Fighter's Heart, A

by Sheridan, Sam

  Michael spoke a fair bit of Thai, and he fought at Samrong, the same place I would, and I went to see his last fight, against a Frenchman who trained out on the islands. It was agonizing to watch Michael chase this guy around, without the energy or the snap to connect with anything. The other guy wasn’t much better but was in slightly better shape, and that’s all it took. After that fight, Michael hung around, half-training, and then left Fairtex to go look at other, cheaper camps. He became convinced that his victories had been fixed, that he couldn’t have beat a Thai. I only spent maybe a month with Michael.

  Johnny Deroy, on the other hand, I spent four and half months with. He was nineteen and this was the first time he had ever been out of Montreal. After finishing high school, he flew to Thailand to pursue his dream of being a muay Thai fighter. Before he left Canada, he dreamt that he had been stung by a scorpion on his leg but survived it, and he had a scorpion tattooed on his leg. He had gone north at first to a camp at Chiang Mai and been ignored and robbed. Instead of giving up, he found his way to Fairtex.

  I was deeply impressed by his courage. When I was his age, I had gone backpacking around Europe, which is a far cry from Southeast Asia. Like Michael, Johnny didn’t like me at first, but we warmed up talking about movies and The Simpsons and then got along famously. He taught me to swear in gutter Canadian French, and I helped him with his English.

  He was small, thin, and leanly muscled with a narrow, angular face. He would stand in front of the full-length mirror with his arms raised and yell, “I’m nature’s greatest miracle!” completely tongue-in-cheek.

  I had been at Fairtex for about two months when Johnny got his first fight. Kum set it up back at his village, Chayaphum, where there was going to be a festival, and so naturally there would be fights. Johnny asked me to come (Michael had just left), and although it would break my training, I knew he would like to have a friend around. I was also curious to see some of the countryside.

  On the second weekend in May, we packed up and took a cab from Fairtex to the bus station, Kum slick in his Fairtex jacket and movie-star hair. The bus station was the size of a major airport, a massive, chaotic edifice of concrete. I didn’t see any farang among the maze of levels and stairs crowded with people, and it wasn’t surprising, because you would have to be able to speak Thai. There weren’t many signs or numbers that I could see—I would have been completely lost on my own. The farang buses all left from Khao San, where tourists were herded together and charged five times the normal price. In Thailand, there is a 300 percent tax on foreigners, and it’s still an inexpensive place. I had flown there on an airplane; compared to most Thais, I was a millionaire.

  We rode the bus, air-conditioned and smelling sweet, for about four hours, and then disembarked in a little town. Kum wandered around until he found a guy with a pickup truck who agreed to take us in the bed out to Kum’s house, about a forty-minute ride, with a few other Thais, who stared openly at us. The villages were havens for chickens and dogs, and the jungle walled us in.

  Kum’s house was a big place for the village, with a tiled ground floor lined with glass cabinets. There was running water; a single spigot in the house filled a large concrete cistern in the only bathroom, on the first floor. This cistern or pool was ubiquitous; you’d find it in restaurants and hostels in Bangkok. There was a plastic bowl floating in it for dumping water, usually freezing cold, over your head. There was no toilet paper, but we’d brought some.

  The second floor was bare, uneven, and unpainted wood. We slept in a big room there, in a line on little pads, a mosquito coil burning at our feet. Michael had convinced Johnny that the mosquito coils were deadly poison, and I agreed with him. That smoke has got to be toxic. Still, at times it was necessary. I woke up much earlier than the other two and crept from the creaking room.

  Kum had a wife, Dee, and two sons, the younger of whom was called Suphumvit and was beautiful in his hammock crib that rose in steep walls around his dense little body. Dee was also beautiful, with a warm matronly body and a smile that lit up her face and squeezed her eyes shut. She was always laughing, and the three of us got along great, Dee and Suphumvit and I. We sat on the front porch that morning while everyone else was still asleep, and I held Suphumvit and we ate mango. After I finished the mango, I put the plate down on the tile floor and washed the copius juice off my face and hands and arms. By the time I got back, the plate was crawling with several types of ants. I could hear Michael in my head singing, “Don’t worry, the ants will get it.”

