Martial Madness

The fighting begins with the coming of the monsoons. Sometime in May, after the rice has been harvested and shipped, young men across Thailand enlist in a legion of dreamers. Joining others who have abandoned classrooms and assembly lines, they head for training camps where they lace on boxing gloves and try to beat back the karma that consigned them to the hard life of the farm or the factory. Their quest: a title, a fortune, their names etched in the bright lights of Bangkok. For tens of thousands of young men in this Southeast Asian kingdom formerly called Siam, the ancient sport of Muay Thai is still the means to glory.

Muay Thai, or Thai boxing, is a martial art culled from the hand-to-hand combat skills of 16th-century Siamese soldiers. Modern Muay Thai, which has been around for about 70 years, has adopted elements familiar to Westerners: boxing gloves, a ring, a referee and three-minute rounds. The sport is often called kickboxing outside Thailand, yet as dazzling and destructive as a Muay Thai fighter's kicks can be, his fists, knees and elbows are also formidable weapons. As are the spirits, ghosts and demons he conjures up as allies during a cabalistic series of prefight rituals drawn from Buddhism, Hinduism, superstition and, on occasion, black magic.

Over the centuries Muay Thai fighters have developed offensive and defensive techniques that rival those of the other martial arts. Unlike the others, however, a Muay Thai fight has the flavor of raw violence, the frenzy of a backroom brawl. Muay Thai practitioners don't compete in flowing robes before silent, reverential audiences. Thai boxers are stripped to their trunks and sacred charms. The cracking sounds of flesh striking bone pierce the roar of gamblers and hustlers and tourists and just plain fans who pack Muay Thai's smoke-filled clubs and small stadiums.

As with the sport anywhere, boxing can be a path out of poverty in Thailand. But it is also a window into the darker regions of the Thai soul. The people of the Land of Smiles are known for their compassion and gentleness. Those attributes, however, are balanced by a fascination with gore and violence reflected in the explicit color photos of murder and accident victims that appear daily on the front pages of the country's best-selling newspapers. It is this latter side of the Thais that allows them to make icons of their fighters.

There was King Sanpetch, who in the 17th century disguised himself as a commoner to test his Muay Thai skills. Nai Khanom Tom, an 18th-century soldier who had been taken prisoner during one of Siam's periodic wars with Burma, defeated 12 top Burmese fighters to win his freedom. Today's most heralded Muay Thai boxer is Nam Khabaun, 24, a devastating kicker from the eastern province of Buriram, where the sport was born and the toughest fighters are still bred.

"Muay Thai is our culture; if we don't preserve it, who will?" says 13-year-old Nittikul Khawsantea. The son of factory workers who migrated to Bangkok from the northeast, Nittikul has had 30 pro bouts since he began fighting at age nine (according to Thai labor laws children must be 12 to box, but those laws are rarely enforced). Most fighters start as young as Nittikul, and at the top stadiums 14-and 15-year-olds can be headliners. Most continue fighting until their mid-20s. For his first fight Nittikul was paid 120 baht, roughly equivalent to $5. Now he makes 1,500 baht a bout. "My dream is to be a 100,000-baht fighter," he says. Thai boxers measure themselves by purse size, and 100,000 baht (about $4,000) is champion's pay.

This April night Nittikul and some other boys from his training camp are fighting at a fair to raise money for a mosque. There are no peewee leagues in Muay Thai, no headguards or oversized gloves for kids. Fighters battle for five three-minute rounds with two minutes of rest between rounds, the same as adults. Before a bout combatants perform the prefight rituals of wai khru (the fighters drop to their knees and bow in respect to their teachers) and the ram muay (a dance that attempts to be both supplicating toward the gods and intimidating toward one's opponent). A special song accompanies each ritual.

The lure of Muay Thai's mystical aspects, like ram muay, is one reason a number of foreigners have given the sport a try. A U.S. serviceman stationed in Thailand in the early 1970s, Dale Kvalheim, took up Muay Thai and won a regional championship. Since then there has been a steady stream of foreigners studying the sport. Most train at the top camps, such as Saiyok in Kanchanaburi or Fairtex in Bangkok, where scores of fighters live and train under the tutelage of the some of the sport's best teachers, sparring in half a dozen rings with new gloves and pads.

A more typical Muay Thai training camp is So Prasit, located under the At-Narong Expressway in Bangkok's worst slum, the Klong Toei port district. In this shadow world darkened by the eight-lane road overhead, families live in shacks made of plywood, canvas and old auto tires. Many of the jobless start their day drinking Mekhong whiskey. Young, emaciated men stumble while sniffing a white solvent from plastic bags. The open-air training camp includes a single bloodstained ring, four worn heavy bags and a rusty weight machine.

"I don't want my boys becoming heroin addicts," says Seri Poompun, the 45-year-old, potbellied former fighter who runs So Prasit. As he talks, about 20 boys, ages 10 to 18, are kicking heavy bags or shadowboxing before a soot-covered shrine to Buddha. Training starts as the rush-hour traffic flows overhead. Clouds of blue exhaust roll across the open camp like noxious tumbleweed. "It doesn't bother the boys," Seri says. "Their whole life is dealing with difficulties." As deplorable as Americans might find a sport in which kids kick other kids in the head, there's little protest in Thailand against children's participating in Muay Thai. In a Third World country with more pressing problems—such as the estimated 300,000 children virtually enslaved in brothels and the countless others working in sweatshops—any abuses involving Muay Thai seem unimportant.