Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu

This is a small, but big deal. Shorter female rounds are linked to all sorts of ideas about the difference between female fighters and male fighters, stamina concerns as well as economic consequences. Lots of details about the struggle for longer rounds in sanctioned boxing in the US. "The issue of three-minute rounds has been a crucible for women’s boxing, and lies at the heart of legitimizing the hard work and effort that goes into professional boxing contests between female fighters including such matters as television time and the pay checks female boxers receive, which are paltry compared to their male counterparts. The “joke” is that women are told they receive less pay because they only fight two-minute rounds! It is also part of a continuing argument on issues of female stamina and even whether the monthly menstrual cycle affects the ability of women to fight longer. The latter was part of the argument used by the World Boxing Council (WBC) sanctioning body, which in supporting championship belts for women, has also waded into the fray by stating they would only sanction two-minute round, ten round bouts for women." and "Boxing trainers also agree that holding women to two-minute rounds is arbitrary at best. Veteran Lennox Blackmoore who has been training female champions since the late 1990s including Jill “the Zion Lion” Mathews the first woman to win a New York Daily News Golden Gloves contest in 1996 said, “I think that’s great. When a woman trains, she trains three minutes a round like anybody else. I don’t see why she shouldn’t fight that way. There are a lot of good women boxers, and it’ll show people what they can do. Jill Mathews fought ten rounds for a championship belt, but it could have three-minute rounds too, she had the experience and the endurance to do that because she trained that way.” The article is here: Three Minute Rounds for Female Boxing In New York State In Thailand it remains either 5x2 minute rounds or less often 3x3 minute rounds, though we thought for a moment in one of Sylvie's recent fights that 5x3 had been negotiate between parties. I think that is Susan of the documentary Fight Like a Girl.

[matt quoting you here, but only as a start] One of the most important distinctions perhaps is that what Sylvie is talking about is training for performance IN a fight. There are two things at play in the overtraining story. Do training regimes that far exceed "normal" or even some "professional" recommendations give you a physical edge? And, do they give you a mental edge? A lot of the training that Sylvie does brings her into non-optimal states, and the mental dimension is about learning how to perform at a high level when your resources are down (both mental and physical resources). Much of the overtraining story does not seem to serve non-optimal performance increases well, as you are told to, or you come to, ever be on the look out for physical diminishment, symptoms that are telling you that you need to stop or slow way down. Given the Brain Governor Model of fatigue, the brain will be telling you to stop when you have plenty left, in many instances. It seems like a very slippery slope to start down, and the opposite of what you are trying to achieve in fighting, which is how to fight and respond to deficit (real and imagined). This goes a little bit towards a way of thinking that both the west and Thailand share (differently), that you want to fight as close to 100% as possible. The west more than Thailand thinks about it in terms of physical capability I think, that your punches are faster and harder, your cardio is way up, that you generally just feel GREAT when you fight. (In Thailand it is almost an obsessive focus on rest before a fight: sit here, lay down here, don't move, as if you might expend some little bit of energy that will be wasted.) We've found that you almost never feel GREAT when you fight, and training towards feeling great does you no real benefit. In fact you are always injured, always sub-optimal. You aren't trying to shave hundredths of seconds off a 100 meter time. You aren't trying to close a minute off of your ultramarathon, or even lift more under pressure than you have before. You are trying to respond to an opponent who is trying to actively put doubts in your mind, and doing so with a mind that is reading back to you distorted information about your own reserves and capabilities. You are fighting in a land of doubt. How do you relax? How do you proceed forward? The overtraining story is essentially a doubt factory to me, pushing your eye towards an ever watchful state looking for warning lights. I can't tell you how many times Sylvie has been in states with the red engine light going off and she simply found ways to do more. It does something to you. The other question is of physical benefit. Is risking your limits something that actually improves your physical capabilities? This is harder to say. Certainly we know that sometimes it does. I am utterly convinced that Sylvie has grown much harder physically. Not only is she stronger, and has more endurance, but she just is made of tougher stuff, than she would have been with a much more reasonable regime. Not only is her pain tolerance high, but she literally does not get hurt in fights. When she clashes against experienced opponents, bone to bone, her opponent gets hurt. We saw this in Master K Sylvie's original teacher (in his 70s), and you feel it in the bones and muscles of old Muay Thai fighters. They are made of different stuff, like iron. Phetjee Jaa doesn't like sparring with Sylvie because Sylvie's bones can be felt through the shin pads though they aren't kicking hard. I don't know the real answer to this, but it does feel like the western, finely tuned sports car approach to the fighter is far more fragile, far more susceptible to injury than the relentless Thai style approach to repetition - keeping in mind Sylvie kind of trains beyond the typical Thai approach as well. Of course the emphasis on active rest is an important and really vital one that Sylvie's talked about a lot. But perhaps the deepest lesson is getting to a place where you can rest and recover in your work, during your work. This maybe is the biggest change I've seen in Sylvie, especially after she took up mental training, her recovery time from both physical and mental diminishment is faster and faster. Something that would have put her in a valley for days sometimes is gone in a minute. This I think is the most interesting thing about the overtraining story. It isn't about hitting the gas every single minute. It's about finding your plateau, wherever you are at on that day, and feeling, believing you always can do more. And finding ways to do it. Also, a really interesting distinction here is that Sylvie basically trains herself. She puts herself in the hands of different trainers, but the entire framework and commitment comes from her. That is, if you put her training exclusively under an all powerful coach who was just pushing and pushing and pushing it would be a very different experience, and maybe a unhealthy one (?). A big part of Sylvie's resistance to the overtraining story is that other people are telling you what your limit is. When Sylvie helps others with their training she's never a driving task master. It's more about making people feel and see that they can do more, sometimes in small ways. Becoming aware of all the habits and pull backs that come from the fear of hitting limits. Just some thoughts as an attentive onlooker to what Sylvie is doing.

