and a taste for baggy cargo pants, which he wears slung impossibly low over his boxing trunks, the waist at his knees. Boy began studying Muay Thai with his father at the age of three, and fought his first amateur fight when he was five, against a much larger boy, who was nine. When, in 1993, Philip Wong decided to open a Fairtex camp in America, he chose a suburb of Phoenix as the location, and recruited Bunkerd as the head trainer. At the time, Bunkerd had an English vocabulary of three words: “yes,” “O.K.,” and “hello.” Bunkerd’s first American student was Chris Cariaso, a twelve-year-old sports fanatic who lived in the area. It was Cariaso who, while doing situps, first taught Bunkerd to count in English. The two became “very close, like father and son.” Cariaso slept in the gym and paid his tuition by cleaning the bathrooms. By 1995, Bunkerd had saved enough money to bring his wife and son to Arizona. But the camp was losing money, and soon failed. After Fairtex Arizona closed, Wong sent Bunkerd to Carmel, Indiana, near Indianapolis, to teach Muay Thai at a local martial-arts gym. (Noi and Boy stayed behind in Arizona.) Bunkerd says that he was the only Thai person in all Carmel, and he was lonely and bored. There was nobody to train with, and in the winter he resorted to kicking snow banks for practice.

The following year, a new Fairtex gym opened in San Francisco, under the direction of a champion middleweight, Alex Gong, who also held a business degree from San Francisco State University. Bunkerd was hired as the head trainer, and in 1998 he won the I.S.K.A. world championship. He retired officially in 2001, at the age of thirty-nine, with a World Muay Thai Association Lifetime Achievement Award and about three hundred and fifty professional fights to his credit— he says that he stopped counting at three hundred. Bunkerd and Noi divorced shortly after their arrival in California, and two years later Bunkerd married one of his students, a hair stylist named Maureen McGrath. They have two sons: Louie, who is four, and Wilson, who is three.

Fairtex San Francisco prospered, until one afternoon in August, 2003, when a driver hit Gong’s parked car outside the gym. Gong ran outside to confront the man, who turned out to be a paroled felon. He pulled out a gun and shot Gong through the heart. In the ensuing administrative turmoil, Bunkerd decided to realize his dream of opening his own gym, and brought in Cariaso as his partner. It was difficult for Bunkerd to break ranks—as Maureen puts it, there is “sort of a caste system in Thailand, and Bunkerd thought of himself as a worker.” But Cariaso and Maureen backed him up, and Fight and Fitness opened in the spring of 2004. The gym, which, according to the Web site, possesses “a feeling of positivism,” has flourished, and an eight- hundred-square-foot expansion has just been completed—the second in a little more than a year. There are six instructors and about three hundred students.

Cariaso is just an inch taller than Bunkerd, with big, serious eyes. He is twenty-four but looks younger, and has the solemn boyishness of an orphan in an old movie. (I once overheard him debating whether to enter a fight at a hundred and thirty or a hundred and thirty-five pounds—”If I fight at a hundred and thirty-five pounds, I can go to the weigh-in eating a sandwich,” he said, his tone implying that this would be the height of decadence.) Cariaso owns two rehabilitated pit bulls, and volunteers for an organization called One at a Time Pet Rescue. Every month, he e-mails all the gym members, urging them to adopt some beleaguered mutt. In his fight poster, he resembles one of his animal proteges: he looks out with raccoonlike eyes; his raised hands, in wraps but no gloves, resemble bandaged paws.

Cariaso also teaches standard boxing five days a week, along with a retired pro named Paris Alexander. During his classes, Alexander blasts Marvin Gaye on the stereo, stomps in circles, waves his fists, and shouts laryngiti

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