Thai Boxing

Happy Birthday To Muay Thai Icon, Ajarn Suruchai Sirisute!

Especially on a day like today, Muay Thai (Thai Boxing) enthusiasts and practitioners express their respects to the teacher (wai kru) to the Founder and President of the Thai Boxing Association of the USA, Ajarn Suruchai Sirisute and we all wish him from every corner of the Muay Thai world a very, very Happy Birthday!

His students simply refer to him as “Ajarn Chai” (Ajarn means master, head instructor).

Master Chai grew up as the son of a prominent Bangkok lawyer. Obviously he did not follow his dad to become an attorney. Something quite different, to say the least, happened.

Master Chai admits that as a kid, he must have have been a real handful and so his father sent him to kick his heavy bag after dinner to, in his own words, “wear me out”.

Now, that’s an idea: We replace TV sets with heavy bags. I’m just sayin’.

Back to Master Chai, who already at the age of 6 was challenging and beating 8 and 10 year old boys at a local karate school.
The karate teacher immediately saw his potential, but he had to infuse some discipline and respect into the youngster.
He must have left such an impression with young Chai that no time this teacher was able to get him lined up with the other kids throwing kicks and punches.

This led Master Chai to study as a boy both Muay Thai and Shorin Karate, in which he attained his black belt at the age of only 12!

At the same time he began his Muay Thai fighting career and went on to compete in over 72 fights in Thailand.

If you’re not that familiar with Muay Thai, let me tell you that it is THE national sport in Thailand.

The Thai people take Muay Thai very seriously and there is a seemingly never-ending source of incredibly talented fighters in Thailand.

The fights are nationally televised very frequently. The fight venues are packed up to the hilt.

It is no small feat to fight on a national level in this kind of environment.

Master Chai retired from a very successful fighting career in 1968 to teach Muay Thai in the U.S. and thus starting his life’s work of spreading Muay Thai.

The following excerpts derive from Master Chai’s profile that was impressively compiled by Terry Tippie, who met Master Chai in the late 1970s:

“As he would soon find out American 1960s culture was very different than the Thailand fighting circuit. With hair mid-way down his back and in rock-solid shape he stepped off the plane and shortly thereafter wound up at the Woodstock rock concert.
Recalling the wild behavior he saw Sirisute mused, “Man, I thought Americans were completely crazy.”

Sirisute by this time had a well-developed penchant for mischief and somehow managed to befriend and train a notorious motorcycle gang called The Hell’s Angels. “I had no idea who they were,” shrugs Sirisute.
That is, until the FBI explained it to him. Grimacing embarrassedly Sirisute continued, “So, then I trained the FBI.” [You could see both in the same class during the 1970s. --TT]

Nonetheless, Sirisute had a vision of spreading Muay Thai that he was determined to pursue.

The early years were lean ones during a time in which public knowledge of Muay Thai was non-existent and hostility from other martial arts was fierce.

He defended almost weekly challenges from Karate and Kung Fu experts who soon found, to their surprise, that Sirisute wasn’t an easy man to run out of town.

In the days before personal injury lawsuits were common in the U.S. it was standard practice to smile politely, close the door and beat the tar out of the challenger.

And that was precisely what Ajarn Chai did. [Those challenges were still happening in the late 1970s when I met him.--TT]

During the 1970s and early 1980s Ajarn Chai taught at several Southern California colleges:
Chaffey College, Claremont Men’s College and Cal. State San Bernardino.

Also during those years Ajarn Chai trained students at his home, the backyard of which was converted into a Thai-style camp.

Many of Ajarn Chai’s early fighters, such as Mike Goldbach, Reggie Jackson, Glen Hernandez and Don Boyd, came out of a backyard training environment.

It was this core of fighters who Ajarn Chai lead to Thailand in 1982 to enter the first American team to compete in the Muay Thai World Championships.

Sirisute also fought battles with the martial arts establishment over fighting procedure, specifically the Wai Kru ["respects to the teacher" dance before a fight], uniform and use of knees & elbows. “They told me that my fighters couldn’t wear the short pants to fight but had to wear a Gi,” growled Sirisute. Shaking his head, quot;They used to laugh and ridicule Thai Boxing [fighters] when they would do the Wai Kru. But they don’t laugh any more because we always knock ‘em out.”

Thanks in part to the early efforts of Sirisute, Muay Thai fighters no longer have to struggle against this kind of indifference.

In 1978, Sirisute met a young Filipino-American high school teacher named Dan Inosanto.

Inosanto trained as a student in Ajarn Chai’s backyard during these years and they soon became close friends.

Once Ajarn Chai gave Inosanto the task of kicking the leaves on a tree, then forgot about him and went shopping, leaving Inosanto to swelter in the LA summer heat.

When Ajarn Chai returned several hours later Inosanto was so exhausted and dehydrated that he could barely stand up. But he still had his hands up and was still kicking.

Sirisute exclaimed, “Oh my God…I forgot all about you,” and held his sides and let out a piercing falsetto cackle.

Actually Sirisute had not forgotten about Inosanto but was testing Inosanto to see whether he would keep going and whether he would come back.

Inosanto did come back, and the friendship that grew up between these two men in those years has served both well over the years.

Already well known in the U.S. Inosanto introduced Sirisute to teaching seminars, which greatly helped Ajarn Chai extended awareness of Muay Thai in the U.S.A. as well as internationally.

By the early 1980s word of Muay Thai was spreading fast in the martial arts community.

In 1983 Inosanto introduced Sirisute to Tom Landry of the Dallas Cowboys.

The diminutive 5’5″ Sirisute was undaunted when greeted with skepticism by the players.

“I just pointed at him [Tony Dorsett] and told him to hold the pad for me,” explained Sirisute.
Taken aback at the jackhammer like impact of Sirisute’s right leg on the Thai pad, Dorsett exclaimed, “This guy isn’t human!”

The Dallas Cowboys were soon throwing Thai kicks and skip knees, and the Cowboy’s incorporated Ajarn Chai and Muay Thai into their pre-season conditioning until the time of Landry’s departure in 1990.

In fact, all-pro defensive end Randy White is reputed to have developed the hardest Thai kick ever recorded–a stunning 450 lbs. per square inch.”

Ajarn Chai continues to teach and spread Muay Thai nationally and internationally, all while enthusing and amusing a growing number of students wherever he appears.

Happy Birthday To Muay Thai Icon, Ajarn Suruchai Sirisute!