On the 26th of May, I had my 8th fight. This one was a bit more special than the others since it was at Radjadamnern. Radjadamnern is the oldest stadium in Thailand and has been the home of many superstars in the past. There is a lot of history in this place.
So obviously, I was excited to compete in a smaller show in the stadium. The whole fight week, I felt amazing. Plus, the weather was good, which means it’ll be easy to lose weight.
I cut most of the weight the day before, landed close to the fight weight, and went to sleep satisfied. Waking up, I checked my weight and saw I was underweight.
We arrived in the stadium, and when checking the fight card, I noticed the fight weight was written down as 153 lbs. I took out my phone and quickly realized they gave me the wrong weight. They told me it was 69 kg, but in reality, it was 69.5 kg. So I weighed in at 151.7 lbs., or 68.7 kg. Well, I was underweight; luckily, it was close to my walk-around weight, so it didn’t affect me much.
This doesn’t surprise me, though. The opponent got changed three times, the fight date twice, and the weight three times as well. Might as well make a mistake in weight conversion to close the show.
Once I rehydrated, I was starving and decided to go eat out with my wife. Over there, I ordered a double portion of Pad Thai. Normally, the single portion is pretty small. But this time they gave me extra, which is a common thing in Thailand if they know you, so I ate way too much and felt bloated, tired, etc. You know how it feels when you overeat. Not good.
It’s definitely not how you’d want to feel a couple of hours before your fight.
In the end, I won the fight after 3 rounds by decision; you can watch it here. After three rounds, there was no doubt who won. That was exactly what I wanted because my fight before that was close and I got robbed.
Robberies.
My fight before that was on the famous prison fight show. When I mentioned to my promoter that I still didn’t get how I lost the fight, he basically told me “We don’t talk about it anymore”. In Thai, he told my wife that the fight was close and that close fights were always given to the prisoner. Just to keep peace in the prison.
Because the people who come to the prison have nothing to lose; obviously, they want to win, but they can only lose the fight. For the prisoners, a win means a 2-year deduction from their sentence. Plus, they are the ones that showed really good behavior and the capability of integrating back into society. They basically want them to regain their freedom.
So robberies are part of the show.
The tape of the fight will never be released, and it’ll be a loss on my record forever. But that is a thing that most people don’t realize. Not every loss on a record is a loss in reality. People just focus on the record but rarely see what really happened. And yes, robberies are a part of combat sports, just like losses. All fighters have both, and they all move on.
Whether you win or lose is not always the most important thing in a fight. In Thailand, they don’t even care about your record. They always ask how many fights you’ve had. The record is irrelevant. What matters is that you learn after every performance.
That is why I changed my style a bit for the fight. I wanted to make sure there was not a single person in the stadium who could question the decision. The prison fight taught me that I needed to make it look more decisive.
I’ll talk more about this in an upcoming post.
Pre-fight injuries.
Pre-fight injuries are part of the sport. In my last two fights, I was lucky. No injuries. Before the prison fight, however, I got sick due to the air pollution. My cardio suffered tremendously, and two weeks before the fight, I couldn’t train like normal. Nonetheless, I took the fight because it was a rare opportunity to fight inside prison. My cardio wasn’t at 100%; I could have even pulled out at one point because the trainers got concerned.
But I wanted that fight after not being able to fight for 10 months.
A lot of fighters go into fights injured. Stuff that is not visible to the people in the audience. Once the injury gets hit a couple of times, suddenly it gets swollen (it happened twice to me). Whether or not you fight injured is entirely up to the fighter, but realize that it might have consequences.
Consequences you’ll have to deal with. The most frustrating part about this for some fighters is not the injury or losing. It’s mostly people critiquing their performance while they gave everything they had with the tools available.
Just something to think about0
That’s all for this week. Next week, we’ll talk about post-fight celebrations and the reality of fight life.
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Until next time.
Alex