  After everyone else woke up, we went out to get Johnny weighed in and find an opponent for him. The event was being organized at a wat, or temple; it was jammed with men and boys, and the drinking had already started. As Johnny weighed in, the Thais crowded around to see him. An older Thai wanted to fight him, a tall, thin, mustachioed man with tattoos on his shoulders, but Kum wouldn’t hear of it. I’m not sure whether Johnny would have killed this guy or this guy would have killed Johnny. They started with the music, traditional Thai stuff, and began a sort of mini-parade around the wat, dancing and twisting their arms. They gestured for Johnny to join in, and like a good sport, he did, stepping delicately in his imitation Tevas.

  We rode in the back of a different pickup that night out to the festival, and got there as the sun was setting. It was a small-town fairground, with Porta-Potties and garish lights strung up and little vendors selling everything. The area where the fights were going to be was cordoned off, and we went in there and found a corner of the grass to set up on.

  The ring was homemade and small and lit by a string of four bright, bare bulbs that hung diagonally over it. The fights began with really little kids, maybe eight or nine, but the crowd followed closely and shouted and cheered. The kids were deadly serious, although they couldn’t hit hard enough to hurt each other too much (although one little boy was cut by an elbow), and the crowd rejoiced ecstatically.

  Johnny was getting nervous, jumpy. He had been putting on a relaxed face all day, but now the nerves were setting in. He started to get his prefight massage from Kum, lying on a couple of towels on the pavement in the parking lot. Kum and I were going to be his cornermen.

  It was a wild scene, with a cheerful, carnival atmosphere. The thick outdoor crowd milled tightly around the ring, hundreds of people drunk and shouting. There wasn’t another foreign face for a hundred miles. Because his fight was delayed through three or four matches, Johnny was getting more anxious. He had warmed up and then cooled off, which wastes energy. Kum was also angry, and insulted. I think Johnny was something of a draw, and Kum was a man of some standing around town.

  Before the fight, Johnny danced the full wai khru and ram muay that the Lumpini fighters do, and the crowd roared its approval, cheering him on; the Thai fight enthusiasts always love it when the farang respect their traditions. The wai khru and ram muay are traditional dances that all Thai fighters perform before they fight, dances to honor their families and teachers. The dance appeases superstitious spirits but also centers the fighter, brings him back to himself. The musicians played throughout the fight, blowing and thumping with cigarettes in their hands.

  After he finished, Johnny looked at me and the heaving sea of brown faces and said, “I’ve never been so scared in my life.”

  Johnny had a right to be scared. He was fighting a Thai who had been born into the sport. The Thai looked young, but just the fact that he was Thai was scary enough: He might be sixteen, but have five years and fifty fights.

  In the beginning of the fight, Johnny dominated. He was bigger and stronger, and every time they clinched, Johnny would throw his man to the ground. But there was a cost. He was too tense, too worked up, and tiring quickly. After every clinch, his hands were lower; he was obviously struggling for air. Kum was trying to get through to him, calling, “Sabai sabai,” and I was translating, yelling, “Relax!” at him. Kum picked it up, and trying to be heard over the din, began yelling with me, “Re-lax!”

  Johnny counted
himself out in the third—just lay back on the ropes and gestured “No more” to the referee. The other fighter couldn’t believe it and threw his hands in the air like he’d just won a title. I was angry with John at first, although I understood the line of fear and exhaustion he was walking. He wasn’t hurt at all, just completely out of breath, and I knew within twenty seconds he was going to be wondering why he had quit like that. He was quiet on the way home. We sat in the pickup bed and watched the stars.

  Eventually, we talked a little about the fight, just Johnny and me. We came through to a rationale. The problem was breathing. Whenever Johnny was in the clinch, straining to throw his opponent down, for a split second he would hold his breath. This was a deadly mistake because with muay Thai you are operating at your anaerobic threshhold for almost the entire fight. Those split-second breath holds were killing Johnny. Kum and the other trainers can’t talk about this with us (here the language gap makes itself felt), but breathing is critical. In the clinch, what the Thais do is stay loose, stay on their toes, and breathe. There isn’t any straining or wrestling, or if there is, it is quick, smooth moves in rhythm with the breathing.

