Legacy Projects: Documenting 3 Student Weeks with General Tunwakom

The driving force behind training with the best fighters, legends, and krus from all over Thailand is this understanding that something is being lost from the Muay Thai of Thailand. It's a documentary project more than a collection of cool moves. There is a legacy of Muay Thai, of techniques and pedagogies, and of characters and personalities that will disappear over time and it's our mission to preserve as much as we can. In some cases, there is a sense of urgency to that documentation.

In the photo above, General Tunwakom is demonstrating an elbow attack - one that goes in two directions - with his friend and assistant, Sirimongkol. Both men in this photo are in their early 70s. Sirimongkol was Fighter of the Year in 1972 and from an era of fighters that many modern fighters don't even remember. And not many months after this photo was taken, Sirimongkol passed away from a heart attack. He's gone, he left us. At his cremation ceremony there was a show fight demonstration between Pudpadnoi (in his 70s) and Sagat (in his 60s), two legends who within a decade will perhaps no longer be able to pass down their knowledge. After throwing paper flowers into the flames that lapped around the box holding the body of Sirimongkol, we descended the stairs of the cremation room and flipped through volumes of newspaper clippings and photos that Sirimongkol had kept  as scrapbooks of his entire career. This incredible man now contained in these wrinkled pages. It was the quietest, softest tragedy to thumb through those pages.

General Tunwakom is an especially unique part of the Preserve the Legacy project, because he is the sole-surviving direct student of the man who invented the Lertrit-Muay Khorat style that the General teaches. The direct lineage is in General Tunwakom alone. It is a style that was first developed aboard a Naval ship, taking influence from different Martial Arts in its travels, and then combined with the founder's Muay Khorat fighting style and taught to the military, where it disseminated to officers. But there is practically no video of it, other than what I have filmed. General Tunwakom teaches classes on weekends to groups who are interested, to pass on his knowledge, but it's mostly older folks trying to find a fun way to keep fit, or want to be connected to Muay Thai's past. He's had very little luck in finding a protege, who can carry on the legacy in a formal manner, someone who will dedicate perhaps a year of their life to learning the style in serious fashion so that it can be passed on. When I've filmed with the General for my Muay Thai Library, I've documented beautiful techniques and have probably some of the only documentation of this style, but it's very little. It's only a corner of the whole beautiful artform. What General Tunwakom, and Lertrit, needs is a student.

Enter Timothy Macias, a reader of mine. He's an academic in the US, who originally contacted me for an interview for his dissertation. (You can watch our discussion in this YouTube). He and my husband, who those of you who have followed me for a while know is a brilliant thinker, totally hit it off and we felt quite surely that we'd possibly found the right student for General Tunwakom, so we brought the idea up to Timothy. When we were working with the General he and his nephew really emphasized that they hoped we would find a student for them. Timothy has a history in traditional Martial Arts, so he's got both a physical and practical understanding of training, and he also thinks deeply about the meanings, histories, and pedagogies of Martial Arts. Exactly what's needed to carry forward a line of art. Starting in just a couple weeks from now, Timothy will be landing in Bankgok and staying for a few weeks to study full-time under General Tunwakom, learning the Lertrit style, exploring the idea of a possible greater commitment. This is such a rare opportunity, Kevin and I have arranged to have Timothy document his experiences for patrons, and for the general public too. Totally in the same spirit as my original website (8limbsus.com), the "who ever gets to do this? Let's share as much of it as possible," ethic is how you make visible the invisible. It's not easy work, I know, and Timothy is not an extrovert - so he's doing a great thing in challenging himself to help document and preserve this lineage for all of us as well.

GoPro for the project!

1. We've purchased a GoPro that Timothy can use to film, and possibly even stream his sessions with the General. This will help in future Legacy Projects as well.

