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Asia > Thailand > Bangkok > Bangkok > Articles > Thai Boxing

Thai Boxing

by Andrew Mueller

As a shrine to a national sporting heritage, Bangkok’s Lumpinee Stadium is an initially unprepossessing venue. Secreted amid a neighbourhood as noisy, chaotic, crowded and filthy as pretty much every other neighbourhood in Bangkok, the tin-roofed concrete building looks, from the teeming street outside, like a run-down high-school gymnasium and, once through the doors, like a vast uninhabited chicken battery.

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As a shrine to a national sporting heritage, Bangkok’s Lumpinee Stadium is an initially unprepossessing venue. Secreted amid a neighbourhood as noisy, chaotic, crowded and filthy as pretty much every other neighbourhood in Bangkok, the tin-roofed concrete building looks, from the teeming street outside, like a run-down high-school gymnasium and, once through the doors, like a vast uninhabited chicken battery.

Nobody comes here for the architecture, though: for Thailand’s estimated half million competitive practitioners of Thai Boxing - the spectacularly graceful and violent martial art they call Muay Thai - Lumpinee Stadium possesses roughly the combined cache of Wembley and La Scala. Lumpinee hosts four boxing cards every week, and for every one of those, 15,000 people turn up. Late in the evening as the main events get under way, they make a noise that echoes from the haphazard, corrugated ceiling to sound like the work of ten times that number. Inside and outside the ring, fight night at Lumpinee is fierce, furious and uncompromising: essence of Bangkok, a city distilled into a room.

Muay Thai bears a few superficial similarities to boxing as the western world has come to know it: the combatants wear padded gloves, compete on a roped-off square of canvas called a ring, emerge from red and blue corners, divide their bouts into three-minute rounds and may be declared winners of a fight by knockout or on points. There are also certain cultural similarities. Fame and fortune as a Muay Thai fighter are common dreams of Thailand’s poor, and the reality for those not quite good enough for Lumpinee is as tawdry and soul-destroying as the life of any journeyman palooka anywhere else: in the go-go bars of Bangkok’s gruesome Patpong district, and the entrancingly ghastly nearby resort town of Pattaya, Muay Thai bouts are routinely staged as diversions for their clienteles of fat, ugly European men and the bored, barely dressed, adolescent Thai junkies who fuel their delusions of adequacy for spare change.

The differences between Muay Thai and western notions of boxing are apparent both before and after the bell is sounded. Muay Thai fighters prepare for combat with an elaborate, ritualised dance - the Ram Muay - offering homage to their teachers. This ends with a solemn exchange of prayers in their corners with their trainers, and the removal of their ceremonial headgear and the flowers draped around their necks.

Once the fight begins, matters become dramatically less languid: as well as using their gloved fists, Muay Thai fighters may also strike each other with their un-protected and un-padded feet, knees and elbows. Unlike some other fashionable eastern martial arts, this is not a pastime for the aesthete or theoretician: Bangkok fight aficionados are fond of pointing out that over the last few years, several tournaments have been staged between teams of Muay Thai professionals and experts in Karate, Kung Fu and others who fancied their chances, and that these contests have rarely lasted beyond the first round.

This warm, humid Saturday night, Lumpinee Stadium is hosting a nine-fight card. The opening bout is an exhibition of “International Style” boxing (that is, fists only) which plays to an audience consisting solely of those who’ve paid for the expensive seats at ringside - which is to say farangs (foreigners) like me, and Thai men accompanied by women. The standing-room terraces - men only, by tradition rather than law - that reach upward in tiers towards Lumpinee’s ceiling only begin to fill during the third Muay Thai bout of the night.

Tonight’s contests cover the weight ranges from 103 to 140 pounds, and all are scheduled for five rounds. For the early fights, the lack of interest from the terraces is mirrored in the ring. Few telling blows are struck (although, of course, these things are relative - every single one of the punches and kicks that these chaps are shrugging aside would doubtless cause the rest of us to walk strangely and/or see double for some time), and the bouts all go the distance comfortably.

The first stirrings of proper interest on the terraces are raised by the fifth bout, between two worryingly young-looking (most Muay Thai professionals flourish in their late teens and early 20s) 106-pounders, rejoicing in the names of Yodsaenchai Sawsagulpunt and Taweesuck Singhklongsee. No sooner have they finished their prayers and been waved on by the referee that a deafening tumult commences all around them; however, the majority of the yelling is not direct encouragement to the boxers, but related to the bets being exchanged all around the stadium. Freelance bagmen by the barriers hold up fingers to communicate the prices to punters too far back to hear the odds they’re shouting: money is passed back and forth over the heads of the crowd in anxious, but honest, fistfuls.

In the ring, the two young men are rising to the occasion: with the discordant pipe and drum music that accompanies all Muay Thai bouts struggling to make itself heard over the din of the crowd’s frenetic transactions, Sawsagulpunt and Singhklongsee seem intent on finishing each other off with as much style as possible. An extravagant flying kick to the side of the head fells one: he paws the blood out of his eye with a clumsy glove as he splutters against the canvas, and then in one liquid movement stands up, swivels on the ball of one foot and drops his adversary with a mercilessly precise elbow. Incredibly, the pair maintain this pace for the scheduled five rounds. They gently help each other off at the end, and it dawns on me that I’ve absolutely no idea who won.

The night’s main event is not half as elegant, but no less compelling for that. Pettho Sitjaopaw, in the red trunks, is a - by Thai standards, anyway - lanky, lithe figure without a superfluous ounce in his 114 pounds. Gongiat Sitchoonthong, in the blue shorts, carries the same weight in a much lower-slung and stockier frame. It becomes rapidly clear that, between them, Sitjaopaw and Sitchoonthong represent the classic boxing paradox: a short man with a knockout punch who can’t reach his competitor, ranged against a tall man who can reach his rival but can’t knock him out.

What is also clear tonight is that neither fighter is overly concerned with the niceties. Where their predecessors in the ring had both comported themselves as if points were being awarded for artistic impression, these two stand toe to toe and flail at each other with apparently random fists, knees and elbows. While the trainers of both men blanche visibly in each corner, the crowd roar their approval: the constant rumbling din of the bookmakers and punters is now punctuated by booming cheers as each blow connects, and a terrifying proportion of them do: so fearfully undisciplined a mill is this that the best shot of the opening round lands on the referee, who officiates the rest of the bout with blood pouring from an inch-long gash above his right eyebrow.

By way of proof that some human values are indeed universal, the crowd react to the sight of the hapless official retreating to a neutral corner for treatment between rounds with gales of delighted laughter.