I don't follow the western Muay Thai scene much, but it's pretty cool to see an ALL female fight card set for next week in Los Angeles California. Cali 8 - Cali's Finest WCK Muay Thai Presents Cali 8. Top ranked standouts in an ALL Female Fight Card! Saturday May 16, 2015 @ 7.00pm Hollywood Park Casino 3883 W Century Blvd Inglewood, CA 90303 wckmuaythai.com

Hopefully Sylvie jumps on this later because I'd love to know what she thinks, but I can say as her husband that it would not surprise me at all if some of her trainers indeed placed bets against her in fights. I know this sounds terrible, and a strong conflict of interest, but the way it feels at many times is that it is really up to the fighter to convince his or her trainers that he or she is the right bet, both during training and during fights (betters don't just bet on who will win, but also bet during the fight and will often hedge their bets). A lot of the betting that goes on is simply out of view of westerners who are fighting. Does this mean that you might get set up in an unfavorable match up? Possibly. But the general experience is that your trainers want to build you up and make you the best fighter that you can be, and they want to bet on you as well. This being said, "representing the gym" and understanding all the relationships that are in place long before you got there, and long after you go is very complex. No gym in the west would do this because gyms in the west don't make their income on students that are only with them for a few weeks to months most of the time. Also betting on Muay Thai fights in the west is not an important part of the fabric of fighting. More or less Muay Thai IS gambling in Thailand. We just don't see it. At the end of it all most matchups I've seen in person between farang and Thai in tourist areas have felt like they favored the westerner if anyone, usually with size.

Well, this is the thing Charlie, overtraining becomes a huge blanket category that is vaguely applied to an almost infinite variety of effects. The very link that you give has a host of causes of Rhabdomyolysis, including: "The use of alcohol or illegal drugs such as heroine, cocaine or amphetamines" - not to mention several other possible causes. The list is long including the flu and herpes simplex and bacterial infection. Instead it just gets chalked up to "He overtrained." It is extremely difficult to cite these examples and know at all where they are coming from.

