A Fighter's Heart: One Man's Journey Through the World of Fighting (34 page)

Virgil went on. “Did Dre ever tell you the story about the Olympics? After he fought the Russian, his second fight, he was totally drained. Spent, he was finished. He went to get on the bus and was thinking to himself,
What am I going to do?
when a woman he never met before stopped him and said to him, ‘God is with you, giving you strength.’ And his strength came back.”

As we parted for the last time, for the first time in days my black mood lifted. I was back in control, back in my own story. You’re always going to be hurt; you’ll never be a hundred percent healthy. This is fighting. But my strength is greater than my weakness.

When we did not live alongside such an ocean of violence, some of us went to the fights perhaps as one keeps an aquarium. We realized that most of the world is under water, but we were high and dry…

—Ted Hoagland, “Violence, Violence”
in Reading the Fights

 

I arrived in Thailand in the middle of the day, and as I stepped off the plane the smell of frying food hit me with the shock of recognition; the heat was familiar, but the smell was utterly unique. When I caught a cab from the airport, the taxi driver surprised me by knowing where the Fairtex camp was. He just nodded and started driving, although I was ready (from the old days) to explain the directions in my mangled Thai. The surprises were to continue.

In the five years since I had been in Thailand, Fairtex had undergone a total transformation; it was now a spa as much as a training center. The whole grounds had been shifted and covered in a beautiful massive wooden structure, and everywhere was dark paneled wood. A cool blue swimming pool shimmered idly, flanked by several workout studios with gleaming mirrors, carpeted floors, and the fanciest in equipment: stainless-steel dumbbells, ceiling-to-floor mirrors, the same expensive Hammer Strength machines as in new gyms in the United States. The grounds were cultivated; trees and bamboo sheltered every path. I walked into the front office and dropped my bag, reeling from the changes; the room was now an Internet café and restaurant. There was staff in clean white polo shirts and other foreigners casually eating. My jaw hung open.

I checked in with a man I didn’t know, then wandered around, stupefied by memory. I was surprised at how emotional I felt. I had forgotten the epic quality and depth of feelings I had gone through here. I walked by newly planted gardens and fountains and a cage in which two baby monkeys clutched at each other in terror. Philip, the owner, had added some giant toucans to his menagerie, and they preened their massive, horned selves while their eyes glared balefully and their scaled talons hooked the balustrade. I passed colossal fish tanks with long, silvery carp and then stumbled into a boardroom, where I found Philip, looking the same: tall, broad, and Chinese. He waved me in, beaming, and introduced me to the room.

Bart Van Der Molen was a massive, hulking man with a dour face. He was Australian and shook my hand politely, but his expression was black and vicious. (I later got to know Bart, and he was a great guy, very friendly—but unfortunately for him, his default expression, his regular, normal look, appears to be furious.) His hands were like bricks, and I wondered what he was—an ex-fighter, some kind of gangster? And what was he so pissed off about? Under his immaculate suit, he was obviously built like a truck.

They were all discussing Steve, a slender English fighter in shorts and a T-shirt who was sitting next to me. Steve was young, quiet, but keen to fight. They were talking about whether Steve could get down to 72 kilos by the next day, for the S-1 Tournament that was to take place on the queen’s birthday in the center of Bangkok, on the fairgrounds in front of the old palace. Bart said with total confidence, “With about fifteen hours, I can take it off him.” Steve was at 77 kilos, just under 170 pounds, at that moment, so that meant about a pound an hour. It was decided that Steve would fight—there was a possible prize of forty thousand baht (about a grand U.S.)—and the meeting broke up.

I moved into my room and met my roommate, Hamid. He was a professional fighter from New Zealand, of Moroccan descent, with a pleasant smile and black curly hair. About twenty-eight years old, he was sponsored by Fairtex and getting ready for a big fight in Australia. I watched him train, and he went to the body well, with ripping body shots that made me shudder. He had the kickboxer’s bulging trunk and core, with skinny arms and legs, and he was going to tell me his whole story but decided against it. “If I start telling it, I might end up out at a bar drinking for a few days.”

