Fight Night Bangkok

In keeping with my love of seeing live sports in the countries we visit, as well as seeing how accurate the martial arts movies are on TBS late at night, seeing a Thai Boxing (or Muay Thai) match in Bangkok was an essential part of my visit.

The quick verdict is yes, boxing in Thailand does pretty much look like it does in the movies. As for the details, read on.

Evidently there is boxing pretty much every night in Bangkok, but since I wanted to go on a Tuesday, the place to go is Lumpini Stadium. Nisha did feel like going, or spending the money for a ticket, so I ventured out alone. After a fun tuk-tuk ride through rush hour traffic and then a brief ride on Bangkok's shiny new subway, I arrived at the stadium, which was off the side of a normal big city street. As I expected from the Lonely Planet, a English speaking host who works for the stadium intercepted me on the sidewalk and directed me to the ticket window after showing me photos of the different classes of seats and handing me a one page English program. I am not sure how the system works, but foreigners have to go to these windows where tickets are 2000/1500/1000 baht for Ringside/2nd Class/3rd Class seating. Thais have some way of getting in paying a lot less, but sometimes in Asia you just have to accept that you are getting ripped off to get into something cool. Anyway, I went for the cheapest seat, which as I learned in Japan, is where the real fans at any event sit.

To fuel myself for the fight I wolf down two pork skewers and a Beer Chang at a cart near the gate and head on in. The stadium is circular and probably holds around 3,000 people at capacity. It looks like you would expect from the movies. There is a ring in the middle and rickety wooden stands rising up around the central floor. The ringside seats are separated from the 2nd class stands by a chain link fence and the stands are similarly separated half way up between the 2nd and 3rd class. The whole thing is covered by a tin roof that is as low as it can be while still allowing everyone to see. There are numerous iron posts for the roof around the arena, meaning that almost every seat has an obstructed view.

When I walk in the stands are around 1/2 full. At ringside the seats are quite sedate and are filled with many westerners. The 2nd class is a smattering of westerners and a lot of normal looking Thai guys. Where I am in 3rd there are a few westerners and a mix of normal and sleazy looking Thai guys. To my dismay they only seem to have beer girls at ringside, so the only concession up in my section is a woman with a cooler of soft drinks and bags of chips. For reasons I would figure out later about 50% of the crowd is in a one quarter slice of the stands around the ring, in both 2nd and 3rd class seating. This means it is pretty crowded in one section while the slice that I hung out in and another were half full and one slice was mostly empty.

We are on the 3rd fight of the night out of 10 with the main event being fight 8. All the fights go down in the same sequence. First the boxers enter the ring and there is a 3 minute dance ritual where each boxer does his pre fight routine. All the dances are different, but the usually involve some bowing to the corner posts, bouncing on their knees on the ground and ofter some swan like positions held for each section of the crowd. There is a band that accompanies this with rather quiet drum, chime and flute music. After this the boxers go to their corner and have their ceremonial head band removed and some water ritually splashed on them by the trainer.

After this the fight is on, but for some reason, perhaps strategy, or to facilitate betting, the first two rounds of every fight would be pretty dull, with both boxers just feeling each other out. With every break in rounds however, the betting does get more frenzied. Unlike the movies I did not see any bookies with big fistfuls of Baht, or anything like that. Rather, when people want to make a bet they put a hand in the air with a different number of fingers up and the bookies in the crowd would acknowledge them and write down the bets. In the first few round breaks there would only be a few people with their hands up, but as the fight went on eventually the breaks would be a frenzy of yelling and hands in the air.

Also as the fights went on the action in the ring would heat up. Usually by the 5th and final rounds kicks and punches would be flying at dizzying pace. One nice thing about Thai boxing is that even when the fighters are clenched, they still use their legs and knees to deliver blows, so the action never stops. Also, as the fights goes on the entire crowd comes to its feet and all the people who gambled on a fighter make a "Ahhhh" sound when a blow is delivered. By the end of the 5th the sound is very loud.

Some of the fights were better then others, a lot seem to involve very small boxers, only a little over 100 lbs. The heavier fights were a little more entertaining. Only one KO occurred, and as in Soccer a stretcher team instantly appeared and hauled the loser out of the ring.

Overall, very fun experience. A little expensive, but worth seeing if you are in Bangkok.