From the Los Angeles Times

 

BANGKOK, Thailand  — In a boxing ring under a highway bridge, 14-year-old Pheeranut Saleephol bounced between the ropes, his lean frame glazed with sweat.

The sound of punches and kicks slamming into sinewy flesh mingled with the noises of the Bangkok street. Thwap. A car honked. Thwap. A bus belched. Thwap.

Pheeranut absorbed the blows of a sparring partner who had two years and about 10 pounds on him.

“Keep your left hand up,” Tapanat Thaisamran, the man who raised him, shouted from outside the ring.

“Protect your chin.”

“Face him squarely.”

Three weeks ahead of his next bout, on a prime stage that could propel him further into the ranks of Thailand’s top young fighters, Pheeranut was even more focused than usual.

Suddenly, he whipped his right leg forward and delivered a kick to the bigger boy’s jaw, sending him tumbling to the mat.

Tapanat smiled. A trim 65-year-old with a gray buzzcut, he had been a teenage boxer himself, back in the 1960s, with a brawler’s style that suited his compact physique.

“I won more than I lost,” is how he summed up his career in Thai boxing, or Muay Thai, known as the “art of eight limbs” because fighters strike with their fists, elbows, knees and feet.

It has become a global fitness craze and a lucrative TV sport, but Muay Thai remains steeped in tradition, a font of dreams for hundreds of thousands of child fighters — many of whom enter professional rings well before they reach puberty.

Pheeranut was 11 when he first arrived at the Pathum Wan Sports Club on the back of Tapanat’s motorcycle, wearing a too-big helmet that made him look a bit like a lollipop. The coaches looked askance at the skinny, asthmatic boy who spoke little and smiled less.

“He’s small,” Tapanat told them, “but he has a big heart.”

Continues at

https://www.latimes.com/world/la-fg-thailand-muay-thai-child-boxer-2019-story.html

I read this in the LA Times this morning...learned a lot (not difficult as I knew almost nothing).