I found Apidej, and it was wonderful—he had barely aged a day in five years. He looked up and saw me, and a huge grin broke out. We hugged and laughed, the goodness radiating off him, the sweetness. He was sixty-four and had more than three hundred fights, and he still held pads for people. He still trained and even ran a little, a walking argument against the oft-touted long-term damage of muay Thai. “Oh Sam, you fat,” he cried mournfully and rubbed my belly, and we laughed about it. Apidej was never one to mince words. He had been chosen to help direct a fund that provided for old boxers, because of his compassion and his legend.

Training was over for the day, and back in the Internet café I ran into big Bart again, and braved his “fuck-off” expression to ask him how he was going to dry Steve out.

“Basically, I’m going to dehydrate his skin,” Bart said. “The body holds water in the muscles and skin, and I’m going to deplete his sodium levels and strip the water out of his skin without touching the water anywhere else.”

Bart, it turned out, had earned a degree in nutrition in Australia—and he also had won Mr. Universe, the biggest amateur bodybuilding event in the world, for Thailand in 2004. Philip had read about him in a newspaper and hired him to help start a massive new facility in Pattaya, the beach town to the south. I had more than a passing interest in what he was doing because I had had such a bad time cutting weight.

Bart was happy to explain. “I can grab a lean body part, a shoulder or something, and test how much water a fighter’s holding in his skin—you push the skin into the muscle, hold it, and then release and see how long it takes to spring back, and about every second is a liter of water. That’s not an exact science, of course, but just a way to get an idea. I tested Steve, and I reckon he’s carrying six kilos of water, so I’m confident that I can get him to shed that by weigh-in. When it comes time to fight, he’ll have plenty of steady energy. In the first round he’ll seem a little slow, but he won’t diminish as time goes by. His energy will remain constant, just like a train, chugging away through the rounds.”

Early the next morning, I was up drinking coffee, and Steve went and weighed himself and he was still way over, at seventy-six kilos—and people were panicking. Bart, however, remained calm. He was in the same suit and it was still immaculate, and he went off with Steve to the weigh-in a few hours later.

Fairtex was very bittersweet. They had my article that I’d written about my first fight there framed on the wall, and they were giving away copies of my National Geographic video, and I still saw people wearing the T-shirt I had designed for Anthony so long ago.

The biggest shock was the early morning runs. Now, instead of outside, the pro fighters ran in the gym, racing on treadmills under the TV, like it was Gold’s Gym. It made sense, it kept them out of the traffic, but it was still disconcerting.

Philip was around all the time now, and the camp was in a sense more serious, but it also more obviously catered to the
farang.
There were still top-level fighters, Beya, my old friend, among them. Beya had been a promising prospect, destined for greatness, when I had been at Fairtex the first time. He was now a highly ranked star, in the top four or five in the country in his weight class, and he’d fought in Japan. Philip told me that the camp had never made money, it was all about his love for the fight game—but now, with the changes and ability to accommodate so many
farang
at once, the camp was turning profitable, and the gigantic gym and health spa he was building in Pattaya would be even more so. Still, Philip’s primary business was textiles; in a sense, these were all hobbies.

The changes in the camp reflected a shift that had been under way even when I’d been in Thailand years earlier: the shift of muay Thai from being supported by Thais to being supported by
farang.
When we went to Lumpini years ago, there were maybe five thousand Thais in the audience, and thirty or fifty
farang,
and now I was told that on most big nights there were two thousand Thais and two hundred
farang.
Foreigners were training everywhere, out on the islands, all over Bangkok and in every city. The introduction of cable TV and the popularity of English Premier League football had supplanted boxing as the sport on which to gamble; in Thailand, certain parts of the country followed certain teams. The foreign interest was keeping muay Thai alive.

The elephant swamp was gone, developed, and now there was a huge concrete wall that blocked out the sun. They couldn’t do anything about the ants, I was relieved to find. The ants were still in the rooms and on the walls, unimpressed with the changes.

Hamid and I and a few other
farang
went into town to catch the fights later that day, the deepening press of Bangkok folding in around us as we came out of the suburbs.

It was hot, humid, and overcast, with the low gray sky threatening to pour rain on us but never delivering. The golden temples and palace glistened dully in the far background on the flat marshy plain of the old city. The fair was huge, an open-air festival, and thousands and thousands of Thais pressed in all around the ring, milling and calling and slightly drunken, willing to be pleased by just about anything.

