Yo! 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...
Kyle McLachlan
2023-10-09 14:05:37 +0000 UTCCallum Battersby
2023-10-09 07:48:12 +0000 UTC