Really nicely done. But is it just me and my personal response to the edits that being summarily called "the perfect specimen of beauty and brawn" is a little jarring and that a male fighter would never be called this? "John Wayne Parr, the perfect specimen of good looks and toughness". Big fan of Caley Reece, and no doubt being beautiful favorably serves female Muay Thai in some ways. But what was special about her wasn't that she was/is beautiful, in my mind. It's that she fought in a Thai style which is becoming less uncommon in the west, fought injured, fought with incredible drive in her career, fought as a clinch fighter. I guess this is just the state of things. When beauty is present in almost any category of achievement for women, it's going to push itself forward into our awareness whether it be politics, academics, business or athletics. And Caley is such an interesting case in this, as she did everything while being iconically beautiful.

Wow. Great long combinations, nice body lean Charlie! It says she fought at 52 kg. Is she now up in weight? Wonderful share.

There is an absolutely fantastic academic article written by Peter Vail just this year which details the ways in which Thailand institutionally is struggling to deal with the internationalization of its heritage sport. You can find a copy here: Muay Thai - Inventing Tradition for National Symbol. Not only does it have one of the best summations of the history of Muay Thai, it also goes into contemporary attempts to secure an official history or histories in the face of foreign appropriation and interests. Because its such a long article I wrote an outline of the descriptions of how the western preoccupation with the Eastern arts and the rise of MMA has put Thailand in a place of codifying, and in some cases inventing a history to maintain the very Thainess of Muay Thai. Some of the author's opinions do seemingly come from political perspective, but the things discussed are seldom thought about the west. Perhaps most interestingly it explains the recent promotion of the Tiger King as a new father of Muay Thai, in an attempt to move away from Nai Khanomtom. The Struggle Over Muay Thai Culture and History An explosion of western interest in "Asian" Martial Art in the 1960s, 70s, 80s due to cinemaBruce Lee, Jet Li, Jackie Chan, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Karate Kid exercise, self-defense, discipline aesthetic, mystical, cultural connections to exotic Asian philosophies. 1990s the west experienced a disenchantment of Asian fighting arts they were rationalized and routinized into sports like Judo and Taekwandoe generations of instruction had devolved into McDojos Muay Thai was a late comer and so did not experience this disenchantment. MMA arrives - UFC founded in 1993 - it repositioned Asian martial arts. Feed on a zeitgeist of western hypermasculinization Originally individual arts were pitted against each other, and thus were emphasizedthe rise of the BJJ Gracie family Hypermasculinity, efficacy and violence in the arts celebrated over past values such as character building & introspection a reaction against McDojos BJJ and Muay Thai stood out as two iconic martial art-styles (ground, standup) MMA subsumes the arts it celebrates, demystifying them and effacing cultural identifies elements of Muay Thai become only part of a "fighting strategy" it's about the individual in the ring, not the art. This MMA strip of national identity meets with Thai ambitions to internationalize the sportthe risk is of losing the "Thainess" of Muay Thai There is Thai anxiety that the Thai identity in Muay Thai will be lost - their art will be stolen Thailand already experienced the loss of Muay Thai identity in the 1960s when the Japanese stole it as "kickboxing" and then later in K1 (1993)This injured national pride and is still remembered. Within Thailand there are movements to shore up and institutionalize the national character of Muay Thai.Three Institutions Institute for Muay Thai Preservation (under the Ministry of Sports and Tourism) Muban Chombueng Ratchaphat University The Department of Cultural Promotion (under the Ministry of Culture) Institute for Muay Thai Preservation Maintains a Muay Thai/Boran museum Houses the Muay Boran Academy since 2003 a Kru Muay association formalizes muay instruction and instructor certification Headquarters of the World Muay Thai Federation (WMF) - formerly International Amateur Federation since the early 1990s has helped the Ministry of Sports and Tourism put on international amateur bouts organized around Nai Khanomtom day - March 17a vast Muay Boran ceremony attended mostly by westerners celebrates the national and historical roots of Muay Thai in Ayutthaya Muban Chombueng Ratchaphat University has established a degree program in Muay Thai studies with even doctorates offered Muay Boran masters enter a thesis program to record history and canonize each school in a nationalist narrative.There is much overlap in this history as sources are scant, and all stem from the 1909 categorization of schools. strongly affiliated with the Nai Khanomtom Day celebrations The Department of Cultural Promotion (under the Ministry of Culture) Muay Thai has been rolled under Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) The DCP seeks to establish "copyright" over Muay Thai performance, maintaining control over their dissemination, insuring its cultural roots. Rejects Nai Khanomtom as the father of Muay Thai (due to being a common soldier)Seeks to establish Somdet Phra Sanphet VIII "The Tiger King" (reign 1703-1709) as the new father of Muay Thaion May 7, 2011 designated February 6th (his coronation date) as "Muay Thai Day" In 2013 the DCP began sponsoring "Thai Fight"February 6, 2013 the Tiger King becomes central in the Thai Fight broadcast Both camps (DCP and the MCRU/Institute for Muay Thai Preservation) are seeking to fight the corrosive effects of Internationalization, and secure the cultural roots of the art and sport. While the author at times takes a cynical view of Thai attempts to re-create and even invent a history for Muay Thai, I can sympathize with the fear that Muay Thai itself is at risk, and at a certain level the ceremonial and institutional codifications of the past are indeed something all nations and arts do. It is ironic that in many ways Thailand depends on the exoticizing passions of the west to preserve the boran of Muay Thai culture (and knowledge), just as the west is also threatening to remove the Thai of Muay Thai through a dilution of techniques. As a point of interest I also find the implication that Thai Fight is something of an ideological show really fascinating. It could very well be that while we as westerners may cringe at some of the fights between aged, great Thai fighters and aggressive, often off-balanced westerners, we don't see how Thai Fight is essentially demonstrating, performing the incomparability of Thai Muay Thai and the Muay Thai of the rest of the world, for Thais themselves.