2. We're loaning him a phone with a data plan so his uploads will be easy, fast and dependable.

3. We are also, though the support of my patrons, able to pay him to produce written records of what he is studying and experiencing. Hiring him as a writer on the project. This way patrons are directly supporting his work, and making it more flexible and feasible. 

This will not only give an archive of the General teaching his style from the ground up, it will also give you, and any passionate others the chance to dig into what it is like to do this. It may even inspire others to train with the General and help save Muay Lertrit.

above, the founder of Muay Lertrit วิสิทธิ์_เลิศฤทธิ์ Ajarn Wisit Lertrit - who originally passed his art to General Tunwakom

We've asked Timothy to film, vlog about his training, write about his experiences in a diary form, and basically create a collection of media to help document this opportunity.  He'll be making his diary entries in the new Muay Thai Roundtable forum which has been recently redesigned through the support of my patrons. Register with the forum to follow what he'll be writing: Muay Thai Roundtable 

be sure to follow Timothy's experiences on the Roundtable forum here, register and build the conversation

Because he'll be on a forum you'll be able to also ask him questions, and discover for yourself more about Muay Lertrit and the General. As he is an experienced researcher, he might also be guided by reader's interests. We want to capture and preserve as much as possible of the General, history and the martial art itself. There is nothing quite like Muay Lertrit, you can see from the Muay Thai Library sessions below.

What this will create is yet to be seen, but it's made possible by my patrons and the official sponsors of the Muay Thai Library. Without the support of my patrons, even finding General Tunwakom in the first place would never have been possible. Documenting Sirimongkol, to the degree that we were able to before he passed, is only possible because of my patrons. If you are interested in supporting this kind of documentary project, you can become a patron at patreon.com/sylviemuay (suggested pledge $5). If you are already a patron, thank you, thank you, thank you.  

Legacy Projects

This is part of a larger outreach that I'm attempting through Patreon, impacting the lives and futures of Muay Thai in Thailand. If you've been following along patron support has already made possible my Legends In Residence projects bringing Namkabuan and Dieselnoi into the gym Petchrungruang, so that legends can come back in touch with Thai boys seeking to become stadium champions. I'll be updating you on that soon in a coming post, with Dieselnoi coming to Petchrungruang for a 6 month mentorship.  

If you have ideas about a Legacy Project - writing or filming - which you feel falls in line with what I'm doing with Preserve the Legacy, shoot me a message on Facebook and share your thoughts. 

from the Muay Thai Library:

#36 General Tunwakom - Lertrit Military Muay (46 min) watch it here 

General Tunwakom is the last living direct student of the grandmaster who developed this Lertrit/Muay Khorat military style of fighting, designed to end exchanges quickly. Much can be learned from the foundations of these techniques, and these are definitely techniques that could be effective in the ring with proper timing.

#54 The Late Sirimongkol and Lertrit Master General Tunwakom (81 min) watch it here 

This session is a big part of what the Muay Thai Library project is all about. It's likely the last substantive video of the 1972 Fighter of the Year Sirimonkol Looksiripat, including a lengthy interview telling of his remarkable career. He also goes through the basics of his southpaw fighting approach. As an added bonus, Muay Lertrit (military Muay Thai) master General Tunwakom jumps in and teaches the unique strikes of his art. 

Become a Serious Student Yourself

If you are interested in becoming a student of General Tunwakom you are about to get a lot more information about what that is like. You can contact me here through Patreon, or through Facebook and I can help organize a connection, or you can contact the people of the World Muaythai Alliance Association (WMA) and talk directly to them.

The videos from the documentation will likely be published in some sort of combination. The vlogs will be found on my YouTube Channel - be sure to subscribe - or in the Roundtable forum with diary entries. The filmed sessions will be made available to patrons, and some likely will be public. There will also be an effort to document the history of Muay Lertrit in an authoritative form, the first of it's kind in English.  

If you want to see what has already been documented in the Muay Thai Library - Preserve The Legacy project, here are the over 70 hours of commentary video in the archive.