While eating out at one of the more highly-rated local restaurants last night (No 9 2nd Restaurant – truly international, with probably the most ludicrously long menu I have ever seen!), a local gentlemen visited our table, dropping off a flyer without saying a word. With so many bars and restaurants in Patong, I guess he was in a hurry to canvas the entire town in a single night…
The advertised event: fight night at the local Muay Thai venue, Bangla Boxing Stadium.
Having never even considering watching live boxing before, it certainly wasn’t our first instinct to snap up tickets and clear the diary. However, as we waited for our food, I remembered some comments I had read on TripAdvisor while planning the Thai leg of our travels. Several people had commented that attending a Muay Thai event was one of the cultural highlights of their trip. And so, we agreed to look further into it…
Today, while Kit was off zip-wiring, I hung out in Patong keeping a sickness bug at bay. After sleeping for much of the morning, I built up the confidence to explore the town on foot, a good opportunity to scope out the boxing stadium and find someone who could sell us tickets for the night’s event.
As I soon discovered, these boxing nights happen very frequently (often three or four times a week), and tickets are easy to get a hold of. There are dozens of vendors around town who resell tickets on behalf of the promoter, alongside tours and tickets for other tourist attractions. You approach them, they quote a price. If you accept, they issue you with a receipt after phoning through your order to the promoter. Later, when you arrive at the stadium, they will already have your name, and it’s just a case of swapping your receipt for actual tickets.
I did attempt to haggle, but having got the same discount offered to me by three different vendors, it was obvious that their profit margin was small, and I wasn’t going to be able to shave much off the face value of the tickets. Never mind, though expensive by Thai standards, two tickets were hardly going to break the bank…
Soon after 8pm, we arrived at the stadium, where there was already quite a crowd. These events are clearly staged for tourists – almost everyone we saw out on the street waiting for the gates to open was a Westerner. I doubt we have seen so many Brits in one place since leaving London nearly three months ago!
Once inside, my decision to buy the cheaper category of ticket was vindicated. Standard tickets are 1700 baht (about £35), then there’s “ring side” tickets for 2000 baht and VIP tickets for 2300 baht. I had done some research and it sounded like the stadium was small enough that any seat would be a good seat, and this is exactly what we found.
For the next 30 minutes, we waited patiently as the stadium began to fill up. Playing on the p.a. system throughout was an increasingly annoying pre-recorded message which was presumably intended to draw in more punters from outside whilst whipping up those already seating into an excited hysteria. Sadly I’m not sure either objective was achieved – the stadium was still less than 1/2 full by the time the first fight began, and the message was just… annoying!! For the record, it was a very repetitive loop that went something like this:
Super real fight, the greatest of the year.
Big fight, big fight, big fight.
Bangla boxing stadium. Bangla boxing stadium
Start 9pm. Start 9pm.
See the best of the best, the champ of the champ.
The biggest fight of the month.
Tonight. Tonight. Tonight.
etc. etc.
Finally, the pre-recorded messages were replaced by the voice of our MC for the evening and the first fighters were introduced.
The first two fights were between local kids, perhaps 14 or 15 years old. Being the national sport of Thailand, many Thai children attend their local boxing gym from a very early age, and these public events sometime feature contestants as young as 8.
As you would expect, these young fighters were very agile, but not especially powerful. There were many very fast and very athletic attempts to land kicks to the opponent’s head (sounds brutal, but that’s what Muay Thai is all about), but few of these kicks connected with any great force.
But, as with all eight fights we saw during the evening, there was eventually a knock down. These fights were all scheduled for three rounds, but rarely did we get as far as the third round, as one clinical kick to the head was usually enough to finish a contest. Rather than requiring a 10-count knock-out for victory, as we see in traditional boxing, there seems to be a lot more responsibility placed upon the referee to make a judgement (whether that’s based upon the health of the fighters, or just whether there is any realistic prospect of the fight continuing after a heavy blow has been dealt). So often the call would be made to end a fight after one of the fighters had been down on the mat for just a couple of seconds…
After the kids’ fights was the evening’s only all-female contest. I’m sure there are some very fearsome female Muay Thai proponents, but this was by far the least impressive of the night’s match-ups. The two opponents spent almost the entire six minutes of the contest eyeing each other up, occasionally swinging a leg in a way that they could not possibly have expected to make contact. I was expecting the fight to end in stalemate, but somehow, a knock down was finally achieved. As with all of the fights, this came very suddenly, and without the ability to watch an action replay, we were left wondering quite what had happened!
Certainly the most entertaining moment of the evening came soon afterwards, when a Chinese fighter was matched against a local. A second or two after the opening bell, the Thai fighter landed a kick to his opponents nether regions! Whether his cup had not been seated quite right, or perhaps he’d forgotten it entirely I don’t know, but the poor Chinese fighter was bent over in all sorts of pain, and he dropped to the canvas. The ref declared the local fighter to be the winner (surely in record time!), but his opponent was clearly quite dazed. He stood back up and indicated his readiness to continue fighting. It took quite a lot of arm waving before he got the message that he had lost the fight and needed to leave the ring!!
As the evening progressed, the fighters became heavier-weight and more experienced. Yet, despite the increasingly “serious” nature of the match-ups, every fighter had their own “dance” that they performed as they entered the ring, and one even wore a Batman mask. Clearly, these events are as much about entertainment as they are sport! Before one of the later fights, we saw one of the kids who had fought earlier in the evening help to prepare a more experienced fighter (presumably from the same gym) for his match-up.
At the end of the evening, the headline match-up was between a Belorussian fighter an a heavyweight Thai. Judging by the fanfare which he received upon his arrival at ring side, the Belorussian was clearly favorite, but the few locals who were inside the stadium put their support behind his underdog opponent. This was certainly the most “brutal” of the fights we saw, with the visitor eventually claiming victory.
At the end of the fight, there was no great fanfare. Our MC for the evening announced that the event was over, and we were soon back on the street and making our way back to the hotel.
Whilst I cannot say that I would go out of my way to go to attend a similar event if I was ever in Thailand again, it was definitely a memorable evening. Though fairly brutal, there’s a lot of technique involved in Muay Thai and I’m quite sure no-one was seriously hurt during the evening. Whilst the early fights were obviously intended to provide younger competitors with “big night” experience (as well, of course, helping to justify the ticket price), I was left wondering what the economics might be for the already-experienced fighters. Especially the fighter from Belarus – how much did he need to be paid to justify travelling all that way, or has he perhaps set up home in Thailand for a few months / years to join a “circuit” of events just like this one?