Some people have experienced slow page load times on Chrome. In one instance upgrading to Chrome's latest version improved Chrome performance. Personally I see some sluggishness on Chrome (vs Explorer and Firefox), but nothing heavy. More that Chrome eats up CPU at a high rate. I did some Googling around and found this very interesting article on how to speed up Chrome: Quick Fix For Your Slow Chrome Browser - I made this change on Chrome and it seemed to really speed up the load time, anecdotally so far. The article explains it, but you basically go into Settings>Show Advanced Settings and uncheck this box (below) and Restart Chrome. It may seem counter intuitive to uncheck acceleration, but it does seem to help in some cases.

Do you have a pic of the street Luc? Would love to see it.

I know you've been at Lanna a long time Luc, what was it that appealed to you about Sitsongpeenong? Things you have heard?

Hi, yes. The dark background probably shows the traveling line. I haven't looked at the dark theme on Chrome.

That may be the color change of the background? On the Chrome browser it shows as a line that moves across the screen. but on Firefox for instance it's just a color gradation. Or do you see something else?

Hey Rosy, Sylvie put up a Forum Features and How to Use them Post that describes it. Basically the photo has to be uploaded somewhere else on the Internet. You take the url of the photo and paste it in the field that shows when you click the picture icon on a post.

As a husband looking on I can really just feel the way in which some (western) men are saying: This is MY space. There is an unspoken degree of freedom, a freedom of movement that men simply accept as their own. Some don't think about it at all. Some do think about it, and make a point of their freedom. Come on Italian dude. Don't go stand next to a woman and put your cup on. There is something about power going on here.

When she breaks down and cries at the end of that last round, backstage, it is heartbreaking. This fight, the fight that never really was. Wow. Has Rena retired?

So many compelling things. Most Karate styles keep their hands low, do they not? I'm just pretty amazed at her comfort guard, and footwork. I love hearing about the backgrounds of these fighters and the events surrounding fights. There just isn't a lot out there. So is the thought that the promotion for some reason fixed the fight for Rena with these ridiculous clinch breaks? Are there actual rules against clinching? I mean, when these cards are shown is it supposedly understood what they are for? I also don't have a very clear timeline of Erika's career. Did she ever really recover from this fight? How long after this fight was it that she retired?

