Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu

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.

Sylvie has been criticized by Thais for not opening her block up more, so this is a little ironic. But here is a short clip of Sifu Mcginnes, who happens to be a sometimes coach of Sylvie (he's a Karate guy), making fun of westerners for having such a wide block, something he attributes to westerners imagining that shin has to directly meet shin: He and Dekkers take the conversation in a different direction, but it came to mind.

This is just such an interesting point about BJJ. You are much closer to the world of MMA than I'll ever be, but it does seem to me that BJJ passion, and all the detailed "educated fan" knowledge was one of the things that really grounded the commercial expansion of MMA. While it was sold as brutal and ass-kicking, the BJJ fan made the whole thing science-y. You had to understand positions in order to really be a real fan. The attitudes toward BJJ seem to mirror the "real" love of Muay Thai. They are in some respects parallel. But because Thai Muay Thai is thought to be just "striking", it just devolved into kickboxing with a few "cool" techniques.

Well, here is a theory I entertained a while ago. The squat toilet since childhood, and squatting in general as many Thais do/did to just relax and wait around, produces a lot of flexibility, and possibly a lot of technique that grew out of it. I wonder, as the western toilet spreads throughout Thailand if hip flexibility will just generally be reduced, and Thai technique may be changed. This has less to do with hips in, but your mention of the hips made me recall this chain of thought.

That pretty much puts it in a nutshell.

This is an interesting point, and one I have to say that I haven't given enough weight. And from your description it sounds really accurate. The big bombs come more from above. But I remain convinced that there are real, substantive differences in how each culture views the body. Rabbit punches may win in the west, because anything to the head feels or looks damaging, in how the body is mapped. In Thailand it's the opposite. Sylvie has lost several fights to rapid rabbit knees, really quickly thrown knees in a row that might not even touch the body. They are almost symbolic strikes to the gut. Yes, they require some additional balance, and that is on display, but it's more than that. You'll see slow motion replays, for instance in a Channel 7 fight, of knees landing to the ribs. Not really something the west would select out from a round. I think the west sees the head as the center of the Self. It is not only its expressive self (the face), it holds the brain (what science tells us is our core self). Strikes are directed to the head, because the head is essentially us. In Thai body mapping - and this is my little theory - the essential Self is divided up. Yes, the symbolic self (face) is above, but the life force of the self is conceived to be more in the gut. Blows to the gut, or ribs, feel more directed to the opponent's life force. We still have this in our language, things like "gut check", or "gutting it out", or "that takes guts", but these are largely leftovers from a differing world view of the body and the Self. Ancient western cultures considered the spleen or liver as core centers of the life force of a person. I suspect that the big divide on how scoring is done, especially in how body kicks or knees are scored, has to do with this different sense of Self. Now, if we say this is correct, then it makes sense that the Thais would also become more proficient at designing techniques to attack (and protect) that core Self, and a martial art meant to do so. The west is filled with head-hunting because the head is seen as the essential life force of a person culturally. ...I do find your notes really interesting though. How though would you explain the difficulty westerners have in putting their hips in during clinch? Sylvie's been doing this full time for a long time now, and even though she's gotten to a place of very balanced hips in clinch, driving the hips in is still very difficult for her to do, even though she knows that is an essential "safe" place in clinching. There has to be something going on there. Of course it's not just Sylvie, we've seen it over and over again, with trained and untrained westerners alike.

Ass-back is a huge western vs Thai difference that I think goes beyond any particular technique. The west has at least a few fighting styles that favor ass-back (or head forward) positions. The wrestler's hunch, and some styles of western boxing. This is a big difference, and it really plays out heavily in clinch where head-forward results in very easy throws or knees. I also feel like there are extra-circular reasons behind this. Culturally it is somewhat in the body image to pull the groin away in times of attack (for what seem like obvious reasons), but also that there is an element of modesty when in proximity. But hips-forward is a really important part or position in Muay Thai stances and Thai clinch, and there seems like there is a kind of "shyness" involved with the western body image/behavior that makes this much harder to access for western fighters.

