Considering that I was born in the States, I followed an unusual path into martial arts: I started striking in Asia, then grappling in Europe, and then, only then, salmoned upstream to North America in order to start beating guys up back in my homeland.
Training in America has been different.
In the States, fighting can be serious business, even at the most amateur level. When guys talk about fighting, they talk about sitting in saunas and donating blood to cut weight, with the same schizoid relish with which a workaholic simultaneously boasts of and confesses to his sleep deprivation and caffeine intake. They talk about creatine, protein, and glucosamine [to be fair: so do I].
A lot of emphasis is put on being ready. Being ready, prepared, qualified by the time you step into the ring for the first time to fight—to fight to win. There’s blood and glory on the other side of a wall of red tape.
By contrast, in Thailand, there’s a playfulness and informality around the lower-level fights. People aren’t so addled with imposter syndrome, and the outcome isn’t given as much importance. The attitude is more trial-by-fire, sink-or-swim. The first time they throw you into the ring, it’s so you can learn to fight. Most of my Thai trainers had their first fight around age ten. No biggie.
Funnily enough, I think some of this discrepancy exists because amateurs aren’t paid in America, whereas every match in Thailand comes with an obligatory fight purse, since it’s sponsored by the country’s only form of legal gambling.
In the States, if you’re a novice, all you’re usually fighting for is glory, and by the time you do your first fight you’ve possibly been training for years and are being called upon to prove what all that training amounted to, or didn’t. Your identity and reputation may feel inextricably linked to whether you win. Balls-to-the-wall, bro.
A lot of Thais who fight at the lower level, on the other hand, are paying their way through college, are semi-retired former fighters, or are otherwise milking a side-hustle teeping farangs. They’ll get paid whether they win or lose, and it’s in their best interest to think of the big picture, to make sensible choices in order to fight again in a week or two.
I got thrown into the ring—on the insistence of my head trainer and the owner of my gym—after I’d trained Muay Thai for only six weeks. Like any good self-optimizing American, I became neurotic about what I might need to eat more or less of in the weeks leading up to it. Among other things, I decided I needed to eat tons of chicken feet every day. For the collagen, y’know. As if that was going to determine what happened to me in the ring.
And then, there I was, in the ring, facing off against an opponent who was not the same person who’d been on the fight poster. Of course I had no idea what I was doing. Of course I more-or-less blacked out during the fight—I went the full five rounds, but could barely remember any of it afterwards, amidst the haze of adrenaline and the abrasive-hypnotic sarana. Of course, all the pad work and sparring and sprints had not quite prepared me for the sensory overload that was my first fight.
But that’s the point.
Sometimes nothing can prepare you for the thing, except the doing the thing, itself—being confused, looking like an ass, kicking your way, with a resolute Beginner’s Mind, to what you’re trusting is going to eventually become retrospective clarity.