How did you see it?

Wow, what an interesting fight. Round 1 Erika looked so beautiful. She's so comfortable with her hands, do you know if she had a boxing background? Her spacing, her footwork, just wonderful. But then Rena figures out that Erika doesn't do so well going backwards. In fact she looks average if she doesn't have her space and her forward lean, which surprised me. But a lot of fighters don't do well going backwards. The first two rounds hold so much promise for this fight. Will Erika adjust and be the forward fighter? But I haven't a clue what happens after that. This isn't Muay Thai rules is it? At first it seems like low-clinch isn't allowed, and Erika suffers for it. But then as the fight progresses it seems that NO clinch is allowed. So both fighters clinch without actually locking arms, and its ridiculous. It turns into a mess. I can't help but feel that under full Muay Thai rules Erika wins this fight, but that's on minimal evidence from the first 2 rounds. I don't know the meaning of the yellow and red cards. Did both fighters get a red card in the end? I will say that I was so distracted by the clinch, no-clinch business I had a hard time scoring this fight on first viewing. Because Erika couldn't clinch she couldn't capitalize on closing with punches and she ended up looking very sloppy. Not her fault, but how it turned out. That sloppiness in my more Thai sensitive eye made her look like the less composed fighter to me, and Rena the more in control. But as you say that Japanese scoring rewards the out-on-your-shield fighter, and that was Erika. Bottom line, even though I was pulling for Erika (in fact I like both fighters), Rena seemed more composed, and okay as the winner, but I have feeling I could probably watch it again and count landed blows and feel that Erika scored a lot more. My Thai lean I feel compulsed to give it to Rena for some reason, but that isn't even knowing what the cards mean, or even what was going on with the rules.

Love this Fightland article about Kathy Long: Kathy Long: Defying the Boundaries. There's a prominent female Muay Thai trainer who strongly suggests that if you haven't started Muay Thai by the age of 24 (if I recall) it's probably too late to become a fighter. Ugh. I don't know where that mentality comes from.That's a full 26 years before Kathy Long's age here. People really make too much about transition to "being a fighter", in my opinion. Too many coulds and shoulds. The article has an interesting piece about promotions, age and investment too. In the fight game, the business equation is a logical one: the longer a fighter is around, the more potential promoters have in cashing-out on a championship name. Investing in a fighter is essentially an investment on youth, and with Long on the horizon of her 51st birthday, it is unclear how many fights her return entails, or if she still retains the athletic capacity to compete at an elite level. It’s been almost six years since her last competitive outing and that contest was her first inside the MMA cage. However, these considerations don’t seem to concern Long. “It means nothing to me, it’s just a number,” Long says when I ask about her age. “You see me in there and I’m working with these guys and I feel fine. My body is responding to what I want it to do, and I feel fantastic. When my body is not responding the way I want to, when my body says I can’t do this anymore, alright. I’m done. But right now I’m not done. Right now my body says, ‘Yeah I like this, let’s go. Laurie Cahill has fought into her 50s in the New York City area. It is almost as if women find more meaning in what fighting is, as they get older, then do men. Some are life long martial artists like Long and Cahill, but some simply discover it later in life, in a different arc.

