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nazee's fight
here is nazee (yellow shorts) delivering a gut-shocking front kick last night i put aside excuses that i was exhausted from two training sessions, and i went out to watch some fights in patong.
watching muay thai fights is pretty cool in the first place (i saw some in koh phangan last year) but it is especially cool when one of your trainers is fighting. last night, one of our intermediate trainers, nazee, was the main event, the last fight. he was fighting this guy as a rematch.
first of all, it was 300 baht for a bus to take us there and back, so aviad and i decided to take our motorbikes instead. it couldn't possibly be that difficult to find. famous last words.
i have found that, when it comes to giving directions, thai people are far more friendly than they are knowledgable. we had a map, but even this was unhelpful. this is a typical direction:
beth: how do i get to patong stadium?
thai 1: ah, go straight, then left.
beth: how do i get to patong stadium?
thai 2: (pointing back the way i came) very far this way.
beth: how do i get to patong stadium?
thai 3: (back the way i came AGAIN) this way, and turn around.
it took over an hour to get to the fights, and we missed the first one.
the fights start with the youngest kids, then the womens' rounds, and then the men's rounds, ending in the main event, which i mentioned, was nazee.
the youngest kids couldnt have been more than 7 or 8, and already their lean, brown backs rippled with muscles. they were so short that they were just barely tall enough to see over the third rope around the ring. their parents and trainers screamed from the red and blue corners, and they were fierce and fiesty little kids. very impressive.
each fight had progressively older kids, and i felt like we were actually watching the same kids grow up from fight to fight.
there was one womens' fight. it was a foreigner against a thai woman. the weird thing was that the thai woman seemed really out of shape and when she fought, she didn't seem to have any muay thai technique. she gave the foreign woman a run for her money for a bit, but within the first round it was over with a single front kick to the thai woman's stomach, which apparently resulted in a knock out. (not literally, but the thai woman didn't want to go on.) it felt a bit staged. someone said that it was common to just pay some person to go in and fight the foreigner for their first fight, that person having little or no muay thai training at all, so that the foreigner would win. i dont know if it was such an example, but it was kind of strange.
the men's fights were pretty impressive. as exhausted as i was (my bedtime is usually around 9:30 or 10pm, and the fights went til midnight), it was impossible not to get revved up about some of these moves. one fight ended in an actual knock out. one guy's elbow to the other guy's jaw, and the guy was flat on his back with a bunch of people around him making sure he could still breathe, etc.
finally nazee. man, what a fight. both fighters were very impressive. nazee started with this graceful gazelle leap and punch to the top of the head. i can't tell you how loudly we all cheered. it is one thing to watch a fight, and another to watch your own teacher fight. watching him put into action what he has been telling us to do every day, but doing it with so much more power and ease.
in the end, nazee lost, i think during the third round. knock out. a very gut-wrenching thing to watch. he was ok, though, and we cheered him out of the ring. it was a really impressive fight.
driving home was even more ridiculous. aviad decided to go out for a while, so i weathered the friendly-but-useless thai directions on my own. eventually i found my way along a long, deserted, dark, winding road for about half and hour. the only light was the feeble glow of my headlight and the occasional friendly road reflector, assuring me that there was indeed a road in the blackness ahead. all i could think about were the sheer number of venomous snakes that live in the forests here, including king cobras, and i waited for them to drop on me from the trees (apparently i believed them to all live in trees). and then i started seeing signs for, can you believe it, ELEPHANT CROSSING. at which point i was sure i'd be the hapless victim of a midnight stampede. what a cool country.
needless to say, i did make it home finally, at about 1:30, and slept through first training session. today is wednesday, so we will do sparring today, and my shins are not looking forward to that. ah well, it will just have to make me stronger...
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