Muay Thai Vlog #142 – Pi Nu’s Stories About Training & Life as a Kid

The above is my vlog shot two days ago. I’d intended to finish up training with a good run on the stairs at the temple, but there was a...

The above is my vlog shot two days ago. I’d intended to finish up training with a good run on the stairs at the temple, but there was a service going on. I’d just had a grand time listening to Pi Nu relating his “kids these days are soft” story at the gym and before finding an alternative to the stairs had to sit and share what I’d heard about his childhood. I’m a sucker for “when I was your age” stories, and I find these generational differences in Muay Thai so interesting. Pi Nu doesn’t train his 15-year-old son Bank, who is a Lumpinee fighter raised in the family gym, in the way he himself was trained. And despite the notion that kids these days have it so much easier, Pi Nu sees that as a positive – just maybe a bit of head-shaking when kids are lazy. There is a sense of his son having a better life, but also a sense that the old way of life and effort has been passed by. This is so common between generations that straddle an uptick in economic class: the parent progressed through his work ethic and the progress is passed on but the work ethic isn’t. You want your kids to have everything, but you also want them to have the character that not having everything created in yourself.

It’s hard to imagine that the Petchrungruang cement-lined neighborhood was a farm with fields and animals only a few decades ago – there is a tiny chicken “farm” next door, chickens raised for fighting, nothing you would see from the street. But even to this day there are strong divisions between areas where Pattaya tourism and the beach have their playground, and where Thai ways of life are still grounded in older generations. They still feel worlds apart, even when they’re a few streets down from one another.

 

Pattaya in 1982

Pattaya in 1982, when Pi Nu was maybe 10 and Petchrungruang Gym was a farm

 

Pattay in 1965

Pattaya in 1965

 

Pattay in 1950s

Pattaya in the 1960s

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Muay ThaiPetchrungruang Gym

A 100 lb. (46 kg) female Muay Thai fighter. Originally I trained under Kumron Vaitayanon (Master K) and Kaensak sor. Ploenjit in New Jersey. I then moved to Thailand to train and fight full time in April of 2012, devoting myself to fighting 100 Thai fights, as well as blogging full time. Having surpassed 100, and then 200, becoming the westerner with the most fights in Thailand, in history, my new goal is to fight an impossible 471 times, the historical record for the greatest number of documented professional fights (see western boxer Len Wickwar, circa 1940), and along the way to continue documenting the Muay Thai of Thailand in the Muay Thai Library project: see patreon.com/sylviemuay

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