Well, this is the truly fascinating thing about this question. I'm a Westerner too. My thoughts are like this. I think that the reason many of us (Westerners) are drawn to Muay Thai, especially the Muay Thai of Thailand, is that it forms a kind of critique of Western values. The "exotic" appeal of it really points to deeper differences that underlie. Once we get over the exotic quality, and even the beauty of it, there are likely critical differences in culture, a way in which Muay Thai critiques the West, and this includes the way children are viewed both in society and as fighters. It isn't to say that the unspoken critique of the West from traditional Muay Thai is right, but it does suggest for us that are drawn to it that something about this critique is informing and powerful. The West isn't the only thing that can critique. The East can critique the West as well. Now the question of Thais seeing things ethically aligned to your way, this too is such a complex idea. One assumes that most of this ethical agreement comes from a position of (mostly urban) middle class, towards a rural, agrarian lower classes. We know that it is not just the fighting of children as workers that is objected to by middle and upper class Thais. Middle class Thais also enroll their children in Taekwondo classes, steering clear of their National sport, notably because Muay Thai itself is read as socially "low". Children in Taekwondo classes (and there is one filled with Thai children just 5 minutes from Phetjee Jaa's gym here in Pataya, which blows my mind) get nicely pressed white uniforms, and nice clean belts, and not real contact. There is nothing dirty about it. If we took the social ethics of those parents as our guidepost of what is right and wrong about Muay Thai we would be turning our noses up at probably 99% of the Muay Thai in the country. Of course there are other Thais that find other valuable objections, including the general progression of generations. We see this in the Petchrungruang gym. Pi Nu watched his family ox as a kid, as a young fighter. Now he has achieved middle class status and his son lives a much more comfortable life, as a young Lumpinee fighter who loves video games and fights only when he wants to. Pi Nu does not want his son to have the life he had. He wants a better life. But, as a Westerner, someone who has lived through the consequences of Western values over time, I wonder: is he also ready for his son to have less obligation to him when he is an old man, than he has for his own father (who lives in the house)? Are we all ready for a Thailand where old age homes multiply, and the aged live alone in the birth of a more western individualism? In so many ways this is just the tide of capitalism and social change, but what I don't want to lose track of is how our love of Muay Thai is teaching us something about the West, a West that Thailand is being pulled towards, with good consequences and bad. In terms of children not having to fight for money, I think we know that if money was not involved Muay Thai would not be the same at all. It's the string that if pulled would unravel the whole sweater. It's the motivation behind the set up of almost every fight in the country, from the smallest festival fight by a wat to a televised King's Birthday match. The gambling of money (the symbolic residue of luck and karma) is essential to Muay Thai culture. It the syntax of its language I suspect. There's a great interview with Pi Dit of the Giatbundit Gym in Buriram which talks about many interesting things, but what struck me is how he says that the fighters of today simply can't touch the fighters of yesterday: "I work with young fighters now, and some of them show a lot of promise. This new generation of fighters, though, can't touch the fighters of the previous generation. It's not because modern fighters aren't talented, but because most of them are not as hard-working. They don't have to be. Back then, it was so much harder to do anything related to Muay Thai. It was harder to find fights, harder to find someone to train you. The ones who fought at high levels were completely focused. No one could afford to half-ass it. Out here, fights were so hard to find that only the most dedicated would end up fighting and earning money. Only the best of the best, the ones with real passion, ever went anywhere." When he says that the fighters of today can't touch the fighters of previous generations is he talking about poverty, is he not? Or at least the pressures of a lack of wealth. Whether we like it or not fighting as an art comes out of difficulty, out of pressure, out of strain. It is very, very hard to say that strain is a good thing, ethically. It feels wrong to say it. But I also think that sometimes as ethicists we think about problems as if we have a god's eye view on them, as systems that we can just intercede in like a mechanic looking at a car engine that won't start. We want to find the (ethically) faulty part and replace it. But life and culture isn't like that. I'm more of the position that I want to find out: Why does Muay Thai speak to me so powerfully? What is it about it that is so unearthly? What is Muay Thai saying, critically, about my own culture? And why, when I see the children fighters at the gym, children who fight for money, do I see a place where I would want to raise our kid, if we ever had one? No. We don't want children fighting for food, but I think maybe that is different than children fighting for money, money bet, money gambled. I think we in the West, a money culture, have a very hard time thinking about how money is perceived in other cultures, and how children are perceived as well.

