Jump to content

Saving What Fighters Have Built With Their Bodies & Ethics of Preserving Traditional Muay Thai


Recommended Posts

I'm drawn more and more to the idea that it is the fighters who have built a fighting sport, its art. Yes, arts & sports do not rise unless they are pulled into circles of power and epic centers of cultural focus - just as the great variations of provincial Muay Thai of Thailand were drawn into Bangkok in the early part of the 20th century, with the arrival of railroads (Khorat 1900, Southern Rail 1907, Lampang 1916, Chiang Mai 1921) - and if not shaped by commercial powers, the brilliance of promoters, the patronage of the King or the State - but amid these forces it's the wills of the fighters who performed in the magic squared circle, and their bodies which built it. This is where the bricks are laid...and not just the bricks. It's the living force of these men (and some women), their creative force, which largely gave shape and complexity to a sport, gave it its fabric. It is much less like an architect who tells workers where to put blocks of stone, and much more like an array of weavers who, on looms of the Self, pull strands through and through to create a pattern.

I am well-known as someone who has dug his heels in the sand as Muay Thai is being dragged forward into new, radically different, highly commercialized (and I believe much less capable, more physically illiterate) zones. I was struck by a very fine argument that was sent my way, as I urged Thailand's Muay Thai not to let go of the complexity and immense competency it had developed over the last century, when taking this commercial turn. It was said that I advocate for a distant Muay Thai where fighters are so little paid for their work, harkening back to when fighters were more or less controlled and owned, and fought for so very little. This is a really good point. There are some problems with it, for instance top stars of Thailand's Golden Age Muay Thai, adjusted for the economy, actually were paid quite a bit more money than those of today (in general), and had a stardom in the country that shaped generations. But still, there is a very good point. Ignoring the top earners of the 1990s, there is a real sense in which the Golden Age drew in countless fighters many of which trained and fought in onerous conditions. There is a real sense in which Muay Thai broke backs, and the blood, sweat and tears of the sport did not pay in a way that feels equitable, for the average, hard fighting circuit fighter. The word floating behind this is exploitation. I think it's a complicated word, because it involves us considering what fair recompense is, and recompense is not just baht; but its an important thing to think about.

Is someone like me who holds firm to what Muay Thai has been arguing that we should return to the systems of the past where big promoters steered the sport and gave fighters life or death in the sport in their powerful networks and decision making, often with very little lasting financial reward? Are we to roll the clock back to patronage of OneSongchai and Klaew? Of unbreakable long contracts and the tight networks of gym owners?  I think this is a really good thing to think about when we make decisions on where we stand on the Muay Thai that is being fought. Where are the power centers? And what are the lower-level, circuit fighters experiencing? What is the compensation for their labor?

This is what I'm thinking about. Let's grant that the Muay Thai of the past was in some significant degree exploitative, in the sense that workers were laboring often under great distress to produce a product the windfall of which largely went to promoters and gym owners. If we want to think just in terms of financial reward and labor/cost analysis we can see that. But this is the powerful aspect that is missing from that world view. Firstly, meaning in life does not reduce to income. In fact there are many things much more meaningful to people than the number of zeros in a bank account (though for some this is paramount). When Dieselnoi tells the story of when he was knocked out by lead-handed Kaopong in his lone boxing fight, and how he bounced from rope to rope, staggering to stand before he finally fell, he talks about the fact that the Prince was in attendance. "I could not even stand for the Prince." As he tried with his gigantic heart to straighten up, and failed, he was not thinking of his kadua (fighter pay), or who bet on him. He was thinking of his dignity. His place. The traditional elements of Thailand's Muay Thai have a great deal to do with "place", and much of the reward, in that there was one, is about "place". Many of these fighters came from places in society without much standing, and fought and trained in the sport to gain that standing. And place is not fame. It's related, but it's not. You cannot not forage it.

This is what I'm saying. If we are to mourn the fact that the fighters of the past were not fairly compensated we have to expand our vision to fully see what they were actually compensated with. And a great deal of what they were compensated with was the tremendous and enormous edifice of Muay Thai that they had built. THEY built it, round by round, bell by bell, cut by cut, hand raised by hand raised. It did not stop. It is THEIR artform. They made it. It's like a pyramid made from 100,000 hands. That it stands and that it lasts is part of their compensation, the part they didn't get when the baht was put in their hand. It belongs to them.

