body to heal. There were always little things: blisters, cuts, bruises. For my last morning run, I went out with Johann, a bald Belgian fighter with a scorpion tattooed on his ribs (clearly scorpions were a popular motif with the muay Thai crowd), and we went farther than usual. We turned around after five miles and noticed that a dark and dirty monsoon had been sneaking up on us the whole time. Big drops began to sizzle and splatter on the pavement like bleeding flies. In Thailand, for a fighter, the rain is death. The added stress of cold water on a fighter’s already maxed-out immune system almost guarantees sickness, and a sick fighter in a fight has about a third of his normal stamina, sometimes less.
The rain was coming down so hard it misted off the ground up past my knees—a real tropical deluge—and it stripped the humidity out of the air, leaving a chill. About halfway back, Johann stopped to relieve himself; I decided to push on through the red mud and deepening puddles. My socks turned crimson and my calves were coated. When I finally got back to the camp, Apidej was worried, warming up the van to come find me. He hustled me into the hot tub and we skipped training that morning. Luckily, I didn’t get sick.
The next day, Anthony and I received a startling fax from the Japanese promoter of my fight. The other fighter was going to try to make 203 pounds but would probably be over; he was thirty-eight years old; and here was the kicker: He was the 1994 Western Osaka heavyweight karate champion. It was my first fight ever and I weighed 187 pounds. Sometimes a professional fighter gives up two or three pounds. Sixteen pounds would be considered suicide. A larger man hits harder with more weight behind his blows. He also just takes up more space; he can do so much more, he can control the ring. When I sparred with Johnny, who weighs about 140 pounds, we were both surprised; he had better technique and moved well, but I was so much bigger, I could dominate him. I stumbled back to my room, thinking, How many fights did my opponent have to fight to become a champion? Fifteen? Twenty? Full-contact karate wasn’t muay Thai, but it was definitely full contact.
A German guy named Bippo, who at twenty-eight had spent a lot of time in Thailand studying muay Thai, had helped me during my training. When I told him about the fax, he looked worried and made no effort to hide it. “You should cancel the fight,” he said. “This is a setup.” He talked about ax-kicks and other bone-breaking karate techniques that I would be completely unprepared for and might walk into blindly. Mostly, though, he talked about experience. “In my first fight, I was so nervous I couldn’t punch,” he told me.
I left Bippo and went upstairs to my room. I thought about his advice. I could quit. I could get out of this! I felt the lure of escape, of dodging responsibility. When I was in junior high school, I loathed the pressure of football games and had a few times faked illness to get out of practice, though I always went to the games. Here was an excuse, an escape hatch. I sat on my dingy bed and stared at the fax. I realized that the guy was trying to psych me out. It enraged me, the idea that this guy thought he could play mind games with me.
I turned it over in my mind. I was a long way from junior high. I was a lot stronger, and I was a better fighter than I’d been an offensive tackle. I was never going to be here again, and I had invested so much. To not fight would be to miss an unrepeatable opportunity. And somehow I couldn’t see losing; I just couldn’t imagine it.
When I went downstairs for the afternoon session, I told Bippo, “I don’t care who he is, I’m going to kick his ass,” and Bippo smiled—he understood that braggadocio is part of gearing up for a fight. He understood, but he still thought I was in trouble.
On the last day before the fight, resting in my room, I took a picture of my stuff hanging on the wall: my mongkol, my warm-up gear, my towel. Kum had made the mongkol out of thick red plastic string. I had reassured my mom via e-mail that it was blessed by Buddhist monks and would protect me. In a funny way, I was growing calmer.
We drove down to Samrong, which was about twenty minutes away, and I could tell Anthony was nervous. Traffic was bad, and if it continued like this, we might not have enough time to prep. I stared out the window, watched the cars, and waited. Everything I could do was done. I was surprised at how relaxed I felt. I even found myself smiling.
We got to Samrong with time to spare, and I met Bippo on the way in. I nodded hello but kept my head down. I didn’t really want to look at anybody I knew.