this is transposed from a Facebook conversation Niamh, hope you don't mind me sharing my own thoughts. There are some big ideas here, but I think part of the problem when discussing these things from a western perspective is that we privilege our own position. No one can doubt that oppressive poverty is an ill, but there are fundamental values that grew out of class economics that help define a society or people, that give meaning to life and become culture. It's very difficult to just "cut out" the bad from the outside, and then try to leave the good. One of the most fundamental differences we've encountered in Thai society, with the west, is the way that monetary exchange is thought of. Generally, in the west we take a financial exchange to be the nullification of obligation between two parties. We each got what we wanted, we are "even" - nobody owes anybody anything. This produces a highly atomized view of the world, with strong individualistic expectations. In Thailand at it's varied roots, and probably throughout SEA, the financial exchange is the BEGINNING of obligation, the signal that we are, as families (of one kind or another), now investing in each other. This difference produces lots of miscommunication. The problem with thinking about child fighting from a western perspective is that we are seeing these children as "workers", antonymous agents, who are unfairly and prematurely being put into dangerous work, for their parents. This is far from the projections of innocence that we in the contemporary west place on childhood (Victorian Ideal) - in the west we largely try to insure that childhood is extended as long as possible, and if wealthy enough, we try to extend it well into adulthood. Working for others is seen as the end of innocence and delight. This is also pretty far from the concepts of care and merit that surround the meanings of financial obligations between family members or even connected parties. Of course there are lots of unjust circumstances where these obligations are not paid by some, and others are taken advantage of. This is abuse. But I'm not sure that the atomized, individualistic concept of work and freed obligation is the most meaningful road forward either. In the west while we celebrate our freedoms and autonomy, our bonds with family are weakening. Our aged parents end up living alone, in isolation, or in "homes", because we have an eroding obligation to them, so that we can live out our more antonymous lives. While we in the west are so drawn to the quiet beauty of very high levels of the Muay Thai fighting art - so balanced, so calm, so "brutal" - we are also quick to pull at all the cultural strings that have worked to bring it about. The truth is our own societies (western) could not come up with such an art. Having children and youths fighting for fun (with head gear on, and elbow pads for fear of law suits), in clubs or in school simply would produce what we already have - mall martial arts, imitations of older, Asian arts. We are drawn to Muay Thai in Thailand because it expresses something incredibly different, a beauty that tells us something I think that our own values could not get us to, even if they tried.

Sounds like Japanese scoring is an amalgam - maybe even a perfect amalgam (?) - of Thai and Western scoring.

Sylvie's Thai isn't fluent, and Sangwean her father is not the most logically minded person I've met. When presented with a contraction I imagine he would just not see it, or shrug. Sylvie might have a different opinion, as she talks directly to him a great deal. The reason is simple. It's bad luck. It is both logical, and not.

Then this is a HUGE difference. For instance in the Little Tiger vs Faa Chiang Rai fight I could see that a western style judge (or a Japanese judge, now) could give Little Tiger points for being the advancing, striking fighter. But Faa Chiang Rai is fighting under a different assumption. She is fighting a Thai style fight. She is countering with kicks above the waist, not a lot, but enough to establish a point lead, and then she is just spinning the rest of the fight, defending that lead. I'm sure she was shocked she lost, it shows on her face. The big surprise, at least for me, is that this was in Thailand. The go out on your shield attitude is appreciated in Thai scoring, but ONLY if you establish dominance. If you become the chaser and you do not catch and punish you then can be read as desperate. Instead Thais (generally) esteem calm, grace under pressure. This creates real problems when Thais and westerners (or Japanese, I assume) fight. A Thai might very well be happy to let an opponent chase them. It's part of the game. But outside of Thai scoring that opponent might be gaining points for aggression, for showing "heart". Basically two fighters can be fighting different fights, under different assumptions. Little Tiger may advance because this is "good". Her Thai opponent, like Faa, might retreat, because this is good. Each fighter assumes that the other is in a deficit. Of course the big problem with this is that if you don't realize you are behind, you can't make possible adjustments to win. There are Thai fighters who fight advancing, and Sylvie does this 100%, but when you fight like that you are assumed to be behind, generally. You have to catch and punish your opponent. If the fight stays balanced, you can usually lose.