This is the fundamental problem with the efforts to radically reduce the complexity, skill sets, traditions and aesthetics of Muay Thai of Thailand. Yes, there might be very good, sensible commercial reasons to do so, especially as market demands have shifted. Yes, it may very well benefit some wonderful fighters who never would have gotten the eye-ball recognition and the financial boon if they had simply stayed in stadium Muay Thai, or just retired as many, many have done. There are good reasons for this, ethical reasons. But as you erase the edifice of Thailand's Muay Thai, to make it more marketable, more readable on the scroll of mobile phones and tiny screens, as you pull into new mechanisms of possible resource extraction, you are actually destroying the one thing all those fighters were paid with, the legacy of the sport itself, as the greatest fighting art on earth. They made that.

Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu talks about not only financial Capital, but also social Capital, which is your place in a culture, but what I'm talking about goes much deeper than even social Capital. It's about the craftsmanship of 100,000 hands to make something, and for it to have reached a level of incredible capacity. One of the very special things about Thailand's Muay Thai is that it was born both out the cultural traditions & practices which give it a profound (non-commercial) substance, but it was also forged out of probably more than 1,000,000 full contact fights over the last century. In regions styles developed, gym to gym grew specific techniques that won under the aesthetics of the sport, krus, gym owners, fighters all mixed to create an immense vocabulary of fight knowledge - and Amazon-like train forest diversity of it - which made it the most capable fighting art in the world. The fighting IQ and skill display was just eye-wateringly good. This came out of ALL the fighters. Countless fighters you've never heard of. The creation of this was the legacy of all of them. Every run-down village festival ring with gamblers pressed against the apron, every (old) Lumpinee clash of titans. All these fighters had a piece of this, because they made it. It was theirs.

If you take out all those musical notes - too many notes! - change the rules and the scoring (which is the DNA of the living animal of it) and make it something unrecognizable you are erasing their legacy, the one thing they had in compensation beyond the baht put in their hand. When you remove clinch for instance, and your version of the sport comes to supplant the very picture of what Muay Thai is in the eyes of the many, you actively erase Langsuan, Samson, Panomtuanlek, Dieselnoi, Namkabuan and Chamuakpet. You not only will erase their memory (which may exist in nostalgic highlight clips), but you, more painfully so, erase their knowledge, the very thing they put their bodies to work in building, fight by fight, years in the kaimuay. They were technicians, they built something. And, it is not only them. You are erasing the great anti-clincher, the femeu masters like Samart, Silapathai, Hippy, Somrak, Karuhat and Burklerk. The entire vocabulary, a whole species of fight knowledge that has been developed through their contest, and to some degree passed on, is wiped out. It's gone. Not unlike mono-cropping where a old wood forest once stood. And this is just speaking of clinch fighting in the sport. So much more can be said of narrative fight control, contests of ruup signature, dern vs matador dynamics. The elite capacities of Thailand's Muay Thai were not earned by the promoters, or even the gym owners. They were earned by the fighters. They were earned out of the bodies, as artists put to endeavor. I just think we should think long and hard before we erase these kinds of very sophisticated, hard-won, achievements of knowledge, the legacy of which within the living culture, within the living sport is their reward.

It's not just a question of: "How should fighters fight today...to make the most money?" As with all things in life, even things of commercial value, it's about meaningfulness, and in some sense it feels as if we are digging into the cultural pensions of the men who made this sport. The new forms are literally unrecognizable to many of them. They don't even know what they are looking at, so they seldom look...or if they look they look in terms merely as spectacle. There is some element in which we owe these fighters for what they made...even if you want to take what they made and turn it into something else for consumption. We owe them that they can look at the sport, the art, and SEE themselves in it. We owe it to them to to preserve something of the pyramid that has been built by hand. We cannot pull the foundation stones out of what it is and still respect the great feats of knowledge and transformation they created.

 

