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Month: February 2015

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Pornsanae Sitmonchai Retires

Muay Thai Legend Pornsanae Sitmonchai Retires

Life After Fighting:

When Pornsanae Sitmonchai stepped into the ring in Bangkok’s Omnoi Stadium last Valentine’s Day, not even the owner of his gym knew he intended it to be his last fight. The Sitmonchai team prepped him backstage, wrapped his hands and rubbed him with oil. Pornsanae, normally exuberant and outgoing, pulled into himself and concentrated on the battle ahead.

It was a high-stakes fight; he was defending his Omnoi title. He freely admits he’s afraid of losing every time he steps into the ring, “but this fight was different,” he said. “It was even worse because I knew it was my last.” It was a lot of pressure, and he was bearing it mostly alone.

He’d been on the fence for weeks about retiring, hadn’t even fully decided to retire until a few days before the Omnoi match. About a week before the fight, he approached his close friend and fellow fighter Jun (Thepnimit Sitmonchai), and told him about his plan to retire. He asked Jun not to tell P’ Ae, the gym’s owner. Jun agreed to keep quiet. He and Pornsanae had grown up together, training and living alongside one another at Sitmonchai for the past nearly 20 years. For the few days leading up to the fight, Jun and a handful of Pornsanae’s other closest friends at Sitmonchai were the only ones who knew this fight would be his last.

None of Pornsanae’s friends was surprised to hear he wanted to retire. At age 34, Pornsanae has amassed around 300 fights and a reputation for a wildly entertaining, aggressive, unrelenting fighting style. With that style, however, comes the danger of injury, especially the cumulative effects of knockouts and concussions.

Recently married and now with a young family, Pornsanae had been questioning his decision to keep fighting since his daughter was born nearly two years ago. In the ring, his aggressive tactics suggested fearlessness. Outside the ring, however, he worried about the effects such a career might have on his health. “When I was younger,” he said, “I was never afraid of anything. But now that I have a family, I’m afraid I’ll die soon if I keep fighting.” His interactions with other pro fighters, mostly Western-style boxers, gave him pause. “You can tell when you talk to these boxers that most of them don’t function at a hundred percent anymore. It scares me that someday I might become like that.”

The first sign of trouble happened during a plane flight in early 2013. Pornsanae had just lost a fight by decision to Michael “Tomahawk” Thompson in Australia. It was a full-rules, caged Muay Thai show in which the fighters wore MMA gloves, far smaller than the gloves Pornsanae had been using in his 20-year career.

On the plane home from Australia, Pornsanae’s head started aching. This was unusual for him, and he worried about what it signified. Thompson hadn’t knocked him out, but Pornsanae had been given two standing eight-counts during the three rounds. Once back in Bangkok, he hurried to the hospital.

He told the doctors he’d been fighting since he was 11 years old—more than 20 years of shots to the head. The doctors understood his career as a Muay Thai fighter meant he had to continue fighting to support his family. They told him to keep coming back for regular checkups, gave him pills they said would increase blood flow to his brain.

Pornsanae’s fans and fight critics were taking notice. Comments and blog posts started showing up, calling for him to retire, alleging that Sitmonchai Gym was forcing him to fight. In Thailand, however, it’s not always a straightforward transition from earning a living as a fighter to earning one as a trainer, or any other job. Hundreds of high-level Muay Thai boxers retire every year, often with no certain method to support themselves. Some fighters become trainers; many do not. Motorcycle taxi stands and fruit stalls are populated with former fighters trying to get by.

Like many other fighters approaching the end of their career, Pornsanae felt the pressure. “You get to a point where you can’t fight, so you have to find some new experiences, do something else. I can’t be a boxer forever, and I have to find other ways to make money. Most of all, I have to think about my family.”