I saw my opponent when I walked in the door of the stadium. I was taller than he was, and although he was as wide as a tree, height made a difference. He had a broad, pleasant face, and glasses, and his hair was cropped short. He was wearing karate gi pants and a T-shirt and his heavy forearms were covered in tattoos. We shook hands, smiling, and talked through our promoters. We nodded at each other, agreeing that this was a friendly match and we were not there to kill each other. Yeah, right, I thought. I may have been uninitiated, but I wasn’t stupid. This was a fight, not a sparring session, and he was going to try to hurt me. I knew I was supposed to be intimidated by him, but I was also aware that he wasn’t as cool as he pretended to be. Showing up in my Fairtex warm-up suit and being big and tall, I looked a lot more professional than I was.
National Geographic was there to film a Westerner having his first muay Thai fight, part of a documentary they were doing on the sport, but it was easy to ignore them. I sat down in the stands, paranoid about wasting energy; I knew that I would need absolutely everything. Yaquit taped up my hands. Finally, it was me getting my hands taped—tape was different than the wraps, tighter, stronger, permanent. My opponent was walking around, a towel around his neck and both hands on it. He was big and burly, but, I reminded myself, thirty-eight years old. He should really sit down.
Yaquit and I moved to the tables, and I lay down and got the hotoil massage. It tingled and then stung. We didn’t talk much. Johann and Bippo and a few other farang stood around, nervous. I had a new roommate at Fairtex, a giant Swede named Blue, who was one of my cornermen and probably more nervous than I was. Blue was about as unsuitable for muay Thai as one could be, but he loved the sport and the training. He was a Fairtex lifer: He’d been there for twelve months some time ago, and when I was there, he was planning on staying for another year. He was seriously overweight—I would put him around 250—though the weight was sloughing off him in the heat. He was primarily there to lose weight; the first time he’d come to Fairtex he’d lost more than fifty pounds. Blue was one of the nicest guys you could ever meet, without a mean bone in his body. The Thais loved him, both for his gentle demeanor and for his persistence in the face of his physicality.
You had to give Blue credit. He wasn’t there to fight, and he didn’t have much form, but he tried. There was a trainer for the Lumpini fighters who in all my time there never spoke to me or looked at me once; he didn’t have any time for or interest in the silly farang. But he would talk to Blue. Blue had won them over by nearly killing himself training, by a show of heart. Now, at my fight, he had his hair carefully styled and looked nervous as hell.
“Sam, you warm,” Yaquit said, as I climbed to my feet and began to shadowbox, staring at the floor. There are two schools of thought about where your eyes should be when fighting: You stare at your opponent’s eyes and let your peripheral vision cover his body like a membrane, or you stare at your opponent’s midsection. I was of the latter school. The eyes are for mind games, and intimidation, and distractions, and tricks. I don’t do any of those things. I just want to hit, to get through and make good connections, to be there in front of the other fighter and to find a way through him. I don’t care about him one way or the other; I don’t know him.
There was a commotion where my opponent was warming up. He’d drawn a crowd, but I ignored it. I later found out that he was putting on a real show, dropping ax-kicks and flat-punching the brick walls. He’d also taken off his shirt and pants to reveal a body covered in deep, serious tattoos—demons and snakes and fish. The Thais loved it and were screaming, “Yakuza!” Traditionally, a member of the Yakuza, the Japanese mafia, has tattoos covering his entire body, except on his face, neck, and hands. Another Yakuza tradition is to cut off a finger to show regret if you disappoint your boss. I can’t prove that my opponent was Yakuza, but he was sporting about five thousand dollars’ worth of tattoos and he did show up with four or five burly Japanese guys (of course, they could have been friends from his gym or dojo). I learned later that he was missing half of his left pinkie. Maybe he wasn’t Yakuza, but the Thais certainly thought so.
I put on my cup and fight shorts and went over and got my gloves. Yaquit tied them on. The gloves weighed ten ounces each and felt like nothing. At Harvard and Fairtex, I had used regular boxing gloves, the sixteen-ouncers, so I couldn’t believe these things. Once a fighter puts on those lobster claws, he’s good for only one thing.
Yaquit spoke to me v