The tournament was called S-1, a knockoff of K-1. It was a round-robin, from eight competitors to four to two, so the winner would have to win three fights. Hamid told me that the pool was not exceptionally strong. There were two Thais, the rest foreign, and only one of them was any good, a
farang
named Arslan, who was also a model, with long black hair and an aristocrat’s pointed face and blade nose. Hamid had fought him in K-1 and lost a decision.

To everyone’s relief (and secret surprise), Steve had made the weigh-in at 72 kilos, just under 159 pounds, but he looked a little pale. Bart wore his habitual expression of doom and gloom. Hamid and I wandered around the backstage area under the tents, watching the other fighters get their massages and complete their prefight rituals.

The fights started and went
exactly
as Bart had predicted. Steve fought a young, heavily tattooed Russian who swarmed him and won the first round, but he weathered the storm and came back, and by the third round was clubbing the guy all over the ring, and won by decision. He rested briefly, got massaged, and then fought Arslan, who was the favorite to win the whole thing—and Steve beat him by coming in aggressively with his elbows chopping instead of jabbing his way in. Again, by the third round, Steve was the strongest.

The final championship fight was against a Thai, an older fighter, an ex-champion who used his face and emotions aggressively in every fight, widening his eyes and shaping his mouth in an
O
of surprise, trying to convince his opponent that he was already beaten, the fight was over. There was a deadly finality to his kicks, but Steve was unconvinced and fought him tough, pressuring him, and at the start of the third round bum-rushed him with a few elbows and caught him with a knee to the head and knocked his ass flat out. It was a good thing, too, because there was no way Steve was going to win a decision—not against a Thai ex-champion who was kicking well and stealing rounds on the queen’s birthday.

I was sitting next to Bart and shook his hand afterward and said, “Well, that went pretty well.” He nodded. “It almost didn’t,” he said. “He was here without me for a few hours, and he was feeling really badly so his [Thai] trainer took him to a store for some Gatorade—and when I heard that, I nearly walked away, because if he’d started in on that he would have felt better, and about fifteen minutes into the fight he would have crashed horribly.” Steve had luckily waited for Bart and kept to the regimen.

I had Bart give me the whole rundown as we sat there and waited for the crowds to diminish. “Well, normally I’d take all the salt out of his diet about two days before the weigh-in, but in this case, we didn’t have time, so I used a potassium-sparing diuretic. Sodium holds water in the skin, and potassium holds water in the muscles, and we don’t want to touch that muscle—the heart, after all, is a muscle. You know that steroids aren’t banned from bodybuilding shows—just diuretics. Too dangerous.

“Now, everyone is panicking in the morning, when Steve still weighs seventy-six kilos, but it was just the start of the process. Basically, Steve had to piss all the water out of his system, out of his skin, and if he stops pissing, you have to make him start again, by giving him water, which seems counterintuitive. Get him flowing, and his body starts flushing, and overflushes, without touching the water in his muscles. He made seventy-two kilos for the weigh-in. The trick is putting it back in; he’s dehydrated and needs electrolytes, and he feels like crap.

“Every half hour I’d ask him how he was feeling, and slowly put the electrolytes and carbs back in him. Don’t give him anything high in sugar—he’ll spike his insulin and then he’ll crash—and in the beginning nothing with salt, only an hour before the fight. It’ll help him hydrate. I gave Steve potato chips: salts, fats, and carbohydrates. As we got closer to the fight, more sugary foods, chocolate bars, electrolyte drinks, an apple. He was feeling pretty bad until about an hour before the fight, and then he started coming back. But you saw how he maintained.”

With his composure and his prophecy, Bart had secured Philip’s trust. It was all the more impressive because Steve had not been highly touted going into the match. In the end, though, it was Steve who did it. He showed tremendous heart, and he obviously had been in excellent shape. Two weeks earlier, he had fought for free, just to get a fight, and now he was a name. Now he had a belt. Bart had gotten him there, had put him in the right position, but Steve had made it happen.

When I had first come to Thailand, Apidej, my teacher, used to meditate sometimes after training. He’d sit alone in the quiet ring cross-legged, with his eyes closed and his hands neatly in his lap, for ten or twenty minutes. The young Thai fighters would roll their eyes and shake their heads, but you couldn’t really do that to a guy who’d won more muay Thai titles than anyone else in history. He’d been doing something right. When I asked him about it, he said meditation had been very helpful to him before fights, to see everything an opponent might try to do.