And how experienced are you? Asking just so I could look around and see how realistic fights might be for you.

What is your walk around weight, if you don't mind me asking?

Royal Thai Residence is I think 800 a night, and has a nice pool. They are a sponsor of the Thai boys at our gym Petchrungruang, so there is that connection (there is a Muay Thai discount). But we've known several people who have stayed there happily. Our apartment building rents out daily rooms at 600 a night, I think. Sorry this isn't super complete, just what I know. At least a place to start.

More on the "inherently deceptive" Thais: Sumaree Sriuam, 29, who sells chicken noodles, was riding her motorbike near Bali Hai Pier, when she found a wallet on the ground. The wallet contained three THB400,000 checks, THB29,822 cash, and credit cards belonging to a man named Wutthikorn Hanwutthisut. Sumaree decided to bring the lost property to Muang Pattaya Police to help look for the owner. “I just feel sorry for the owner,” Sumaree told Siamchon News. “I don’t want other people’s property, and I know they’d want it back.” source

Not to go too far into this, but there is another layer from my own experience and perceptions, if the thoughts are worthy to put out there. It seems that many of the western men who come to Thailand long term come because they already feel like outcasts, or unacknowledged to the degree that they hoped to be, in their OWN cultures. There is a wide spectrum on this, all kinds of reasons they did not sit well where they were in their own culture, but when they come to Thailand the seduction is the incredible sense of freedom they can feel here, at least in the beginning. They can more or less reinvent themselves (nobody knows them), their $$ go further, they are much richer than they were, and they can at times more easily access women of a beauty standard that they may not have at home (this can also apply to western women who can have their own syndrome of this, but that's another story), and the seeming non-judgmental nature of Thais (Thais do form very strong judgements but they just won't let you know about it) all speaks to a kind of wonderland of self-esteem and self-creating. This applies to older sex-pats, but also to fighters who find themselves doing hyper masculine things, like beating people up for a living...or being beat up. The thing of it is, if you come from your own culture where you already feel you aren't respected like you should be, and then find yourself in a kind of playland, it can be pretty jarring when you run up against the "you are farang" wall, and realize that you aren't embraced the way you thought or hoped. A lot of these more vocal older ex-pats already feel embittered along the line of acceptance. They can often come here to feel special in some way and resent it when it doesn't work out that way. For us we never imagine that we could or would be taken as a "Thai". Why would we? We aren't Thai. Thais, to be very broad about it, seem to be very clannish (family-like extended groups) and sensitive to shifting alliances, and there are so many difficulties to be found within Thai social hierarchies, and within clans and friendships, things we don't see. This isn't "deceptive" in the sinful western sense, but it is...maybe cloistered is the best word. There are circles of trust, within circles of trust, to use a line from Meet the Parents. But a lot of the "Thais are so blah, blah, blah..." talk really seems to come from a combination of putting yourself in poor situations, and unrealistic ideas about how you should be appreciated or embraced.

Maybe someone who has trained at Santai can hop on. My personal sense from afar is that the gym is VERY well liked by loyal, return fighters, but that it is something of a farang camp. And it has a reputation of teaching only a single style of Muay Thai (which some might prefer), changing people's kicks and techniques to suit that style. That isn't something I'd recommend given the richness and variety of technique available in Thailand. This would be perhaps in contrast with what we experienced at Hongthong when Sylvie did a private with Joe. Joe thought hard about how Sylvie fights (in advance, he had seen her fight) and how he could show her things that could really compliment and expand her already existing style. The private was more or less amazing (you can see the full hour of it on Patreon). But that degree of freedom or looseness of approach might not be for everyone. Also, if you are going to divide time between Kem (which is isolated), Hongthong makes more sense because Santai is pretty isolated too, there's a bit of a trek if you want reach Chiang Mai. This being said Hongthong is reportedly ready to move to a brand new location (they are keeping this under wraps) which sounds like it's going to be an enormous upgrade in terms of facilities. I'm not quite sure where that location will be (in/around Chiang Mai). They will probably have moved by the time you arrive, so maybe watch their Facebook page?