Muay Thai in Koh Samui

I’m really not sure if it was perspiration or water from the trainer’s bottle that exploded from the boxer’s brow, and flew directly down the neck of my Singha beer. The 200 baht premium for ringside seats was already paying for itself.

Chaweng Stadium, an arena taken straight from a Van Damme classic, was rife with local Muay Thai fanatics and Westerners wearing nervous expressions. Shomit and I did our best to appear relaxed, but the tension in the place was palpable. The boxers swayed around the ring, gloved hands circling their cheeks, with resemblance to cobra snakes, seemingly charmed by the beating of the drums from the top row of the bleachers.

As the three minute round progressed, the rapping of the drums hastened, and so did the pace of the bout. The fighters traded heavy blows, catapulting through the air and slashing at each other with their feet. Their bodies came crashing together, now joined from the shoulders in a twisting grapple. The more aggressive of the two began driving his knee into the rib cage of his opponent. A red welt the size of a pancake began to bubble around the recipient’s kidney. The aggressor, sensing the opportunity, unbuckled his grip from the neck of his hostage, and unleashed a battery of snapping punches.

In a final ditch to escape, the defeated man turned in our direction. He was close enough for us to see his eyes glaze over as he parted from consciousness and crumpled to the mat. The local contingency went bonkers. Baht changed hands like cards in a poker game. Men shouted emphatically at each other in Thai, carrying on with an energy that flirted with turning hostile. The same intensity we had witnessed in the ring could be felt now in the crowd. It was clear in the way some of the men postured (and by the cut of their jibs) they were not foreign to being inside the ropes. Something about an ear that looks more like a cauliflower tends to give that away. After the collaterals had been collected, and a sufficient amount of fingers had been pointed, the crowd settled back into their seats and we settled back into our Singhas. This was only the first fight. We had six more on the bill.

Touted by promoters as the “most devastating martial art,” Muay Thai boxing feels like the national pastime of Thailand. It seems as though every town has at least a handful of stadiums (to be accurate, the venues I’ve seen are more like smoky bars than stadiums). The match spectators are nearly all men. (The stadium makes a great location for sizeable groups of entrepreneurial Thai women. They clog the exits looking for paying dates.)

While the matches do seem to encourage some of the seedier practices of Thai society, there are elaborate traditions to the sport that I have not even begun to understand. Every bout begins with a ritualistic song and dance, in which the fighters very serenely engage in what looks like prayer. It also appears to be a sport of great honor and respect. The fighters attack with abandon between bells, but when the battle is over they embrace and sip water from their opponent’s cup. For all of its violence, there is a strange beauty to Muay Thai. We’ll have to see if it’s beautiful enough to lure Jeannie from the massage parlor in Bangkok.