unlimited: a match ended only when one fighter was unconscious. There were a great number of deaths in the ring—one reason, perhaps, for the introduction of the Queensberry rules, in the nineteen-thirties. The rules were not fully standardized until after the Second World War. Bouts now consist of five three-minute rounds, and fighters are required to wear protective gear and Western-style boxing gloves.

Most professional boxers in Thailand are between fifteen and twenty years old, and are welterweights or lighter. When you watch a Western boxing match, you can often follow the course of the fight just by observing the boxers’ expressions: relief, calculation, defiance. You can tell from the boxer’s face whether he has just pulled off a successful fake or delivered a righteous counterstrike. This transparency seems naïve and touching in comparison with the opacity of the Thais, who hone their poker faces from early childhood. In Thai fights, counterstrike succeeds strike quickly and mechanically, and no feeling is betrayed. The boxers fly at each other relentlessly, dispassionately, unceasingly, their bodies buffeted to and fro as if on an invisible sea.

Some of the fighters move so fast that they seem to violate the laws of physics. Panya Kraitus, the author of “Muay Thai: The Most Distinguished Art of Fighting”—the definitive English- language source on Muay Thai—writes of “great jumpers, capable of boosting themselves with a foot on the waistband of an opponent’s boxing shorts and delivering a stunning kick to the head.” In Thailand, fights are accompanied by the music of the pi, or Javanese clarinet, an instrument prized for its eerie timbre. The music escalates in rhythm and pitch throughout the fight—”to increase the adrenaline of the fighters,” Kraitus writes.

Muay Thai, like much of Thai culture, is subject to the Buddhist emo ional ideal of jai yen, or “cool heart.” (Physicians at the Phuket International Hospital recommend jai yen as a strategy to maintain health: “Adopt what Thais call a ‘cool heart’… and just walk away from troublesome situations.”) Kraitus writes that a boxer must always be able to “replace hot, volatile and murky emotions with those that are cool and rational.” Outside the ring, he should “act as if [he] were not well versed in the lethal art of Thai boxing.”

Muay Thai is also associated with magic and rituals. Before a fight, each boxer circumambulates the ring, gliding one hand along the ropes; according to the anthropologist Peter Vail, this is meant to “seal the ring against outside influences.” Traditionally, the boxer then recites a secret incantation, called kata, imparted to him in private by a trainer or manager. Vail describes one popular kata, “four-faced Brahma,” which is said to have the double function of making the opponent see four faces instead of one and causing the boxer himself to radiate extra metta (“loving-kindness”), so that nobody can bear to hit him too hard. During these pre-fight ceremonies, all fighters wear a protective headband called the mongkon, which is approximately the same shape as a tennis racquet, and is worn with the handle sticking out in the back. Rolled up inside are talismanic items—usually paper inscribed with magical letters and numbers, though boxers have also been said to include clippings of their fathers’ hair or scraps from their mothers’ robes, dried pieces of venomous snakes, and even fragments of their ancestors’ bones. Kraitus’s book includes an entire chapter about such charms; he also mentions boxers who recite spells in graveyards, particularly seeking out those which are “reputed to be very much haunted”

Nowadays, Muay Thai instruction takes place in boxing camps, which are run for profit by entrepreneurs and businessmen. Still, as Vail has written, the analogies between Muay Thai fighters and Buddhist monks persist. Monks live in monasteries, for example, and boxers live in secluded camps; monks are celibate, and boxers aren’t allowed to have sexual relations in the twenty days leading up to a fight. Boxers and monks change their names when they take on their new vocation, suffer physical mortifications, possess charismatic powers, and wear special clothing. But, unlike monks, boxers have dose ties to the nakleng—the criminal underworld— and must negotiate with thugs and bet-fixers; they sometimes make extra money by working as leg-breakers and bodyguards.

Rajadamnern Stadium opened in 1941, and Lumpini in 1956. A story is frequently told about one of the first female television announcers, in the nineteen-seventies, who allegedly climbed under the ropes at Rajadamnern and walked around the ring in front of the cameras. That night, every fight ended in a bloody T.K.O. owing to cuts. The female announcer was held responsible, on the strength of a murky associative link between

Next page >>