Once I started boxing, I prized hammering away on a big bag, working the speed bag, running stairs, jumping rope. Of course, I still smoked two packs a day and drank five nights a week—this was college. Sparring with headgear comes as a revelation, because you get hit and it doesn’t really hurt. It becomes like a chess match: You think, Hey, he jumped back when I did this, so next time I’ll fake this and actually do that—and then you have the satisfaction of burying a hook to the side of his head. There is the battle rage that is so enthralling, the berserker emotion that doesn’t discern friend from foe but simply rejoices in blood. This was the feeling I was after. My adrenal glands were triggered and I was fully engaged in the moment: Someone was trying to kill me. The door opened on a new world.
By senior year, I was boxing less and less. College was winding down, and I was wondering what the hell comes next. I was signed up with the Marine Corps, but also to go to Honduras with the Peace Corps, both to begin right after graduation. I vacillated daily, hourly. I used to say, “Peace Corps or Marine Corps, just so long as it’s hard core.” Hilarious. Then, about two weeks after graduation in 1998, my godmother told me that a friend of hers had just bought a yacht and was looking for crew. I sent him my scrawny résumé and we talked and I kept my mouth shut (that essential survival skill learned in the merchant marine) and didn’t reveal my cluelessness, and he hired me. He was going to pay me good money to help fix up his yacht and sail it around the world with him. It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, impossible to refuse, and so I spent a year and a half on the boat, seeing her through three captains, five stewardesses, two engineers, and a variety of guests. I made it all the way to Australia, where I finally had had enough of being part of a rich man’s toy and stepped off onto dry land.
I was twenty-four, in Darwin, Australia, loaded with cash, and I planned not to work again until I’d spent it all. I got a room in a hostel and started working out in a local gym; I stopped smoking and began thinking again about fighting. It occurred to me, slowly, that I could return to fighting now, without distractions. I started taking classes in muay Thai, the Thai variation of kickboxing that utilizes elbows and knees, with the local Aussies. The instructor, a thin, bald, narrow-faced former professional fighter named Mike, had trained in Thailand.
Muay Thai is considered by the sport-fighting world to be the premier “stand-up” ring sport, for the simple reason that it allows the most dangerous moves. Western-style boxing is all hands, and punches must be above the waist. Kickboxing, full-contact tae kwon do, and karate all allow kicks, but they’re restricted to above the waist. Muay Thai, on the other hand, allows kicks anywhere, which dramatically changes the style of fighting, as leg kicks are quicker, nastier, faster, and easier to execute. Perhaps more telling is that muay Thai also allows fighting in the clinch. In Western boxing, the clinch—when fighters come together and lock up arms—is a safe haven. The clinch in muay Thai is very different: The fighters wrestle for control, looking to throw knees and elbows; the clinch is where most of the damage is done.
After a few weeks training with Mike, when he could see I was getting more serious, he told me that months spent training in Thailand were worth years of training anywhere else, including his gym. He also said, “You can either be tough or you can be quick.” When I asked him which he was, he smiled ruefully and said, “Quick.” I thought that maybe I could fake tough.
I left Darwin with Craig, the engineer on the yacht I had crewed on, traveling in a Kombi-van with flowers painted all over it. We spent a few months driving across Australia, telling girls we were professional long-board surfers but the waves were too small for us today. Along the way, I kept thinking about muay Thai, and at campsites I would throw three hundred kicks with each leg at trees, amusing and occasionally alarming the other backpackers.
We ended the road trip in Sydney, and I found my way into a gym where I met a short, mean-looking Maori who had spent a year training in Thailand. His legs were a lattice of scars and veins: In muay Thai, the leg kick uses the shin as a striking point, and the only way to counter a shin kick is to block it with your own shin. Shin-on-shin contact is very painful—at least until all the nerve endings there have died. The Maori told me that if I was going to get serious about muay Thai, I should cover an empty bottle with a little oil and vigorously roll the bottle up and down my shins while pressing hard, a procedure that if repeated enough times would eventually kill the nerve endings.
