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The old way was very slow. You don't rock the boat in rd 1 or 2 and the winner is known by rd 5 and the "victor" takes the foot off the pedal to assert dominance.

Then there is a somewhat mutual respect and understanding between fighters that while they want to win they don't want to get injured cos back then people may be fighting weekly. None of this 3 month fight camp and skipping and ducking fights for years that people like Mayweather did.

And then I never quite understood why but once everything was rigged by gambling circuits it all became very clinch dominant.

Not to mention that the traditional scoring also does not favour muay mat (punchers).

Chatri wants to make martial arts more entertaining because no one wants to see people just pull guard in BJJ or grab each other's legs in Judo. And why should only practitioners of Boxing see these huge purses when Buakaw and Saenchai stayed essentially poor.

Also very traditional muay thai/boran fights were done with kard cheuk anyway which aren't much different from those 4oz gloves...

Yeah, the need to fight weekly definitely had a lot to do with the style back then. As for the gambling circuits, my trainer once told me that the bookmakers didn't like surprise knockouts that could mess up their numbers, so rules and style changed. Maybe that has something to do with clinch being dominant, you certainly could get taken out with an elbow or knee in the clinch, but maybe less so. I do love watching old Petchboonchu fights though, it's amazing watching him clinch.

That's fair about kard cheuk being like the 4oz gloves, I've seen some fights with them, but like you said hands never scored as high, whereas One scores things equal these days iirc.

Worth noting that Lethwei is still done with cheuk so ONE using these smaller gloves isn't strictly departing from the norm...

Not that Lethwei is the golden exemplary sport for preventing head trauma...

Oof yeah, I’ve only seen a couple Lethwei bouts and I’m guessing legal headbutts and KO-only rules aren’t caring much about concussions!

Umm, doesnt a Thai MT athlete have a short career after accumulating injuries fighting weekly?

Truthfully, I don't know. There's some selection bias involved but anecdotally there is a culture of mutual self preservation because of MT being a career and also the relentless schedules.

It's almost like there's an honour code that you aren't trying to kill each other and ruin each other's career.

I guess it's like very very hard sparring rather than the kind of bad blood fights you see in some western promotions. After all, you do get KOs in sports like TKD too.

There are def some of the older generation who lament about injuries or head trauma and having a short career. But then you look at the muay femur who specialise in evasion (like Jockey Gym) and they all had decently long careers

I don’t know that 4oz gloves are the problem. Boxers have more brain damage if anything and they wear 10oz for their fights. Gloves protect the hands and wrists and your face from cuts I feel like

Bigger gloves are useful for defense. You can catch a lot with big gloves that you can't with little ones.

What's gonna matter most is how the athletes train, how hard they get hit in sparring. A very long professional career might be 30-50 fights, but that's thousands of hours of training. If you're spending much of that sparring hard, even if you don't get many concussions, the cte is going to build up

What's the "cte"?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronic_traumatic_encephalop...

Chronic traumatic encephalopathy

In fact, the 10oz gloves that boxers wear allow them to hit their opponents' heads harder and more often, resulting in more brain damage. In MMA, we typically see a few light blows followed by a knockout blow or a quick flurry of head strikes before the fight is stopped. In a boxing match, the fighters can trade head shots for 15 rounds ...

Is this true? I actually haven’t been hit with 4oz gloves, but I train a lot with 10oz gloves and while they hit harder than my 16oz, I’d assume the 4oz hurt more. Or at least cut more and cause superficial damage since you have less padding for your opponent.

My thought was that since western boxing is limited to hands and standup, you’re going to go for headshots a lot more. You’re limited in your weapons. Muay Thai has a lot more options, and since punching scores less, you end up with a lot more shots to the body.

I only brought up the 4oz gloves in my original comment because I just don’t enjoy watching the style of lots of punching headshots as much. I feel like modern scoring and use of gloves that get through guards easily changes the style and encourages more punching to the face, which isn’t what I find artful in Muay Thai. My personal weapon of choice is going for knees.

