Why I'm Obsessed With Golden Age Muay Thai and Its Fighters

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

Many are curious or questioning why I’ve become so focused on fighters of the Golden Age, if it might be some form of nostalgia, or a romance of exoticism for what is not now. Truthfully, it is just that of the draw of a mystery, the abiding sense of: How did they do that?, something that built up in me over many years, a mystery increasing over the now hundreds of hours I’ve spent in the presence of Golden Age fighters - both major and minor. Originally it came from just standing in the ring with them, often filming close at hand, and getting that practically synaptic, embodied sense that this is just so different, the feeling you can only get first hand - especially in comparison. You can see it on video, and it is apparent, but when you feel it its just on another order, an order of true mystery. When something moves through the space in a new or alter way it reverberates in you. How is it that these men, really men from a generation or two, move like this. It’s acute in someone like Karuhat, or Wangchannoi, or Hippy, but it is also present in much lessor names you will never know. It’s in all of them, as if its in the water of their Time.

I’ve interviewed and broken down all the possible sources of this. It seems pretty clear that it did not come to them out of some form of instruction. It was not dictated or explicitly shown, explained (so when coaches today do these today they are not touching on that vein). It does not seem sufficient to think that it came from just a very wide talent pool, the sheer number of young fighters that were dispersed throughout the country in the 1980s, as if sheer natural selection pulled those movements and skills out. It did not come from sheerly training hard - some notable greats did not train particularly hard, at least by reputation. It’s not coached, its not trained, its not numerical. A true mystery. Fighters would come from the provinces with a fairly substantial number of fights, but at a skill level which they would say isn’t very strong, and within only a few years be creating symphonies in the ring. Karuhat was 16 when he fought his first fight (with zero training) and by 19 was one of the best fighters who ever lived. Sirimongkol accidentally killed an opponent in the provinces (I would guess a medical issue for the opponent, a common strike) and was pulled down to Bangkok because of this sudden "killer" reputation, but he’d tell you that he was completely unskilled and of little experience. Within a few years he was among the very best of his generation. We asked him: Who trained you, who taught you?, expecting some insight into a lineage of knowledge and he told us “Nobody. I learned from watching others.” This runs so hard against the primary Western assumptions of how Knowledge is kept, recorded and passed, but it is a story we heard over and over. Somehow these men, both famous and not, developed keen, beautiful (very precise) movement and acute combat potency without direct transmission or even significant instructional training. The answer could be located nowhere…in no particular place or function.

Sherlock Holmes said of a mystery: Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.. All these things that we anticipate make great fighters, these really seem to be the impossible here. They were not the keys, it seems. Instead it appears that it was in the very weave of the culture, and the subcultures of Muay Thai, within the structures of the kaimuay experiences, in the richly embedded knowledges of everyone in the game, in the states of relaxation of the aesthetics of muay itself, in the practices of play, in the weft of festival fighting, the warp of equipmentless training, in endurance, in the quixotic powers of gambling, the Mother’s Milk of Muay Thai itself, which is a very odd but beautiful thing to conclude.

It does pose something of a nostalgia, because many of these cultural and circumstantial elements have changed - some radically altered by a certain modernity, some shifted subtly - so there is a dimension of feeling that we want not to lose all of it, that we might still pull some substantial threads forward into our own future, some of that cultural DNA that made some of the greatest fighters ever what they were. It's not a hope to return to those past states, but a respect for what they (mysteriously) created. As we approximate techniques, copy movements, mechanize styles, coach harder and harder, these are all the things that make up a net through which everything slips out. Instead, this mystery, the how did they become so great, so proficient, so perceptive, so smooth, so electric, so knowing, stands before us, something of a challenge to our own age and time.