WaffleNinja
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Posts posted by WaffleNinja
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I think all these VERY old (by Thai standards, 300+ fight) names are not really the answer, Saenchai included. I do think Thai clinch at the deepest levels is a profound grappling art, but these guys don't have much tread on the tire. Petchboonchu even lost in the IFMAs against a strong Russian dude, including in the clinch at times, in a very unexciting fight. Not to say that he isn't amazing, but he isn't what he was.
True, but I dont have much hope for a 20 year old muay Thai phenom suddenly leaving the sport for MMA. As for the Russian guy, the fight was at 65kg I'm pretty sure and that guy had a pretty good size advantage. Petchboonchu would probably compete at 135 if serious about mma. He is pretty worn and I don't see him becoming a superstar, but maybe he would become the champion of ONE C or WSOF.
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Really interesting. Add to that that "Bang" Muay Thai isn't really Muay Thai other than they call it "Muay Thai", UFC audiences are maybe already shifting off the Muay Thai bubble.
There is some MT cross over in Glory now, but I guess what it would really take is a true Muay Thai fighter making waves in the UFC. Most of the Muay Thai seen in the UFC has been fairly limited in development. On a brighter note, maybe Joanna and Valentina will do something for female Muay Thai awareness.
There are rumors that Petchboonchu has been training MMA and may go pro. I think if anyone could show the world what Muay Thai has to offer its a guy like him. Maybe some waves will be made!
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Good luck Sylvie! The training sounds very intense. Remember the words of Ali, suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion.
Also glad to know I am among fellow language nerds :lol: Personally I didn't really enjoy German class. I liked that I was legitimately learning it and starting to think in German, mostly because of the similarities with English I think, but we very quickly arrived at the point where the grammar was done and the class was basically memorize a new 80 or so words a week.
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I try and show my friends Muay Thai and none of them care. Even the 18-35 y.o. males who love MMA. I can't help but speculate that guys like Sage Northcutt and Wonderboy Thompson are taking some of the wind out of Muay Thai's sails by repopularizing karate-boxing, marketed as "new breed striking." To be optimistic though, Glory is now on Fight Pass so a bunch of MMA fans will hopefully cross over to kick fighting because of it.
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Sylvie and Loma are gonna fight again! I'm more excited for this than McGregor vs Diaz! Also today I learned what cacophonous means :laugh:
Excellent post Kevin, reading that made me feel bad for people who don't know Sylvie's incredible story. Hollywood really ought to make a movie about her one day.
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I'm feeling this rush of "bring it bitch" coming at Sylvie in waves, and I'm sensing Sylvie feeding on it, growing bigger in her stance, her shoulders starting to roll, like when she gets serious... It was total Fight Club, just a throw down.
So intense! I gotta watch that fight now!
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Looking forward to reading more Kevin! I have always thought that after all this time getting to know Sylvie through her blogs it feels a bit strange that we don't hear too much from you.
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Loma's reign of terror continues! Personally I'm not a fan of the interround dancers, it seems so out of place. I prefer the K-1 system of card girls doing that cool choreographed walk.
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I pretty much expected Loma to land the dumps all night, she is crazy good at it! Hey Sylvie, have you tried copying her dump technique and incorporating it into your game? On a side note Chomanee has awesome shoes.
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Hopefully we get someone filming it on their phone and putting it on facebook.
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Awakening says Kim fights between 110 and 116 lbs, so she should have the size advantage. I'm curious about what the judging will be like.
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You can practice this stuff outside of the ring, too. For me, I'm super shy and feel like I'm bothering people or imposing myself to ask anything - like, very normal stuff: asking directions, asking someone to show me something, ordering a coffee... I'm very unwilling to interact. But I push myself to do those things, because that's part of assertive, confident, and aggressive tendencies as well. I'm not a jerk about it and in the ring you shouldn't feel like you're being a dick just by being aggressive in training. You're helping your training partners by being aggressive, by "acting like" an opponent who does want to hurt them, even if you, personally, don't want to make your training partners and friends uncomfortable. But we've talked a lot on this forum about what a disservice it is when our training partners go too light on us or don't challenge us. Think of it as that you're helping the team, but also know that it's not easy. It feels weird. But do all those small things that, to you, feel and look like aggression: staying close, hitting more often, not backing up, blocking strong instead of kind of as a flinch...
Again, I'm still working on this on a daily basis. It's not easy. But it's also not impossible.
Do you feel like the whole, become a badass world class fighter aspect of your life has transformed you as a person? Has it changed your outlook on life? If you met yourself from 10 years ago what would you tell yourself? Also did you happen to see the Lomanee vs Tessa Kakkonen fight?
