Getting in a Few Good Shots Is What Mattered

Yok

was once the best fighter, the toughest man in Bangkok, and he stares at the foreigner, the farang. They are seated at an uneven wooden table next to a dirty canvas boxing ring between two concrete supports of the highway that arches over Bangkok's Khlong Toei slum. Beyond one of the supports is a dumping ground for a local trucking company. Beyond the other, the shacks begin. And everywhere there are roosters and dogs, dozens of vomit-colored, fidgety mongrels. The dogs chase everything down.

The Khlong Toei Boxing Camp for Youth is famous the way a local bar might be. The cops know the camp and like it. It keeps tough kids off the streets, gives them a place to beat each other up. Neighbors stop by, riding motorcycles through the low gate. A tired-looking young man working in the nearby Catholic Mission knows all about the camp and smiles when he talks about it. "Good place, good, good," comes through in his broken English. "Ask for Yok."

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Westerners have come to the boxing camp with questions before. But they don't ask about boxing, and Yok isn't talkative. If he really liked to talk, he wouldn't have been a fighter, Champion of Bangkok three times. TRIUMPH IN LUMPINI STADIUM would scream the headline of Yok's life. Now he is a trainer, doing what he can for the boys, keeping busy with his camp. But the camp is not really his . It belongs to a Chinese shop owner who put up the money for the ring, the heavy bags, the gloves. The Chinese man leaves some money every day for Yok to buy food for the 20 boys who live under a tin roof next to the ring. They are all under 22, some are just six or seven. The Chinese man is generous. He doesn't even gamble on the fights. Sometimes he just walks through the camp, watches the fighters. "Makes him smile," says Yok.

The boys, his fighters, have had an easy day. After their running, Yok allows them to play football in the broken field behind the trash heaps . Yok watches them from his crooked table. He is not busy now and has time to talk, but the questions are about the Prime Minister and his drug war, about matters outside the camp, things that Yok cannot control. Yok's own trainer, who was to him as he is to the boys, was executed in the country's drug crackdown very recently in the North, and it is not good to talk about that. Yok looks at the farang with a question of his own: Does he like boxing? Does he want to fight?

A nod from the farang, and Yok smiles. He calls one of his fighters from football. The boy, Tao, 19, is short but hard as a cannonball.

The sparring match between the farang and Tao draws the whole camp. The fighting cocks walking the field follow, and the dogs follow the cocks. The boys lean on the ring and watch the gloves go on. Jokes are cracked, bets jested. But no one, of course, has any money. The gloves are thin and dark, not the big red cartoonish gloves of Western boxing. Both fighters go shirtless. The farang is much taller, but size means nothing and in fact can be a handicap. It must be lived up to.

The blows are tentative, pawing at first but then crack, and "Oyoyoyo" the boys scream around the ring. To the farang, it seems as if even the dogs are howling and the roosters are crowing. A correctly thrown one-two is shocking as one fist replaces the other in the eye. Tao is dancing effortlessly. The next time the gloves skid along the farang's eyeballs, a contact lens pirouettes on his eyelashes, flashing and distracting. And another crack.

The farang is lumbering and squinting through one eye. This is the nadir of his fight, wheezing from cigarettes that the boys don't smoke, slow from television that the boys don't watch, soft from the carbohydrated West the boys will never visit. So crack and crack and crack. Until return crack and triumph! An even greater "Oyoyoyo" for the farang. Lots of laughter. Ha, Tao, he tagged you.

But Tao is confident and is not flustered by this. Lucky shot, and he knows it. At his leisure he sends the final crack, and the farang is bloody and staggered. Yok stops the fight and comes with water. As it washes the blood away and falls red from the ring, the dogs drink it up. Yok smiles at the farang. The fight was a laugh, a good joke on a slow day.

In front of the ring, the would-be gamblers have a bottle of Jack Daniels, and one of them, in a Bob Marley shirt, offers the farang a full plastic tumbler on his way out of the ring. The light is dusky and fading, and the boys go to play a guitar by the heavy bags. They belt their songs up into the dark bottom of the highway. The lamps strung up around the camp sputter on. Yok hands the farang the water bottle and motions for him to clean his face of the blood again. The farang no longer thinks of any questions.