  Johnny was unhurt, but his voice was shaky. I could tell he was angry and a little ashamed to have lost the fight, but as we talked and figured out what had happened, he cheered up, and by the time the sun rose the next day, he was back to his old form, cracking jokes about everything he saw.

  The next morning, Kum commandeered a truck, and we rode through the countryside in the hot sun, past rice paddies and thick forest, and stopped and wandered up to a waterfall. We all stripped down to our underwear for a dip and annoyed the hell out of a Thai teenager and his girlfriend who were up there for a make-out session.

  After the swim, Kum took us to a Buddhist monastery, a huge complex up in the mountains that stood on a cliff and overlooked the valley. There were monkeys in dismal cages and a strange sculpture garden depicting the afterlife of a bad person. It was deeply disturbing, a wide area filled with hundreds of human-size wooden carvings. There were demons with animal heads and human bodies attacking the humans: cutting into a pregnant woman’s stomach, piercing eyeballs—real serious gore. The carvings were all painted to look lifelike. Over all this presided two huge statues, twenty feet tall, thin and wooden in the same style: a man and a woman with their skin flayed off and their eyes melted out and their tongues hanging past their waists.

  We went back to Kum’s house and then wandered down through the one-road village to the square and grabbed some folding chairs. We sat there for a parade of elephants, all dressed out in finery and ridden by monks and children. Some of the elephants were walking billboards for Red Bull and Coca-Cola. There were a few hundred people in the square, mostly children running and shrieking and carrying on. Several columns of dancers in traditional costume came through. Although we were all exhausted from the unfamiliar sun—living at the camp, we never got any sun, as we were training under cover and resting through the days—we sat stoically through it.

  After the parade was finished, we wandered back down to Kum’s house. On the way there I saw an elephant handler, a big, heavily muscled, tattooed guy punch his wife, hard, in the stomach, and Johnny saw it, too. I thought we should do something, but Johnny, from inner-city Montreal, said to just stay out of it. I looked around for Kum, but he was far behind us. The moment passed, and I did nothing. So much for the tough fighters.

  Then there was the participatory parade around the village that we joined in—strangely crowded for such a small village—an endless line of trucks and vans and people. There was music, and we danced as we walked, and people sprayed us with water, which was welcome in the stifling heat. The Thais seemed happy to have us there, and we were happy to be there, willing to enjoy ourselves.

  That night we caught the rickety old run-down bus that passed through town. It was full of people and children and chickens, so we clambered up onto the luggage rack and prostrated ourselves on the bags and baskets. The night air was thick with fat white locusts. We stayed as flat as possible, with our mouths clamped shut, watching the stars roll by. It was a mad, dreamlike ride, and I kept eyeballing the cheap, shitty welds that held the rack to the bus and thinking that we might go around a corner and the rack would shear off, that this is how tourists die in Southeast Asia, but the night was shimmering and the magic of travel and silence took away my free will.

  Back in camp, time stretched on and on, but things were changing. The trainers began to notice me. Yaquit, a big, handsome Thai who looked a little like Elvis, would sometimes train me, and he would kick the crap out of me and chuckle with delight. Kum would watch me kick the bag and frown and shake his head, then demonstrate a fuller extension or a thrust of the hips. Slowly, Apidej took more and more of an interest in me, and when I started doing whatever he told me without question—like eating a raw egg in the morning with a Sprite—he decided that I was his property.

  Anthony would at times come and lean on the ropes and watch us train. We’d chat and he’d ask me if I was ready to fight. At Fairtex, the farang could fight when they felt they were ready, but I’d put him off for two months while I was still getting my bearings. Then one day, as I was unwrapping my hands and covered in a cool film of sweat, Anthony, dressed in his usual black, sidled up to the ring. We bullshitted about training for a few minutes, and then he raised his eyebrows and asked again if I wanted a fight. “Sure, why not?” I said. He nodded, satisfied, and walked away. I hung up my wraps to dry in the afternoon breeze and realized that I had just committed to stepping into the ring for a professional muay Thai fight. Just like that.