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You could try watching tape on highly aggressive fighters like Mike Tyson and Pornsanae and try to emulate their style.
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Interesting. This topic is very fitting given your name :laugh:
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The "amateur" world championships of Muay Thai just concluded. Both Loma and Lomanee competed. You can watch the replays here:
https://muaythaiwc.solidtango.com/video/live-finals-muaythai-wc-2016-28-may-19-51
Its about $4 per playlist, it makes you repay each time you pick a new one, and the playlists are divided by days.
**********Spoilers below!**********
Both Loma and Lomanee lost! With that said, IFMA obviously doesn't use Thai scoring because Loma faced the same girl as last time and tossed her around like a rag doll just like last time. To the other girl's credit, she did land a nice head kick and some nice punches in the fight, but she still got dominated. The Lomanee fight was much closer, and I'm no expert on Thai scoring, but it looked to me like a legitimate win for the other girl. Round 1 they landed about equal kicks but the other girl landed much more punches. Round 2 Lomanee landed more kicks, but the other girl swept her twice! Round 3 was a back and forth round where Lomanee did better I think. She didn't seem surprised by the decision. The Loma fight is in the Finals playlist, the Lomanee fight is in the May 24th playlist. The girl Loma fought was Liashkevich, the girl Lomanee fought was Tessa Kakkonen.
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My old roommate tore his acl. He had to have it reconstructed with a cadaver tendon. I have also heard that without this procedure your performance can be permanently affected.
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Now, the number of women significantly affected by this Lanna policy have been very few. But the experience of it I think really gave a unique insight into the bottom rope issue for Sylvie, one very different than what most other western female fighters have faced. Yes, going under the rope to enter a fight is a ceremonial nuance that certainly can be done with no skin off your nose. But I would wager that in Thai spaces where you have to enter the under bottom rope for the training ring (or of having a ring that is off-limits all together), there are a set of beliefs about gender which will limit what you can achieve as a female fighter.
I have a bit of anecdotal evidence that also suggests this kind of thing can be really limiting. I was on my high school's wrestling team and after a few years of wrestling the really dedicated kids got a chance to go on a trip to go to Poland and train with a Polish wrestling team. When we got there it wasn't long before it we noticed that the Polish guys were doing fine against our guys, but the Polish girls were getting crushed against our girls. After a while we found out that in Poland the men and women aren't allowed to wrestle each other, and the limitations showed in their performance.
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I'm conflicted on how I do embrace a lot of those elements that make this practice meaningful, but I also cannot embrace that the meaning is inseparable from women being "lesser than".
It has always been striking to me how I can see you strongly value traditions and see their quaint beauty, yet oppose the bottom rope thing. I think there is much of tradition that we should maintain yet also elements that can be gracefully discarded to improve our societies. To me the rope thing reminds me a lot of the Christian and Buddhist religious institutions which reserve the highest of ranks for men. The practice suggests a lesser status of women, but I have always been under the impression that it is just seen as a harmless practice by most women. Maybe I haven't asked around enough though! Btw your current win streak is pretty awesome!
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Despite the changes this is a common trope of the passionate male, western pro-female fight "expert" that I've seen, the idea that Thai female fighters are somehow on the edge of becoming (or in this case, treated like) sex workers. Steven Wright also forwarded this idea as well. It's all part of the fantasy image of the "poor" Thai girl, forced into horrible conditions, and that these conditions make female Thai fighters inferior to the liberated, socially embraced western female fighters of the world. It's a complicated argument. He's very right that female Thai fighters are NOT treated in the way way as male Thai fighters in Thailand, and there are huge cultural (and economic) reasons why. And yes, the bottom rope custom is intimately woven into this. But the willingness to slip into these frankly bizarre and uninformed fantasies about Thai women, is just sexist and to me also (Orientalist) racist.
Yes this is an interesting topic. It reminds me of the more well documented "noble savage" stereotype of indigenous Americans. Its not racist in the malicious hatefully sense, but it is a racial prejudice which leads to a cultural misunderstandings, and is in its own way degrading. The "other" is held to a lower standard, so even when the intention is to help them, it is still conceptualizing them as in some way lesser.
It is interesting how it seemingly does, consciously or subconsciously, complement the trope of the heroic compassionate male who saves the damsel in distress. I have a hunch they have an enabling effect on each other, and because the damsel in distress aspect seems more pervasive across cultures(possibly a bias of incomplete evidence on my part here) I think it is the independent variable which facilitates the ethnic preconceptions.
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Great posts! I will be watching for this sort of thing from now on in fights.
