Combat Chronicles
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Found something whilst moving house (Muay Thai & Boxing history)
🕑 Added 2023-10-08 18:39:47 +0000 UTCYo! Whilst unpacking some of my boxes from moving, I found a single A4 print-out tucked into a big art book.
It’s an article I remember paying for (can you believe that!) from The New Yorker. It’s the June 4th, 1949 edition, and I can see why I was so eager to get hold of it!
Not only is it a Western account of a Muay Thai card (here called ‘Siamese Style’ given the time it was written) it was relevant to a project I was working on at the time, a book about the history of boxing in Thailand.
Of course, any work covering the history of boxing in Thailand would have to cover Muay Thai as well, and unsurprisingly when Thailand was trying to find its first Western-style boxing champion they sent their best Nak Muay Thai into the ring! This article makes reference to Chamroen Songkitrat, who fought Jimmy Carruthera for the bantamweight title in a bout infamous for being staged in monsoon weather and thus the ONLY world title bout in boxing contested barefoot!
So this is just a curio then, but I hope you find it somewhat interesting. If nothing else, I finally found a use for it outside of random knowledge stored in ever-deteoriating brain...
Comments
Kyle McLachlan
Nooo! I was due to move to Thailand in 2013 but met my partner (still together now) so cancelled it. Still, I’ve recycled plenty of my research over the years and no doubt it’ll still come in handy for future projects!
Callum Battersby
Did you ever release the project? I would love to read that!