  Once a month the Lumpini fighters from Fairtex would go to Lumpini stadium, and two or more would have fights. These were big-money fights—career fights—with purses of eighty thousand baht (around two thousand dollars U.S.), which is serious money in Thailand. A large part of the camp would go with them, a retinue of trainers and observers and fighters dressed in their Sunday best. We would leave in a parade of vehicles, from tricked-out, low-slung pickups (Yaquit used to drag-race his) to a decrepit old van.

  Lumpini stadium was what I came to Thailand for. It epitomizes the romantic lure of Southeast Asia: the heat, the noise, the adrenaline, the betting, and the wildness. On a big night, Lumpini feels full of possibilities, with a dark and bloodstained edge. The concrete amphitheater probably holds anywhere from four to ten thousand people. There are three main sections of seats: The uppermost section consists of benches; it’s where seats are the cheapest and also where the gambling is the heaviest. The middle section has folding chairs that waitresses navigate to bring beer and food. Ringside seats are the most expensive, about twenty dollars U.S. There can be anywhere from nine to twelve fights in a night, with the main-draw fights scheduled about three-quarters of the way through the evening.

  Although my fight was not likely to happen for at least another several months—and when it did, it was not going to be in front of four to six thousand people in the Lumpini stadium—Philip wanted me to be a cornerman for Neungsiam’s comeback fight. He wanted me to get used to being in the ring in front of people, to confront that stage fright. The cornermen in muay Thai are directly involved with the fighters during the fight, much more than they are in Western boxing. When a round ends, both cornermen dart from outside the ropes and set up a stool and begin vigorously massaging and rubbing the fighter’s arms and legs. The previous week, Neungsiam had shown me what he wanted.

  In the back room there was an assembly line processing the fighters: A fighter stripped down for a vigorous massage with hot liniment, which had the effect of warming him, fully, without him having to waste a drop of energy. He then had Vaseline smeared on his face and chest so that the gloves would slide off his skin and not cut him. When his massage was finished, the fighter got off the table and the next one took his place, with his trainer as his masseur. After the oil massage, the fighter got his cup tied on and put on his fight shorts, emblazoned with his name
and the name of his trainer or gym. He warmed up a bit, but not too hard, with a few minutes of shadowboxing. His trainer tied his armbands on, recited short Buddhist or Catholic prayers, and then the mongkol—a headdress that used to be made from rolled-up Buddhist scrolls but is now made of decorative plastic—was placed on his head. The mongkol, usually blessed by a priest, helped protect the fighter from harm. Fighters sported different styles of mongkols, some with tassels, some without, many with a Las Vegas garishness. While all this was happening, you could hear the pipes and drums tinking and plinking in their dissonant way, and the crowd outside shouting “Oh-way!” in response to a fighter’s good technique or solid hit.

  I watched Neungsiam get lubed and then start his warm-up, marching up and down the alleys in the backstage room, throwing a few punches. He seemed extremely confident and calm, even eager. He received his blessings and had his robe threaded onto him, and then Kum and I went out in our traditional red vests and took up position behind Neungsiam’s corner. Although I knew what to do, and it wasn’t that complicated, I was still a little nervous.

  Neungsiam’s bout was one of the main events of the evening, and a key step in his comeback. The Thais called him “Mr. Smart,” and if you watched him fight, you knew exactly what they were talking about: He was cold and calculating and explosive. Above all, he was patient, his dark eyes missing nothing, blocking everything, and he loved to punch. A fight was just finishing and Neungsiam was up next.

  A typical muay Thai fight starts out slowly. The trainers or promoters are good at matching fighters, and there are few knockouts. The fighters begin by feeling each other out, probing for an obvious weakness. The first round or two might see just a few kicks and blocks per round; the fighters are aware that they must carefully conserve energy for the ordeal of the rounds deeper into the fight. The later rounds, the third and fourth, are where the fights are usually decided. The fighters often go straight into the clinch as they tire, looking to land knees for the most points. The pace quickens, and there is no way to communicate how strenuous this is. Going twelve rounds in Western boxing is a breeze compared to going five in muay Thai—at least, that’s according to Apidej, who had boxed professionally as well.