I started doing the bottle rub back in the hostel while watching The Simpsons and figuring out how I could become a real muay Thai fighter. I had the money, I had the time, I had the inclination—so I decided to train in Thailand. I’d always wondered what would happen if I could train all the time, like the Shaolin monks who were raised in the temple, the samurai, the Spartans. No drinking, or smoking, or coffee, or girls—just fighting all the time.
I wanted to find a contact before I went over to Thailand and on a whim bought a copy of International Kickboxer magazine, which featured a full-page ad for a muay Thai camp called Fairtex. I began a tentative e-mail correspondence with its manager, and he was matter of fact: Come on over and stay as long as you can, no experience necessary.
I arrived in Bangkok around midnight on Valentine’s Day of ’00. A gentle, round-faced Thai named Han picked me up at the airport and drove me the hour to Fairtex, where he unceremoniously deposited me at my room. There were two men inside asleep when I stumbled in and flicked on the lights; they half-woke to curse me out in French before I hurriedly shut off the light and lay down on a mattress on the floor.
I was too jet-lagged to sleep, and tossed and turned in the dark with the snoring of strangers in my ears, the unfamiliar heat thick in the air. I stared at the ceiling for long minutes or hours, ears pricking at strange noises. Finally, I crept from my room, trying not to wake my unseen roommates, and padded down the stairs into the green wash of morning. The camp was silent, still and deserted. I glanced briefly at the boxing rings; the heavy bags hung like a neat row of lynched corpses. I could hear dogs barking and a nearby cock marking the morning.
I found my way out of the camp through leafy bowers over cracking concrete and scurrying geckos. At the end of the driveway, at a loss for which way to go, I turned right and walked up onto a curving concrete bridge. It was warm and light already, although nobody else seemed to be up yet. The sun was low in the eastern sky, nearly obscured by the muggy clouds of gray and pearl. The river was still and black and silver, and a low mist hung on it, getting thicker farther upstream. Rickety wooden houses and piers stood in the white shrouds of fog; a lone Thai woman with a broad straw hat poled her boat through the murk. I finally felt the full strangeness of where I was, this movie set of the Far East, the mystic Orient.
That first day I didn’t train, on the say-so of the camp manager, an American-born Chinese named Anthony, the guy I’d been e-mailing. He told me to let my body adjust after the long journey, so I sat and watched.
One of the first things one notices about muay Thai is the youth of the fighters: The boys are often six or seven when they climb into the ring for their first fights, and they’re generally considered to peak at about seventeen. Muay Thai, like many of the ring fighting arts, is a way out for the very poor. The prize money can support families who can’t afford to send their children to school. It is an extremely grueling sport, not only the fights themselves, but the training. Most Thais are surprised that anyone would pay to come to train in muay Thai, because it is such a horrible, painful way to live.
I sat next to the far ring, which was reserved for the Lumpini fighters—Lumpini is the premier fighting stadium in Thailand, where the best muay Thai fighters in the world compete—and watched them train. They were working the pad rounds, which I learned are the heart of training. A trainer with shin guards, a thick belly pad, and pads on his forearms takes the fighter through rounds of kicking, punching, elbows, and knees. The noise was tremendous: The fighters yelled with every kick and every punch. In other martial arts, you execute moves at 70 percent of full speed and power; in muay Thai, everything is 100 percent all the time. The din of twenty men and boys all yelling and hitting is a strange, desperate noise. That noise was my introduction to the urgency of a real fight.
The trainers were older, heavier Thais with battered faces and scarred brows. They would drill their fighters relentlessly, switching through positions smoothly, and the fighters would follow, kicking and punching and kneeing, screaming something like “Aish,” while the noise of their legs hitting the pads crackled like gunshots. The fighters resembled oiled, tireless machines, functioning beautifully. Competence displayed is always fun to watch, but this kind of speed and power and skill was mesmerizing.
The next morning, I had my first training session, with a trainer