festival, his family ate “good food,” meat and chicken; the rest of the year they ate sticky rice. The festival featured Thai folk theatre, puppets, acrobats, Muay Thai bouts, and cowboy movies, of which Bunkerd was particularly fond. When I asked which movie was his favorite, he looked regretful and said that he didn’t remember the name. “But look what I can do,” he said, and, sitting up straight in his chair, he began to whistle a spooky yet buoyant melody: the theme from Sergio Leone’s “For a Few Dollars More.” (Later, I burned the track onto a CD for him. The next time I walked into the gym, he jumped up and hugged me. “Thank you for the song! When I hear it, I think I am in my home town!”)

Bunkerd’s first professional fight took place in a neighboring village when he was thirteen. He entered the fight without his mother’s knowledge; she did not support his boxing aspirations. As soon as the fight began, Bunkerd knew that he could win; he felt stronger and faster than his opponent. But he was careful not to knock him out: boxers got paid ten baht per round, so he hit not so much to cause damage as to score points. At the end of the fifth round, his brother and their friends ran down to congratulate him—only to have the judges score the match in favor of the local fighter. Bunkerd and his friends narrowly escaped a fight with the entire village, and had to walk the five miles back to Chaiyaphum in the dark.

“I learned knockout is best,” Bunkerd said. He challenged the boy to a rematch, and knocked him out in the second round. Six years and thirty-one professional bouts later, Bunkerd left home and set out to make his fortune in Bangkok. At the time, the two- hundred-mile journey from Chaiyaphum entailed a dangerous ten- hour bus ride through the mountains. (“Sometimes the bus falls down the mountain,” Bunkerd said.) In Bangkok, Bunkerd found a trainer who put him on a program of remedial drills: all day, every day, for an entire week, Bunkerd stood in front of a mirror repeating a simple jab-cross sequence. He lived in the gym, and ran for an hour every day in a nearby stadium.

The trainer introduced Bunkerd to a manager, but a month passed, and Bunkerd still hadn’t got a fight. The manager, it turned out, wasn’t exerting himself on Bunkerd’s behalf, because he thought that Bunkerd’s arms and legs were too short. Bunkerd refused to be discouraged: “In my heart I say, “One day I win.” Bunkerd told both his trainer and his manager that he was going to go back north to work on the rice farm. He packed his bag and set out in the direction of the bus station, but instead he went to Fairtex, a big new Bangkok gym that was starting to produce champions in impressive numbers. Fairtex belonged to a wealthy Bangkok entrepreneur and Muay Thai aficionado, Khun Bunjong Busarakamwongse, better known as Philip Wong, who had made his fortune in T-shirts. (Today, Fairtex is a major manufacturer of Muay Thai gear.) In 1978, Wong became a promoter for Lumpini Stadium, fashioning himself as Muay Thai’s ambassador to the West. He recruited European fighters to train and compete in Thailand, and helped get ESPN coverage of Lumpini title fights.

Bunkerd joined the gym and, deferring to tradition, surrendered his last name. Twenty-five days later, as Bunkerd Fairtex, and weighing a hundred and four pounds, he won the title at Rajadamnern. Even in a sport whose champions are primarily underdogs, Bunkerd stands out as an underdog’s underdog. He barely went to school, learned Muay Thai on his own, and didn’t undergo a day’s formal training until he came to Bangkok, at nineteen—an age when most Thai boxers are already thinking about retirement. Muay Thai champions often retire after about five years (or as soon as they can afford to). As Wijarn Ponlid, a gold medallist at the 2000 Olympics, announced in 2003, “Now I do not need to leave my family to attend the camp and suffer unbearable pain for money.” Bunkerd, however, fought at Lumpini Stadium with visible relish for ten straight years, and travelled by bus all over Thailand to fight in local tournaments—an unheard-of practice on the part of a champion. Bunkerd was a “good boy”: he prayed to the Buddha and thanked his parents before every fight, saved all his money, and, until he was twenty-nine, never drank a drop of alcohol. Because of his great modesty and his love of fighting, Bunkerd became a popular hero in Thailand. His rise to fame is recounted in a short essay on the Fight and Fitness Web site: “Because of Bunkerd’s humble disposition and fierce fighting style, he became known as ‘the People’s Champion.’”

One day in class, we were jumping rope to the usual “ill” vocals and “sick” grooves when Bunkerd went to the stereo and put on a new record, and the room was filled with the beautiful cascading waves of a nineteen-eighties synthesizer, interrupted by a gentle human voice. It was impossible not to recognize Bunkerd. He sounded exactly like himself; only singing. (He had made the recording in a California karaoke bar.) Next came a reggae-inflected chorus. I looked around the room, half expecting the boxers to drop their jump ropes and start break-dancing. But everybody was just stolidly hopping up and down, the same as always.

In 1984, Bunkerd met and married a young Bangkok woman named Noi Duangdon—something of an achievement for a country boy who spoke in the northeastern dialect. Their son, Arphit, nicknamed Boy, was born in 1985. Noi went into labor while Bunkerd was fighting at Lumpini. “On Friday, I win the big fight,” he recalled. “On Saturday, I have Boy.” They lived at the Fairtex boxing camp, where there was a pet tiger and a tame falcon. Boy says that Bunkerd also kept a rice- field mouse, which used to follow him when he went jogging.

Today, Boy is a twenty-year-old amateur fighter, known for his talent and his artistic temperament: he is said to be more interested in technique than in winning, and has had mixed success in the ring. (Owing to a foot injury, he took the past year off and worked as a cook at a pub a few blocks from the gym.) Boy is three inches taller than his father, with an equally infectious smile,

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