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Article Excerpt
Bunkerd Faphimai, a three-time world champion in Muay Thai, or Thai boxing, has a gym called Fight and Fitness, on Bryant Street in San Francisco, across from Dad's "No Collateral OK" Bail Bonds, on the tail end of bail-bond row. In the evening, the street is dark and deserted, the warehouses locked for the night; inside, the gym has the mesmerizing aura of a beehive, all yellow light and subsuming, languageless activity.
I first went there for a trial class last winter. Electronic music was droning from a set of speakers. An electric bell was beeping at thirty-second intervals, jump ropes ticked clocklike against the mats, and the movement of the speed bags produced a hypnotic triplet rhythm. I remembered a Turkish expression, "The bear knows forty stories, but all of them are about pears," which is used to describe someone who is always harping on the same subject. The boxers at the speed bags had a dogged eloquence that reminded me of that bear. On a high shelf near the entrance sat a green enamel Buddha with a glass of Gatorade.
I didn't notice Bunkerd until he was standing in front of me: a diminutive man in his early forties whose nose clearly had been broken several times. He instructed me to hold out my left hand, which he proceeded to bind in boxer's hand wraps. When he had finished both hands and closed the Velcro around my wrists, he patted my arm. I had never met anyone who so manifestly radiated good will.
After a week or two, I was hooked--I invested in my own hand wraps and a pair of beautiful red fourteen-ounce boxing gloves with "Bunkerd Sportswear" printed on them in white. (Bunkerd has his own line of gear, manufactured in Bangkok.) I started spending all my free time at the gym--drawn by the universal pleasure of kicking and punching one's fellow-man, and also by Bunkerd's personal magnetism. Every day, I was increasingly impressed by his gentle and lively demeanor, pedagogic skill, and volubility. It was difficult to label him. He couldn't be the "boxer with a heart of gold," because that is a fundamentally conflicted, ironic figure, and Bunkerd didn't seem to be in conflict about anything. He was more like a small person made entirely of gold. (He often wore a tiny hoop earring, a big gold watch, and a gold ring.) Although his English was limited, he spoke with an air of sincerity and persuasiveness, and didn't seem bothered by the thought that people might not understand him. His teachings were devoid of any tormented, get-inside-the-other-guy's-head rhetoric. A move either worked ("Easy knockout") or it didn't ("No fun"). "No fun," he said flatly, demonstrating an incorrect stance. "Lose balance."
One day soon after I started, I was having trouble with high kicks, and Bunkerd came over and began explaining something in a heartfelt, meaningful tone. "||| || ||||!" he said, an utterance that I pictured as a row of vertical lines, like Woodstock talking to Snoopy. "|||| ||||| ||| kick," he added, pointing at my leg.
As I stepped back to try another kick, my partner called, "Look out! I think he's going to grab your leg."
Sure enough, Bunkerd seized my leg, rotated it ninety degrees, moved my arm back, and executed the entire kick for me, as if I were a puppet. "That's right!" he said, beaming. "Perfect!"
I started to get the hang of it, and toward the end of class Bunkerd approached me from a distance. "|||| || ||||," he declared, raising one hand.
"Ah, thanks," I said, when it became clear that he was expecting some response.
"|||| || ||||!" he repeated, his boxing glove still aloft.
Finally, I understood what he was saying: "Give me five!"
Muay Thai is known as the Science of Eight Limbs, because fighters use their fists, feet, elbows, and knees. The basic movements include punches, high and low kicks, elbow strikes, and a wide variety of knee kicks. Of all the "eight limbs," Thai boxers are most partial to elbows and knees. Elbow strikes, which typically result in deep gashes to the face, are prohibited in most American fights.
Muay Thai was brought to the United States in 1968 by a retired Thai fighter named Surachai Sirisute. He opened a training camp in his back yard in Pomona, California, where his pupils included several Hell's Angels. Sirisute became a guru in the martial-arts community, worked with members of the Dallas Cowboys, the F.B.I., and the C.I.A., and was instrumental in the rise of Muay Thai in America throughout the seventies and eighties.
The first professional American Muay Thai championship was held in Los Angeles in 1974, under the designation of "full-contact karate." The main American sanctioning organizations--the International Sport Kickboxing Association (I.S.K.A.) and the U.S. Muay Thai Association (U.S.M.T.A.)--were established in the eighties and nineties. Today, there are four or five hundred fighters on the professional Muay Thai circuit in the United States--about ten per cent of them women--and thousands of amateurs.
In Thailand, there are hundreds of thousands of professional boxers and tens of millions of fans, many of them gamblers. Thais love to bet, and will bet on almost anything. (When the former Muay Thai champion Somluck Khamsing won a gold medal in Western-style boxing at the 1996 Olympics, people all over Thailand started buying lottery tickets corresponding to his license-plate number.) At the two most prestigious stadiums in Thailand, Lumpini and Rajadamnern, nearly every audience member has some money on the fights. Bookies and professional "prognosticators" offer odds not just on who will win each match but on the type of win (K.O. or T.K.O., unanimous or split decision), on the outcome of individual rounds, on whether the first blow will be struck by foot or by hand, and even on whether said blow will come from the left or the right. Thai politicians regularly endorse boxers as a means of gaining publicity. The King, the Prime Minister, the Mafia--everyone cares about Muay Thai. Boxing in Thailand is what poetry was in Soviet Russia: an aesthetic form treated as a vital affair of state.
Muay Thai is a ring sport, and low on philosophical rhetoric. The point is not to...
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