“People were analyzing his knockouts and fighting style, talking about his life and what he should do, without actually talking to him to see what his wants and needs were,” said Abigail McCullough, foreign liaison of Sitmonchai and a resident of the gym for the past five years. “They have no idea what his life is like. I was getting pissed off at these people who were writing about Pornsanae’s life from their positions of privilege, espousing to know what’s best for him. It’s creepy moral arrogance. It’s all well and good to say he should be retiring, but are you going to pay for his kid’s food? If you’ve been here [in Thailand] any length of time, you know these fighters fight for survival. It’s how they provide for themselves and their families. Other people’s values, all the critics saying he needs to retire from fighting, it doesn’t apply in his world. Everyone knows he’s getting old and that he needs to stop fighting. But this is the current state of Muay Thai. It’s changing all the time, and now luckily these retired fighters are finally getting better options for their post-fight careers. But the transition is not always easy.”

When he stepped into the Omnoi ring for the last fight of his career, Pornsanae wasn’t thinking about what he’d do after fighting. He told himself this was it, his last fight, so put in one hundred percent. He wanted to leave a legacy, what he called “a beautiful history.”

From the red corner, Pornsanae squared off against his opponent, Petch GL Suit. The fight lasted only two rounds. Pornsanae knocked Petch down with an elbow in the second round. Petch jumped back to his feet quickly but shakily, received a count from the ref. Looking to end it before Petch could fully recover, Pornsanae pushed forward, fired a sharp low kick, stepped in and leveled Petch with his punches.

Petch collapsed onto his back. The ref waved it off, fight over. Pornsanae raised his hands and danced around the ring, leaped onto the neutral corner and faced the cheering gamblers in the stands, mouth agape in the half-crazed ecstasy of knowing he did it, he retired as a champion, an old fighter at 34 and now permanently a legend in Muay Thai.

Back in the dressing room after the fight, Pornsanae broke the news to gym owner P’ Ae that he was officially retiring from fighting. P’ Ae and Pornsanae had grown up sharing a room; they were like brothers. Keeping the secret from him had been hard. Pornsanae apologized for not telling P’ Ae sooner, saying it would have been too stressful before such an important fight. P’ Ae was understanding, and completely supportive of his decision to retire.

Pornsanae was relieved to let his secret out to everyone at the gym. Making the decision to retire and then keeping it from his fight family had been an emotional burden. “He was afraid even to tell me,” said Abigail, Jun’s partner and close friend of Pornsanae. “But the truth is, we all wanted him to retire. We wanted him to take care of himself, didn’t want his health to suffer. He himself had said a few times that he was getting too old.”

According to Abigail, one of the biggest hurdles to Pornsanae’s retirement was money. “He didn’t have anything that would pay as well as his fighting career so we all knew he was inclined to keep fighting. He has a new family so of course he wants to make as much money as he can while he still can.”

What prompted Pornsanae to hang up his gloves once and for all was a call from Evolve MMA in Singapore, a highly regarded gym famous for its coaching staff of retired champions. The day after Pornsanae’s Omnoi fight, Evolve MMA announced he would soon be joining their team as a trainer.

In his 23-year career, Pornsanae has seen the sport of Muay Thai go from being nearly exclusively Thai to internationally famous. This foreign interest in Muay Thai is providing him a smooth path from famous fighter to highly sought trainer. Pornsanae, who was born into a poor family in rural Kanchanaburi Province, will be making a base salary of approximately 100,000 baht a month (about $3,100), not counting additional private lessons. He’ll potentially make more in a month than many of his countrymen make in a year. Not bad for a high school dropout who grew up fighting for a living.

Pornsanae is scheduled to depart Thailand in March 2015. He plans to work the next few years in Singapore, taking a break every four months to visit his family in Thailand. Working as a fighter and now a trainer abroad present challenges to his family, but both the financial and emotional stability of his family are paramount to him. “When I was growing up,” he said, “my parents were never very warm and we were not very close. Now that I have my own family, I want to give them the warmth I didn’t have growing up. Unfortunately while I was fighting, I had to be very focused and disciplined, so I didn’t have much time for my family. Now I’m going away to Singapore, which is necessary because I have to provide for my family, but I plan to come home as often as I can, and have them come visit me too.”

Knowing the kind of person Pornsanae is, some of his gym friends have started making bets as to how long he’ll last at his new job. “Some of us think he won’t last more than a few months away,” Abigail said. “He’s such a homebody! He hates being away from home.”