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Edit: just realized this is the Euro championship and not the world championship :laugh:
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Good post Kevin! I agree that the Thai version will only exist in the West among a small group of purists, but it seems like that is how it has always been. Another factor which might have an effect on the Thai style is the (growing?) feeling in Thailand that scoring is too influenced by the gamblers. Samart put out a video on youtube where he said the Thai scoring is set up to benefit gamblers(easy to throw a fight by losing balance, etc) and leads to fights which only show off some of Muay Thai's beautiful weapons(way more kicks and knees than punches and elbows).
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To me the kard cheuk fights are a joke/gimmick. They are put on, as form of spectacle in an attempt to rile up Thai nationalism, usually in a show like Thai Fight. There is a strong and lasting narrative told in Thai history that it was Muay Thai that kept Thailand free from western (and neighborly) control. Kard Cheuk is an evocation of that narrative. Thai Fight usually isn't really Muay Thai...it's a Muay Thai show, featuring famous fighters of Thailand, often against overwhelmed western fighters. At the gym the Thais joke about how you have to fight in a totally different, artificial way for Thai Fight, featuring ridiculous moves, etc.
I always wondered what the local perspective was, very interesting!
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I'd say I pretty much agree with your breakdown, although the fighting boom in Japan was a bit ancillary. It created a hardcore niche fan base in the West, but the UFC really exploded because - in my opinion - it gave expressing to (largely white) male (middle and lower class) frustration. The sliding social power of the UFC demographic found potency in what the UFC was selling, something that felt like REAL fighting. Part of this was taking the wave against the orientalized martial arts fads of the 1970s and 1980s, with so many McDojos, and martial arts developed outside of actual fighting. Muay Thai partook in some of this because it is developed through 1,000s and 1,000s of fights for decades, it felt like "real" fighting (as opposed to so many other martial arts, which didn't). But, those that love Muay Thai also love the culture of Muay Thai, which falls back into the orientalization of the art (it's Kung Fu-ism). This is the fundamental contradiction of Muay Thai in the west, and the thing that prevents it from becoming commercially viable.
1. It has this Kung-Fu aspect, full of "cool" moves and techniques, and a whole Boran history (it's exotic).
2. It has this real fighting aspect, born of actual fights.
Those that love it's real fighting aspect just want to steal or imitate its moves. You get a very watered down version of "Muay Thai" in the UFC (and elsewhere) which is really much more just kickboxing. All the supposedly exotic stuff just gets thrown away. So you get silly reverse elbows over and over, out of context, and off-balance kung-fu-like moves, and the rest of it is all tossed away. The Muay Thai moves will just be absorbed by kickboxing and MMA, there's no need for the rest.
For those that love the exotic dimensions of Muay Thai, this runs hard against the very core of what makes the UFC and MMA in general popular. Doing the Ram Muay, calling your instructor Kru or Arjan, the UFC fans looking for KOs don't care about these things, they are antithetical to "ass kicking". The people who love the exotic aspects are seriously marginalized. Any promotion is forced to draw on this very small group of people because they are most passionate about the art/sport. But any promotion always has to face the fact that it can't answer the question: Why not just do kickboxing with cool Muay Thai moves throw in? There is no answer to that.
The truth is that real Muay Thai is found neither in its exotic fantasy component, or it's "cool moves" stand up MMA component. It's found in the 1,000s fights across the country of Thailand. It doesn't really exist outside of Thailand, in my opinion. So any western promotion is really forced with presenting some sort of imitation of it, to a largely inexperienced audience. It has to piece together its fanbase from very diverse quarters.
That's an interesting perspective! I think it makes sense in an American context, yet I wonder if these same dynamics can be applied to say, Japanese society, where MMA started before it did in America and attained a much greater popularity at its peak. I think the biggest appeal MMA has is the Bloodsport/Mortal Kombat element, put all the tough guys in a big tournament with minimal rules and see who's the best. It explains why MMA is growing fast in so many different societies, it explains why the same development happened in Brazil 50 years earlier, and in ancient Greece thousands of years earlier.
Maybe this is also what hinders the development of Muay Thai. Can a crowd looking to find their champion gladiator who overcomes all trials invest themselves in Muay Thai after having seen stand up fighters smothered by MMA grapplers? Maybe to most MMA crossover fans Muay Thai will always be a secondary interest for this reason, while most fans will never be passionate enough to seek a second fight sport. The one thing that kind of throws a monkey wrench into this theory is the enduring and global appeal of boxing. This begs the question, can Muay Thai achieve the same global appeal as boxing? Maybe, but I think it would need a catalyst, like if it became an Olympic sport.
A writer's journal - Muay Thai, My Wife and Thailand
in Open Topics - men and women - General Muay Thai Discussion and News
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I just read Sylvie's blog. The story of the young woman martial artist going to train with the old master who puts her on a harsh training regiment made me think of this: