When I Chose Violence -
Muay Thai Kick-Boxing and Bangkok Nights
The white light punched through the arena like bullets shot through water.
With every movement I could feel swirls and eddies in the heavy yellow
air. The fluttering Thai oboe and tingling bell floated and quickened,
rocking us forward in our seats. The roar of the crowd above poured down,
pushing me, cascading towards the ring. In the corner, fat trainers with
long cigarettes and oily glasses barked frantic instructions. A sweat-slicked
fighter spun, his elbow connecting with a face. An arc of sweat
and blood swept out, falling warm and fat. I sipped my warm, flat beer.
Back in Bangkok for a few days. I had been shooting in the slums of Rangoon
and Cambodia, crawling streets filled with open sewage and ribbed dogs,
grabbing photos of people who might never again have their picture taken.
Getting back to Bangkok seemed like coming out of the diving bell. And
like any sailor on shore, I needed a release. And in Bangkok, there's
two ways to do that, sex or violence. I chose violence.
Earlier that night, my buddy Tom and I had found ourselves in the back
of a darkened Thai cab speeding downtown. We were looking to see some
"Muay Thai" - Thai kick-boxing - Thailand's second religion,
just behind the Buddha. For years I had heard of the excesses of Thailand.
I had friends who had made trips solely for PatPong Street, the main sex-district
in Bangkok. Every time we stepped into a cab the driver looked back at
us in the mirror, "PatPong?" But Muay Thai held a special
fascination for me. I had seen it as a young kid on late-night TV. Even
then, with Thai commentators and bad sound, it held me. Simple and brutal,
barefoot and lanky, the fighters had none of the flash or bravado of western
boxing. And for a kid who dreamed of the world, it seemed so very far
away. Since then, whenever I had heard Thai kick-boxing mentioned
it was always as if on one level there was Fighting, and then on another
there was Muay Thai.
We swerved to the curb outside Ratchadamnoen Stadium, one of Muay Thai's
two holiest temples, and it felt like arriving during a coup d'etat. People
were spilling on to the streets, blocking traffic, blowing whistles. A
Thai with slicked hair and a pink satin jacket opened our door, smiling
past his cigarette. Pulling us out of the cab, he quickly passed us off
to a Thai woman dressed like Rizzo in the Thai touring company of "Grease".
Her fat heels clopped on the pavement as we followed her towards the churning
entrance of Ratchodomnoen. "You here to see Muay Thai? You pay 1500
baht, you sit up front. You don't want to sit with the Thai people."
We passed huge lines snaking out towards the street, we hustled by soldiers
slacked against the door, their polished helmets reflecting back fluorescents
overhead, and we plunged straight down into the bowels of the building.
The narrow cement hallway seemed to boom with concussive explosions. Suddenly,
we punched out into a large concrete arena that rose straight up over
our heads. 
I
quickly flashed to the fighters grappling in the ring, frenetic punches
and kicks in the final round of the under-card match. A thin layer of
cigarette smoke swirled over the ring like swamp gas and a tremendous
thunder echoed from a thousand darkened throats above us. We were handed
to a boy with a crushed arm who led us towards the front rows around the
ring. Thai generals in polished boots sipped from paper cups in the back
as we passed bloated European men with young Thai girls on their arm,
watching the ring with watery eyes.
We circled the floor, passing the Thai band B two Thai drums, a Thai oboe
and a small bell. The music moved and rushed, finding its tempo and cadence
from some unseen rhythm of the fight. The kid with the shattered arm sat
us ringside. Another Thai in a Hawaiian shirt and knock-off aftershave
leaned in as we sat down. "You want beer?!" On the matt right
above us, two Muay Thai fighters brawled to the frenetic roil of the music,
the frantic rumble of the crowd. I shouted back, "TWO! EACH!"
I looked around. The stadium rose high up into the sweltering Asian heat.
The lights from the ring were so bright, so close, I felt self-conscious.
Next to us were a couple of women from England who worked with severely
emotionally disturbed adults in Swinton. Most of their patients had anger
management problems. I asked if they felt like any of the fighters might
need counseling. They pulled their gaze from the fight above, and mumbled
something about "channeling anger properly".
From the expensive "foreigner seats" ringside, I turned towards
the real action which was behind chain link fences behind us. Hundreds
of Thai men in short-sleeve button-downs and flip-flops stood on large
concrete steps that rose into darkness around the ring. Every movement
in the ring brought a swelling thunder from the crowd. From the darkness
above, hand bets flashed around the stadium and light flashed off glasses,
reflections of eyes watching the fight far below.
Muay Thai, perhaps the most bad-ass fighting style in the world, started
over 1,000 years ago as a fighting technique used by the Siamese King's
bodyguards. Through the centuries, it drew on elements of Buddhism 
and
grew into an art form, a fighting style in which people could train and
fight without killing. Legend has it that in the 1500's a Siamese King
used Muay Thai techniques to fend off Burmese invaders, securing Siam's
independence in a series of royal grudge matches. This imbued its fighters
with legendary skills while opening a way for disempowered peasants to
quickly gain honor and respect.
By the 1880's Muay Thai had progressed to a fairly regimented form where
almost any part of the body could be used to strike. In most matches,
fighters would fight dressed only in shorts, striking and kicking bare-handed,
though it was also common to wrap banana leaves around the fists to keep
them from splitting open from repeated strikes. In poorer areas, where
shorts were too expensive, halved coconuts tied around the groin sufficed.
In one brutal form of Muay Thai, fighters would dip their hands and forearms
in resin then roll them in shards of broken glass. These fights would
be to first blood or unconsciousness, whichever the fighters agreed upon.
While in southern Thailand we had gone to a rural fight out in the sticks.
The open-walled stadium was next to an Aquarium which had its own seafood
restaurant. At the fight I sat next to a martial-artist from Norway B
Kristian. Dressed in an Oakley tank-top and banded tattoos, he had the
glassy eyes and rolling tongue of a true believer. Though he was a massive
man and outweighed any of the kick-boxers in the ring by at least 100
pounds, he told me he wouldn’t dare step into any Thai ring. One
reason Muay Thai Fighters were so dangerous, he explained were the 9 weapons
of Muay Thai B two hands, two elbows, two feet, two knees and the forehead.
In the 1930's in response to so many deaths in the ring, the Thai government
began issuing a series of fighting regulations and many international
boxing rules were incorporated. Rings with ropes, weight divisions and
gloves were adopted while many dangerous techniques such as limb-breaking,
choking and head-butting were banned. With the loss of the forehead, there
were now 8 official weapons of Muay Thai, but still, explained Kristian,
many brutal moves are legal. Fighters can spin and drive their elbow into
their opponent’s temple, they can kick the opponent’s knee
out to the side and it’s still legal to grab your opponent=s head
and drive it down into your knee.
The bell sounded in Bangkok, the fighter turned towards the corner just
above us. Silently he offered a prayer to the Buddha for protection. He
turned again and the music started. Surprisingly, the first three rounds
of any Muay Thai match offer relatively little action. Typically in these
rounds, the fighters circle slowly, their eyes locked on each others waists,
their fists held out in front of their face. Their movements seem almost
part of a dance.
There is something professional dancers know that most of the rest of
us only discover after a couple of cocktails at a cousin's wedding reception.
There is purity to movement, an honesty in motion that is strikingly open
and direct. To live life dedicated to this is to be admired, but how do
we judge when combined with violence? There is a coarse and jagged truth
to violence that in a way lives outside philosophical teachings. Everyone
implicitly understands the directness, the lack of ego that comes with
the moment of violence. What precedes and what follows are where humans
can reflect, but the moment of fist hitting face is simply that. An act
pure and direct, lacking subtlety and intelligence but containing in a
very finite moment an undeniable and direct connect. It is that physical
connect, in different form but similar function that dancers understand.
And it is also that connect which Muay Thai fights seem to hover near,
3 minutes at a time.
Before each Muay Thai fight, the musicians play a droning, sedate music
as the fighters enter the ring. The "Ram Muay" or "Wai
Kru" is a 3 or 4 minute dance that intended to honor and pay respect
to the boxer's trainer, religion, family and the fighting spirits. Gamblers
say they can tell how a fighter will do in the ring simply by watching
how he performs the 'Raam Muay'.
Once the bout begins the fighters move into a fighting stance, their head
thrust slightly forward, their fists held in front of their face. Their
legs are spread, one slightly forward, the other slightly back. And they
bob, their upper body moving, sawing, side to side, forward and back.
Very different from Western Boxing’s kinetic “bob and weave”
where there is a thrusting and feinting, a sense of trying to draw the
opponent out the Muay Thai movements are more like a rhythmic dance, the
body weaving, the hands staying still. Far from being full of adrenaline-pumped
energy, the fighters seem almost to have entered a place where violence
is not to be avoided or unleashed, but simply accepted. Each elbow uppercut
or kick to the knee simply brings them back this swaying movement. And
it is done to the rhythm of the music.
The bell in Bangkok rang for the 4th. The fighters closed, now dripping
with sweat. With passive eyes, they started striking with punches, their
knees rising to crack into each others ribs. The music began to quicken,
throbbing off the concrete steps, forcing the crowd to rise. Every knee
now brought a rumble from the stadium, every elbow a boom. Large red welts
began to form on the sides of the fighters from the repeated pounding.
Every so often one of the fighters would crack their elbow quickly up,
smacking the jaw of the other, sending a spray of blood and sweat to slowly
freeze in the lights overhead. The fighters started to jump with each
knee or kick, trying to deliver all of their strikes higher on the body.
Their bodies, now reddened with welts and blood, still moved with strength
and alacrity, operating on training and sheer force of will.
Muay Thai fighters tend to be lanky, their bodies not so much like prize-fighters
but more reminiscent of swimmers, built like struts on a car, steel that
bends but snaps back with incredible force. Kristian, Tom and I watched
a bout in the steaming heat of the jungle which pitted two fighters against
each other who couldn't have been more than 6 or 7 years old. Kristian
claimed that no ranked Muay Thai fighter had ever been beaten by a ranked
fighter of any other discipline. And there is a much repeated story of
five Muay Thai champions who were brought to England to fight five Karate
black belts in a showcase tournament. All five Black belts were knocked
out.
Kristian ran a Martial Arts gym in Norway that had a number of European
champions come out of it (though I suspected that was like being the basketball
champion of Bhutan). He said he made a yearly pilgrimage here to Southern
Thailand to train with Muay Thai Fighters. ”These Muay Thai guys
sleep in a puddle, wake up and eat a handful of rice, train for six hours,
eat another handful of rice then train for another six hours." He
said they were conditioned 24 hours a day, year after year to reach the
condition they were in. Unlike fighters in Norway and the West, he said,
here there were no distractions, no video games, no clubs, no couches
to lay down on. Here there was only fighting, fighting, fighting.
The bell rang at Ratchmodomnoen to end the fourth round. Two small trainers
swooped into the ring and quickly sat their kick-boxer on a small plastic
stool in inside a large upturned trash can lid. They sprayed him with
water and wiped his blood with their bare hands. The head trainer in a
pressed shirt and flip-flops jumped to the side of the ring to shout at
his fighter in Thai, his arms sweeping back and forth. Just behind some
low metal railings, trainers from the fighter's home gym leaned over screaming
their own directions, their long cigarettes, pressed slacks and flip-flops
constantly jumping, like an old projector skipping frames. Above and behind
us the crowd shouted bets back and forth, the odds flickering in open
handed signals across the arena. The fighter's face began to swell, oddly
apple-faced and round atop his thin body.
If Thailand is the Holy Land for fighters, then Bangkok is Mecca and the
stadiums of Lumphini and Ratchmodomnoen the dueling Hajj's. All across
Southeast Asia in thousands of rural arenas, fighters meet for no reason
other than the chance for a shot at the big time. And it is not merely
Thailand where Kick-boxing is popular. Muay Thai simply translates as
"Thai kick-boxing". And as my guide in Cambodia once explained
while pointing to an 800 year old relief of two fighters carved on the
side of one of the Angkor temples, Cambodia has “far better kick-boxers
than Thailand." Rivalries aside, Thailand is where the kings still
fight. To fight just once, even on an under-card in Lumphini is to gain
great honor for the rest of your life.
The final round bell rang, the boxer above us stood and bowed to the corner.
The music started and he turned. The crowd rose again in support, the
sound deafening. The fighters fought with manic energy, each punch and
kick brought full force, their entire body moving into the crushing blow.
Blood and sweat flew far out into the audience, the music tenor driving,
the Thai oboe shrieking out a desperate peal. In front of me a Thai woman
in yellow silks jumped up and down, screeching under the bottom rope,
minute drops of blood slowly soaking into her blouse.
With only a minute left in the fight, more dramatic moves - roundhouse
elbows to the temple, kicks to the knees, running kicks directly to the
chest B started to score. In a number of matches, fighters at this point
seemed to wilt under the crushing pace, like the fast motion of flowers
in movies. At the fights in the south, I saw one fighter slowly droop,
a number of ribs broken and yet another who laid down, his will simply
giving out. Here at Ratchmodomnoen though, that doesn’t happen.
The crowd swayed and boomed crazily with each blow. The trainers jumped
over the metal railing, rushing to the side of the ring, their arms grasping
desperately under the ropes, urging their fighter on. The English women
beside me rocked slightly forward in their seats, muttering softly, their
eyes unblinking for the full final minute of the round. The fighters
crashed into each other, again and again. The sharp slap of wet flesh
being hit, strike after strike, desperate fighters working their last
moments perhaps ever in this ring.
Finally the last bell sounded and both fighters broke. Blood sheeted down
their faces as both raised their arms in triumph. One fighter dropped
to the matt and started doing push-ups, a final effort to sway the judges.
The fighters walked back to their corners, the referee getting the judges
scores. With little fanfare he simply pointed to the blue corner, our
corner. The fighter jumped in the air a few times, put on his robe and
left the ring. In the red corner the fighter bowed to the judges and quietly
left. The crowd behind us began their pay-outs. I drained the last of
my warm beer, called over our server and ordered another round. The English
girls turned towards me. "Only in Asia."