The high salary and good working environment are appealing to Pornsanae, but what he’s most looking forward to about Singapore, he says, is being so close to Universal Studios. “I can’t wait to bring my family there. I’ve been to a lot of countries, but Singapore is my favorite because Universal Studios is right there and I can go all the time now.

“I won’t stay in Singapore forever, though,” he said. “I’m doing this to earn money for my family, and we will ultimately stay in Thailand. Kanchanaburi is my home; Sitmonchai is my home. I will always come back here.”

Source: www.fightland.vice.com

Muay Thai admin

Life of a Pad-Man

Life of a Pad-Man

A Muay Thai Trainer’s Remorse

He was splitting coconuts with a machete outside his elderly aunt’s cement-block house when we approached. He acknowledged me politely and gave my friend Frances a wide, welcoming grin.

“This is Dam,” Frances said. “He’s the best trainer I’ve ever worked with.”

He invited us to sit on a woven grass mat laid out on the cemented porch. “Here,” he handed us a pot. “Have some coconut water.”

Dam’s aunt emerged from her one-room house, stepped into the sunlight and squatted next to us. “What you want for dinner? We have fish,” she said, hobbling around for the ingredients. Permanently bent at the waist from a lifetime of working in rice fields, unable to stand up straight without pain, she lives her life close to the ground, fluidly moving between sitting, squatting, and half-standing.

“Dam stays here sometimes,” Frances told me. “He bounces around and stays with various family and friends in the area. He’s homeless. Dam was living in Bangkok until I called him a few months ago. I told him I wanted him to come back to the village, be a full-time trainer at our gym Giatbundit.”

Dam had been working as a motorcycle taxi driver in Bangkok, holding pads for the kids at his friend’s gym in the evenings. When Frances called and offered him a job back in his hometown, he packed up his Bangkok life and came home.

Extended family of Dam by marriage, Frances began training with Dam at Bor. Breechaa Gym in Bangkok about 10 years ago. “Best trainer I’ve ever worked with,” she said again. “Good talker too. He’ll ask you for a bottle of Lao Khao, and then he’ll tell you some stories, whether you want to hear them or not.”

“What’s Lao Khao?” I asked.

“Thai rice whiskey, cheaper than moonshine.”

This was my first time meeting Dam but I thought I’d heard his name before. I remembered my interview with Namkabuan, a former champion and now gym owner in Buriram. He had mentioned someone named Dam, said he was the “number one pad-man” in Thailand.

“Yeah,” Frances said, “it’s the same guy. Everyone knows he’s a great trainer, and everyone knows he’s also a drunk. He’s famous for both.”

We had stopped by Dam’s aunt’s house for Frances to pick up clams and crabs for dinner, but I wanted to know more about Dam. He was tall, bigger than most of the other people I’d seen in the village. There was a sadness to him hidden among his initial exuberance. Here he was, the best trainer my friend Frances had ever worked with, now homeless in his own village among the rice paddies.

“He’s bad,” Frances said. “Dam’s a broken man. I’ve been hearing stories about him since I first arrived in this village nearly 10 years ago. We train here in the village now because he got kicked out of Giatbundit. He punched out a fighter, broke his teeth, because the fighter said something about how he shouldn’t criticize others without looking at himself first.”

Frances calls him a product of his surroundings. “They say he’s a drunk, yet they pay him in Lao Khao.”

His childhood was spent fighting in Isaan, under the guidance of a local gambler who appointed himself as Dam’s de facto manager. With no gym and no trainer, Dam learned by fighting, watching other boys fight, shadowboxing in his backyard and hitting a spare rice sack stuffed with whatever he could find. “It was a luxury to hit the rice bags,” he said. “They broke down quickly, and they were hard to find because they were needed for farming.”

He told me about the slow evolution from fighter to trainer, starting in his early 20s when he moved to Bangkok and volunteered to hold pads for the other fighters when he felt the gym’s trainers weren’t giving them enough attention before big fights.

“I just wanted to help out,” he said, “and later I realized I was better suited to being a trainer than a fighter. It’s a hard life, though. I was training top names who were winning big fights, but I was barely making enough to live.

