fights at even a lower weight. If western Muay Thai fighters had 50 fights by the time they were 13 I'm not sure how much their eventual body size in adulthood would factor in. Westerners start fighting already at KO size, and then grow bigger. I still don't think that Thais would have become predominantly headhunters if they were physically bigger...for instance Japanese fighters are known for being very heavy with the hands and I'm not sure that they are all that much larger than Thais. Even small Japanese Muay Thai and Kickboxing female fighters tend to be very hands heavy when compared to Thai females. That seems to be something in the culture, how violence is viewed and celebrated.

This is an enormous factor. And it's been terribly disappointing to see so many women in fighting swept up in the male promotional system. This isn't just what promoters are doing in terms of ads, or photoshoots, it's the entire "I'm going to manage you" ethos of male-oriented, male-owned and run gyms, generally inherited from western boxing. When Sylvie started really communicating directly about her process, her weaknesses, her humanness all the other female fighters in the area were just locked away in their gyms, safeguarded. And it produced a lot of resentment in the local scene I suspect, a kind of "who does she think she is, putting up videos, she's no good?!" Sylvie just did it because she didn't have a gym, she had no male manager energy to follow. And she felt isolated living up where we did, about 60 minutes from NYC. She started building a community out of necessity. Along the way manager/coach types did try to take control a little: "You should be fighting easy fights to build your confidence, you should stop fighting big opponents." Everything was from the perspective of building a product, or a certain kind of "talent". This is the thing though, what we discovered. The biggest power female fighters could have would be to just connect directly to other women. Sylvie's message was, and still is, I'm not special. I just have a passion. She's become kind of special, but only out of the accident of her passion. All female fighters should really throw off the male-oriented, or male-proven bullshit and just start communicating directly with other women. It's a big fucking deal. Stop trying to portray yourself as essentially badass, or so damn hot, or whatever. Just share what you are feeling, your ups and downs. Because the fight game is nothing other than a magnification of things that people feel everyday. The gift of social media is just the gift of direct communication. The chance to be real. To slip outside of, beyond management. Yeah, I understand, there is an entire male marketplace that needs to be catered to in MMA. It's huge. But I think failing to create true female community first, or at least along the way, is a mistake.

Another technique difference, and this probably goes across the board for other strikes, but there is great variety in knees in Thailand. This variety doesn't seem to make it to gyms in the west. It's really the case that there are tons of styles and tons of different technical differences within Thailand (or even within a single gym). Sylvie's video on knee variety demonstrated this:

I'll say this, if very early female MMA fights were the cause of major spikes in Muay Thai searches in the United States, apparently some of the highest (proportional) spikes ever, people may have underestimated how powerful female MMA is, especially in regard to triggering new interest. At least in that time period. Anecdotal across thin data, but interesting.

It could be that the 2008 summer spike was related to an MMA fight between Kaitlin Young and a certain future actress who did not make weight for that fight. The Google Trends data does not exactly match itself in differing views. It's hard to tell.

The only event I could find for the first spike was the Cro Cop vs Bob Sapp fight in the last week of July of 2007, which corresponds closely to the timing of the spike:

I've tried to point this out to people, but fans of Muay Thai are caught in a kind of bubble and they don't realize that the popularity of the sport may be actually decreasing in the big picture. People in gyms don't realize it because they are surrounded by other enthusiasts. Check this out. This is the popularity of the search term subjects BJJ (blue) vs Muay Thai (red) in the United States: As you can see, both (probably) rode the wave of MMA and the UFC, but while BJJ has maintained its popularity Muay Thai has been in the decline in the US for a while now. This same curve is reflected in many other countries as well. There is a kind of crisis in the potential of Muay Thai in the west, and people just aren't aware of how deep it is. I think all your observations about BJJ are huge and important elements. We really should be thinking about how BJJ and Muay Thai both played out in the aftermath of the wave of MMA.

5-10 Above, ideologically problematic fantasy image put into a meme context to talk about fighting and value. The huge father-who-enjoys of psychoanalysis, here upon a heap of HIS violence, his pliant lady treasure practically a part of the amorphous death accumulation, his sword declaiming a verticality out of the mounting matter, the halo of death cult an atmosphere. The Barbarian, invoking qualities of virility that our current Age longs and lurks for, a harkening back to the thymos of primitive effectiveness in space, how the heart displays itself. And then "What Belts?" calling into question the trite trinkets of contemporary measures of what can only be called manliness, even when women pursue it. I can't help but think that in this image and word-set a vortex of ideas descend to a center that is in itself agonistic. Is THIS what men (and women) fight for? Is THIS really the ideal that hides behind so many layers of shimmering achievement? Is this the cage, the ring, the stage? There is an interesting Thai word - and I am by no means even a student of the language - that comes to me: ittiphon. It is a kind of power ascribed to big nakleng (gangsters), though also to many other types, which essentially means "charm". Charm is no small thing in the ancient world. It was the nearly indescribable, indiscernible power to influence others. In Greek antiquity it is strongly associated with Aphrodite, the goddess of love, and with magic itself. It operated from a distance, and had no explanation. It en-thralled. It spell struck. A great orator would be said to have the power of Influence, his words spellbinding. Anything that charms is not to be trusted because its mechanism is largely unknown and unseen. From what I have read Ittiphon is the magnetism of great men. In the case of nakleng Ittiphon also is accompanied by a second power, Ittiroot. This is the power of perceived magical invulnerability. Cannot be killed. Escapes attack. Lucky. Protected. These are the twin powers of the fighter, the double wings that give him (or her) flight. Even the most grounded, unspectacular fighter is moving to and through these two powers. Charm and invulnerability. However ideologically challenged the image is, this is what it portrays. What is victorious notably localized. It is here, on this heap, with this sword, in this person. What is expansive is that this is a realm of death. Here the thinnest whispers of an idea spread out like a shadow very far from a candle. Faint. The battle field of the fighter is inevitably one of death. Not to-the-death per se. But the trading of strikes that ever work to the diminishment of the opponent. I once read that the ultimate tone of a Muay Thai attack is one that makes the opponent seem to collapse from his (her) own internal flaws. The theater of defeat is a kind of collapse or breakdown from within, and that the victor only serves as the means by which this is exposed. There is a kind of nemesis nature to this, in the old sense...divine justice. The crumbling of the opponent, rather than the outright aggression of the victor, makes this a kind of theater of Death and decay, out of which a mechanism, the victor, stands as a shining light of something alluring, the charm and power of the untouchable. These are repeated theatrical performances of localized divinity, the shine and glimmer of the thing that ascends through matter, is born of matter in conflict. How grace and violence are married through combat, invoking something else. Ultimately, the question of masculinity itself arises, and its role in the cataclysm of this kind of arranged apparition. The question...the problem of masculinity though begins to unweave itself a bit when we recognize that masculinity does not inherently belong to men.

Mixing in private lessons is a really good way to get concentrated instruction. Pi Daeng at Lanna in Chiang Mai I believe charges 500 baht per hour (as do the other instructors).

We asked Teresa Wintermyr who is at AKA in Phuket and she said that there is a girl there now who is 6'0" and about 80 kg so at least there is one woman your size. She doesn't fight much I think due to opportunity, but at least they have experience with her, which could help.