The Thai evening began its warm embrace of darkness and jungle sweat - from waxy green leaves rose a mysterious and enduring symphony of endless insects, vendors ran out of coconuts, and nocturnal millipedes glided gracefully across the black asphalt like shadows. Street dogs lay on the side of the road in a coma-like sleep. Food stalls were draped off with tarps and the lonely flourescent light of the 7-11 burned on into the coming night.
Yet on this night, the camp was far from asleep; the cars and vans of the gym owners sat waiting, loaded with Thai fighters and farang (foreigners), ready to make a two-hour trek to the rural wilds of Bangkok, Amphawa Samutsongkram. There was not enough room for everyone to go; the owners shuffled us around, talking to each other frantically in Thai. I lucked out; the manager offered me a seat in the car with one of the trainers and two of the fighters who would be competing that night.
I rode with two fighters, both from vastly different worlds. One was an Italian who had been fighting in Bangkok intermittently for the past several years. The first time I met him was on one of the morning 10k runs; he was running through the wet heat of Bangkok...in a sweat suit. Running through the most intense heat and humidity I had ever experienced...practically wrapped in a body bag, a thick black plastic suit for weight cutting. He smiled as he recognized me from the gym, jogging by with a cordial Hello. I was humbled immediately; not only did fighters run in this heat, they ran in this heat in sweat suits, and did it with a smile.
The second fighter was a thirteen-year-old Idaho boy with a lisp named Hunter. You would never suspect by looking at him that he had over forty professional Muay Thai fights under his belt, or that he had lived in Japan and in fact spoke Japanese, or that he was living in Bangkok alone. I no doubt believed him when he stated, authoritatively and without the slightest hesitation, "I will fight in the UFC when I grow up." This thirteen-year-old was far more fearless and wise than many adults I knew.
"I hate it when other kids think I'm just some sort of nerd, or that I can't fight." He laughed with a kind of self-assurance most men couldn't muster, musing that "I can always kick their ass, though!"
I wondered in awe at how someone could be so young and already have lived so fiercely, so fully, so fantastically. I wondered in awe at how I could be so privileged as to meet such amazing and inspiring people.
In the midst of this reverie, we made a 7-11 stop so that the Italian could refuel. Come to find out that not only had he been cutting weight, but that his weigh-in was only an hour --- one hour --- before his fight. He sat in the backseat sucking down a coconut before passing out for the rest of the ride, trying to get back some iota of the energy drained away running through Bangkok in a sweat suit.
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| Amphawa Floating Market, Thailand |
We arrived in Amphawa at almost ten at night. The stadium was an open-air festival, a stage set up on wild grass and between decaying, ancient Thai buildings. Amphawa is a sleepy river town known mostly for its floating market, but when the boats are docked and Saturday night sets in, the town comes alive for Muay Thai. Hundreds of spectators stand or sit in folding chairs, sandwiched between ice cream vendors and the giant dancing stage pulsating with live music and gyrating half-naked Thai women. Outside the archways and beyond the grass, street food vendors fill the paved parking lot, filling the air with the scent of fried meats and the sugary-sweet of Cokes from glass bottles.
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| Food Vendor outside the stadium fights of Amphawa |
Full rules Muay Thai was already underway as we crowded backstage to prepare the fighters. They were rubbed down head to toe in Thai oil and greased for the purpose of making it harder to land a deadly blow. They lay on the pavement on worn grass mats, closing their eyes in focus, blocking out the world and its gyrating Thai women and screaming crowds.
We settled in to watch the fights before our Kaewsamrit fighters came on. Hunter won his fight; the Italian lost.
As we drove home that night, the Thai coach told the Italian in broken English, "next time, you
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| Street food outside of the Amphawa fight arena |
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| Entrance to Amphawa fight arena |
"When someone is seeking," said Siddartha, "It happens quite easily that he only sees the thing that he is seeking; that he is unable to find anything, unable to absorb anything, because he is only thinking of the thing he is seeking, because he has a goal, because he is obsessed with his goal. Seeking means: to have a goal; but finding means: to be free, to be receptive, to have no goal. You, O worthy one, are perhaps indeed a seeker, for in striving towards your goal, you do not see many things that are under your nose." -Herman Hesse, Siddartha
What I took the coach to mean was this: if you focus only on winning or any other singular goal, you overwhelm yourself with tension and become blind to your opponent's maneuvers against you. You lose the ability to "think like a fighter" and react to the situation you find yourself currently in, be it a clinch or a southpaw or a strange new style. Many a fighting coach chants the familiar words to fighters, "relax, relax, relax." What this means is to clear your mind of any goal, to focus only on absorbing the visceral reality of the situation, to trust utterly the instincts you have trained by merely following a flow of action and reaction based on the simple reality of what your senses perceive. You see the punch, you block it. You see the opening, you take it. Bruce Lee explained it this way in his essay on gung fu:
"[the principle of gung fu] has to grow spontaneously, like a flower, in a mind free from emotions and desires. The core principle of [this] is Tao - the spontaneity of the universe."
After explaining his initial frustrations with learning the "art of detachment" inherent in fighting, Lee explains his revelation further in his famous water analogy:
"On the sea I thought of all my past training and got mad at myself and punched the water! Right then - at that moment - a thought suddenly struck me; was not this water the very essence of gung fu? Hadn't this water just now illustrated to me the principle of gung fu? I struck it but it did not suffer hurt. Again I struck it with all of my might - yet it was not wounded! I then tried to grasp a handful of it but this proved impossible. This water, the softest substance in the world, which could be contained in the smallest jar, only seemed weak. In reality, it could penetrate the hardest substance in the world. That was it! I wanted to be like the nature of water.
Lee continues, "Suddenly a bird flew by and cast its reflection on the water. Right then as I was absorbing myself with the lesson of the water, another mystic sense of hidden meaning revealed itself to me; should not the thoughts and emotions I had when in front of an opponent pass like the reflection of the bird flying over the water?"
This was one possible interpretation of "for the experience." As I contemplated what the coach's thoughts were, Hunter worked to help translate. The coach spoke Thai and Japanese; Hunter spoke Japanese and English. In a game of international telephone, Hunter asked the coach in Japanese what he had meant, then translating to English for the Italian.
"He means fight for the experience, as in don't focus just on winning or just on one thing. Just relax, have fun, go with it, enjoy yourself," Hunter said. Huh, I thought. Not too far off the mark from what I was thinking of.
"Oh, okay, okay, I see what you mean," the Italian said.
As we drove home to the gym, mostly in silence, thunder and lightening lit up the entire skyline. Rain loomed ahead of us, but the storm passed around us. We drove on. As the dark night flashed alive, I listened to the conversations in Thai and Japanese, devoid of meaning to me. I sat empty, letting the world flow by and flow through me, absorbing as much of it as I could.
I closed my eyes and listened. I thought of how unpredictable and at times extreme life in Bangkok could be, how wild and wonderful life in a Muay Thai camp was. I savored it in its entirety, thinking of all the amazing things I had already done.
All amazing, if only I kept letting it be. Fun, if only I kept letting go of fear. An opportunity to truly grow and change, if only I kept relaxing. All "for the experience."
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