“That’s the problem with being a trainer at a a lot of gyms: you’re never paid well, never paid on time, no steady salary. Gyms naturally go through ups and downs, and it affects your wages. It’s common not to get paid at all. You’re given a place to stay and food to eat. You don’t dare ask for more.”

He looked sad, almost defeated. “Okay,” I said to him, “I want you to tell me a story: I want to hear about your biggest regret.”

His hand loosened around the coconut and he held the machete still. “My biggest regret?” he said. He paused, took a deep breath. Tears began to well in his eyes. I looked to Frances, mouthed, “Is he okay?” She pushed him for the story.

“I was 18,” he said, “supposed to fight twice in one day. In the morning I fought and won on Channel 4 in Khon Kaen, then we drove to the other venue at night.

“My opponent was an Isaan champion. I felt so lucky to fight him. I wanted a title shot, and I’d already beaten him once before. I knew beating him a second time would give me a shot at the title.

“Everyone thought I was going to win. I remember the odds were five to two, in my favor. They called the fight a ‘dream match-up’ because my opponent was a famous local champion who had a lot of big-name gamblers in his corner, and I was an unknown, but the local gamblers knew I’d already beaten him and they thought I could beat him again. Even my family was there, and they put their money on me too.”

Dam paused. He stopped and rubbed his eyes, trying to hold back tears. His aunt pushed him and told him to start helping with dinner. Dam ignored her, too engrossed in his story. “I don’t want to remember,” he said.

“I was gearing up to face the champion. And then… they told me I had to throw the fight.

“The owner of my gym said they needed money. ‘The other boys at the gym don’t have enough to eat,’ he said. ‘You have to throw this fight so we can feed the kids.’ The odds were in my favor, so whoever bet against me would have made a lot of money if I didn’t win. My own gym bet against me secretly, then told me to lose.

“I was only 18, barely more than a kid myself. I had everything going for me back then. But I had to do it. I had to throw the fight. When the owner of the gym asks you to do something, you do it. You have to. He owns the gym, he owns your contract, he owns you. ‘The kids need food, the kids need food,’ he kept saying. And it was true, the gym was poor, the other boxers did need food. I wanted to help.

“So I did what they said I had to do.

“I wasn’t even paid for the fight. The boss said he needed my purse for the gym. There was nothing I could say or do about any of it.”

Dam stopped talking abruptly to wipe tears from his eyes. I looked at Frances uncomfortably. No one had ever cried during an oral history interview before.

She was unfazed. “Alcoholics living in the past,” she said, “and now they’re stuck with no way to make money and move on from life after Muay Thai.”

Dam tried to compose himself before continuing.

“You want to know what the worst part of fighting is? It’s not the pain or the cuts on your face or the training or anything like that. The worst part of fighting is the humiliation when you lose, when everyone knows you should have won, when you know you should have won. Having to walk out of the ring with everyone jeering and booing at you, calling you worthless. Stupid. Weak.

“They all yelled and screamed at me, threw their beer cans at me after that fight. I just had to keep quiet and take it. I couldn’t defend myself, couldn’t tell them that it wasn’t my fault, that I didn’t want it to be this way. My family was there watching me and I couldn’t even look them in the eye as I left the ring. All the money my friends and family lost on me that night… I can never pay it back.

“But that’s how you have to throw a fight — you have to make sure no one can tell and that everyone thinks it’s real. I kept it a secret for years, from everyone I loved. I was so ashamed.

“It happened 30 years ago, but I still think about it often. It messed me up in the head. In the heart, too.

“Look at me now, I have nothing to show for any of it. I was a good fighter, and I trained top fighters, helped others become champions, and I never got my own shot for anything bigger. I’d be a different man now if I hadn’t thrown that fight.

“Being a trainer is hard, being a fighter is hard. People use you and then cast you aside. It’s a harsh world. Now I have a young son, not even a year old. I don’t want him to go through what I had to endure. I won’t ever let him be a Muay Thai fighter.”

Frances was the first to break the silence on our drive out of the village.

“You know his son?” she said. “He’s just a baby, but he’s going to be a fighter, no matter what Dam wants. He was born into that life. Dam couldn’t escape, and his son won’t escape either.”

Source: www.fightland.vice.com