Bonus: Karuhat Teaching a Rare Clinch Throw Technique with Yodkhunpon (3 mins, public)

video, above

Karuhat had just walked into his bedroom at our house, phone in hand, ready to flop onto his bed and relax until lunch. I peeked my head in and let him know that I was going to spar with Yodkhunpon, but it's at the gym that was too hot for Karuhat the last time we'd worked together there, so I was almost teasing when I asked if he wanted to come along. (He's visiting with us so I can take him to get PRP treatment on his repaired ACL.) To my surprise, he walked toward me and just said, "pbai," (I'm going, too). So, we drive across town and climb up the endless stairs to the top floor, and it is, indeed, very hot, but mercifully a little on the cooler side for how the weather has been. Yodkhunpon is in the ring, listening to the news on his phone while he lies flat on his back, knees bent, flopping his legs from one side to the other to stretch out his lower back. When he hears me, he sits up to greet me and then immediately stands up to come shake hands with Karuhat. This is an awesome moment and recreates the moment (caught by Kevin's camera) in 2018 when the two met in person for the first time in real life, at our "Muay Khao Summit," and the two touched hands through the ropes of the ring; it's even a slightly odd gesture, in that this isn't how Thais greet each other - a wai (which was included in their greeting, befere the hand shake) doesn't include any physical contact, but for whatever reason, these two like to shake hands. As I put my gym bag down and started organizing my equipment, Karuhat and Yodkhunpon sat together on the ring, chatting away.

After Yodkhunpon and I were finished with our sparring, Yodkhunpon turned to Karuhat and asked him something. I wasn't really listening, so I didn't catch the specific question, but Karuhat got into the ring and squared up with Yodkhunpon, who then put his shin as a bar across Karuhat's upper thighs/hips (what we call the "Wall of China," in my videos, as that's what one of my teacher's in New York first called it), and Karuhat demonstrated his escape. The leg/shin bar is a very common counter to clinch fighting today, and Karuhat's solve is boardline incredible, and nobody I've ever seen uses it. As Yodkhunpon, who had been turned onto the ground, got up to repeat the movement, I grabbed my camera and started filming. The first few examples in the video, Yodkhunpon is already trying to "solve" the move, so he's really extending his shin bar and body to try to bend Karuhat in half. This distorts Karuhat's move, but it doesn't stop him, he solves the solve; you'll see Karuhat grab Yodkhunpon's body as an adjustment to this deep folding - a position that, honestly, Karuhat would never get into in a fight situation and is tolerating in this example as a means of being polite, as Yodkhunpon has asked him to teach him the move. As the demonstration/teaching went on, I realized that Yodkhunpon was having a hard time really seeing what Karuhat was doing because it was being demonstrated on Yodkhunpon. So I offered to have Karuhat demonstrate on me, so that Yodkhunpon could get the full vantage, and then we switch again so that Yodkhunpon was trying it on me and Karuhat could make corrections as a third party. But it's near the end of the video that you see Karuhat's true technique for this move, from a much less "folded over" position.

I really love that this kind of thing happens: legends playing with each other, like when Karuhat and Samson started clinching each other at one of our filmings for the Library (you can see that from the 4th Samson entry, linked below). Or at Sirimonkol's funeral, Samson and Sagat had an impromptu clinch/spar when Sagat thought aloud that you could "solve" Samson with punches in the clinch (didn't work, Samson locked him and started bouncing - watch that unfold here). But what I love so much about this particular example is that Yodkhunpon, who has a very open mind and is hungry for experimenting and learning new things (he even asks me to show him, if something I'm doing is working on him in our sparring), and that he - somewhere in the back of his mind (although maybe not far back) - was probably thinking about how he'd have fought Karuhat (they were similiar weights in their prime, but with different promotions), so he probably tried to sneak that in while learning the technique, and Karuhat just solved that, too. For myself, even as a fighter, who knows better, I find myself watching fights and thinking, "Oh, why doesn't s/he just blah blah blah," as a solution to something I'm seeing in the ring, or thinking that some fighter would be easily beatable if you just x, y, or z. Karuhat, time and time again, proves to me that there are fighters who look like you could solve them, and you just can't. Even in his late 50s, with a knee recovering from surgery, Karuhat is insanely hard to deal with. And, at the same age, Yodkhunpon still wants to try to learn from, and be slightly competitive with, the fighters he never had the chance to meet in the ring. What a cool thing to witness.

above the photo of Yodkhunpon and Karuhat meeting for the first time back in 2018. You can get a high quality print of it if you like (100% of the profit going to them).

You can see Karuhat and Samson kind of competitively sparring in this 4th Samson MTL entry, its a lot of fun:

#123 Samson Isaan 4 - Secrets Of His Pressure Fighting (122 min) watch it here

Our most extensive documentation yet of one of the most relentless pressure fighters of the Golden Age of Muay Thai. 2 hours of work on all the small things, the weight transfers, angles, tempos and techniques that made the 1991 Fighter of the Year such a wrecking ball with heavy hands and endless clinch.

Browse the entire Muay Thai Library table of contents here. Over 200 commentary hours documented.

Karuhat teaching Yodkhunpon his leg-bar Clinch Throw (Patreon, bonus) (YouTube)