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
  • Most Recent Topics

  • Latest Comments

    • The way the power is generated, the relationship of the shin to the arc, the point of the knee in sympathy to the overall movement, the hip drive. I've been meaning to write a short entry on Kerner and the Golden Age knees of the Hapalang gym. As we've documented in the Muay Thai Library project, and in our conversations in doing that documentation, Thailand today has pretty much LOST the Hapalang knee technique. The greatest Muay Khao gym in the history of Thailand featuring 3 absolute legends of the Knee Dieselnoi, Chamuakpet and Panomtuanlek, had an expertise of kneeing that has largely gone extinct. I've mentioned it several times, watching Dieselnoi knee Kru Gai with his belly pad on, at the age of near 60 then, and blasting the pad so hard it actually stunned Kru Gai, an experienced stadium fighter kru. They were like shotgun blasts. The legends of the Golden Age and other fighters of that age have told us that today Thais knee without damage, they knee largely to score, or set up another knee, which is fine, but they have largely lost the power and precision of the Hapalang knee (and likely of many other less famous gyms of the Silver Age and Golden Age era). It's very cool that we have documented these techniques for coming generations, but the video above is also a wonderful piece of history. The French fighter Guillaume Kerner, whose original Thai teacher was the legendary Pudpadnoi, spent a year at Hapalang gym in 1985 when he was 17 years old. Dieselnoi was already retired and a said (pi) trainer, but Chamuakpet and Panomtuanlek were there ascending, peaking into their FOTY performances. He was in the middle of the greatest Muay Khao space in Thailand, right in the heart of the Golden Age, and if you watch his highlights above it shows. No farang I've ever seen knees like Kerner because he was tapped into the source, and Thais today really don't knee how he did, because so far removed from the training conditions and pedagogy that develops this kind of technique. And, his case is a beautiful one because sometimes in "convert" coming to a technique can kind of over-sharpen it, which causes aspects of it to become even more clear, and I think that's the case with Kerner's kneeing. I assume his foundations were developed with Pudpadnoi, but the art of the power, sharpness and freedom of the knee in space bears the Hapalang mark. He also trained at other notable gyms in the Golden Age, (read up on his bio here) for us like a time traveler deposited where we imagined no farang were. As someone who has studied the knee styles of the 3 Hapalang legends, and other kneeing techniques of Thailand, and watched Sylvie develop her own versions of these, in her journey as a prolific, undersized Muay Khao fighter, its actually quite beautiful to see this video. Each time I watch it I'm amazed at how much of Hapalang got transferred to him, the traces and arcs and ethic of kneeing that even Thailand today no longer really has.  You can study the Hapalang 3 legends in the MTL here: Dieselnoi (1982):  #48 Dieselnoi Chor. Thanasukarn - Jam Session (80 min) watch it here  AND  #30 Dieselnoi Chor Thanasukarn 2 - Muay Khao Craft  (42 min) watch it here  AND  #3 Dieselnoi  Chor Thanasukarn  - The King of Knees (54 min) - watch it here #76 Dieselnoi Chor Thanasukarn 4 - How to Fight Tall (69 min) watch it here Chamuakphet (1985):  #49 Chamuakpet Hapalang - Devastating Knee in Combination (66 min) watch it here  #81  Chamuakpet Hapalang 2 - Muay Khao Internal Attacks (65 min) watch it here Panomtuanlek (1986): #131 Panomtuanlek Hapalang - The Secret of Tidal Knees (100 min) watch it here   Of course there still remain in Thailand many beautiful knee styles, many of them quite effective in their own right, there have been legends and great fighters who have carried the art of the knee fighter on. But, as knee fighting has been downgraded in the sport, and in some versions outright suppressed, there is reason to fear that even more branches of the rich pedagogic tree of knowledge  will be severed, as legends and great krus start to age out.  
    • Sylvie politely and obliquely pointing out how insane the brutal knockout bonus is, with illustration of one of the great fighters of Thailand's past:  
  • The Latest From Open Topics Forum

    • I can only comment on Perth. There's a very active Muay Thai scene here - regular shows. Plenty of gyms across the city with Thai trainers. All gyms offer trial classes so you can try a few out before committing . Direct flights to Bangkok and Phuket as well. Would you be coming over on a working holiday visa? Loads of work around Western Australia at the moment. 
    • Hi, I'm considering moving to Australia from the UK and I'm curious what is the scene like? Is it easy to fight frequently (proam/pro level), especially as a female? How does it compare to the UK? Any gym recommendations? I'll be grateful for any insights.
    • You won't find thai style camps in Europe, because very few people can actually fight full time, especially in muay thai. As a pro you just train at a regular gym, mornings and evenings, sometimes daytime if you don't have a job or one that allows it. Best you can hope for is a gym with pro fighters in it and maybe some structured invite-only fighters classes. Even that is a big ask, most of Europe is gonna be k1 rather than muay thai. A lot of gyms claim to offer muay thai, but in reality only teach kickboxing. I think Sweden has some muay thai gyms and shows, but it seems to be an exception. I'm interested in finding a high-level muay thai gym in Europe myself, I want to go back, but it seems to me that for as long as I want to fight I'm stuck in the UK, unless I switch to k1 or MMA which I don't want to do.
    • Hi all, Does anyone know of any suppliers for blanks (Plain items to design and print a logo on) that are a good quality? Or put me in the right direction? thanks all  
    • The first fight between Poot Lorlek and Posai Sittiboonlert was recently uploaded to youtube. Posai is one of the earliest great Muay Khao fighters and influential to Dieselnoi, but there's very little footage of him. Poot is one of the GOATs and one of Posai's best wins, it's really cool to see how Posai's style looked against another elite fighter.
  • Forum Statistics

    • Total Topics
      1.4k
    • Total Posts
      11.5k
×
×
  • Create New...