Its kind of ridicoulus to argue 4oz gloves are bad when you are allowed to use feet, elbows and knies. The gloves protects the hands, not the face. The same argument as boxing applies.

Old people complaining about lack of defensive training is universal in most sports.

I think everyone keeps misunderstanding my comment, I never wrote '4oz gloves are bad and they create more concussions". What I did say is that modern One rules with 4oz gloves and punches scoring equally as other weapons encourages a style I don't like to watch. You have less guard to work with in smaller gloves and you see a lot more straight attacks to the head. One rules I feel encourages more brawling and repeated punches to the face because blood and damage draws a crowd. They are trying to draw an MMA crowd and often even pass out KO bonuses to encourage that style. Just compare two Rodtang fights, someone widely known for his Muay Mat (punching) style, in One with 4oz gloves versus a bout in 10oz gloves [1][2]. I prefer watching the larger gloves, it's just personal preference, even though Superlek is keeping a lot of distance in the One bout since he's known for attacks at kicking range.

But I disagree that gloves only protect the hands, as gloves protect the face and head too. There is more volume in my guard in larger gloves that allow me to protect from head attacks while wearing larger gloves.

Anyway, if you watch fights from other promotions that have more traditional Muay Thai rules (even if it is still entertainment Muay Thai), you see a lot more attacks to the body with kicks and knees. I just find the more traditional style to be more artful.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZtadif15WU

[2]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFv4mpUPvBc

> One rules I feel encourages more brawling and repeated punches to the face because blood and damage draws a crowd.

One could also say the encourage to have excellent boxing, offense and defense rather then putting a premium on everything else giving the defender pads to hid behind. You actually have to be good at dynamic defense, using head movement, footwork, clinching, hand fighting, distance and so on.

Combine that with the large ring and you have a more dynamic fighting sport. I do wish they would not separate clinches so fast as that is a vital element that makes MT different and interesting. But generally they have been striking a decent balance there, it depends a lot on the ref.

A lot of traditional MT is just two guys hiding behind gloves while spamming low kicks against each other while standing in the middle of the ring.

Its just a reality of the world that in actual fights punching people in the head is effective, so by that measure One MT looks more like an actual fight rather then ceremonial combat sport.

I do agree that the gloves protect the face, but mostly because you can use them defensively, not because of the actual padding on the hands itself.

Of course, one can have preferences what is more enjoyable to watch. I think One MT is a amazing striking competition.

> They are trying to draw an MMA crowd and often even pass out KO bonuses to encourage that style.

I am not disagreeing that, that is what they are doing. Having a promotion that deals in many different fighting styles they also have to differentiate, where the retained the large gloves and MT where they have the small gloves.

Bonus for KO are a pretty logical intensive, to make sure fighters want to win, rather then run out the clock when they are ahead in points. Also it makes it hard to do lots of illegal things regarding buying or influencing the refs. Something that we know was common in lots of combat sports for the last couple 1000 years and in MT too. Of course that has a lot of issues too.

Yeah these are all valid points and I don't disagree with any of them! Except maybe the ceremonial combat sport one, I wouldn't want to diminish how talented and brutal the golden age fighters were. You could say Superlek spams tons of low kicks too. I've seen Liam Harrison do the same, and in both cases it's strategic to take out an opponent's best weapon.

I totally understand that people want to watch a fight that is more true to what would happen on the street. Clearly all the bouts on One are filled with super talented people and all these fighters deserve to make more money than they were making even a few years ago if they can. I just have a lot of aversion to it and don't find it as beautiful as watching, say, old Karuhat fights.

> I wouldn't want to diminish how talented and brutal the golden age fighters were

I wasn't trying to suggest that, being partly ritualized doesn't mean that these were not incredible fights and athletes. And MT was far ahead of almost everything else in terms of how 'real' the fights were.

Are you seriously telling me that a sport that allows elbow and knee strikes to the head has become more dangerous because they reduced the weight of the gloves? Have you thought about this for a second?

And the mention of your "untrained" friend being unable to enjoy a traditional Muay Thai fight the way _you_ can just reeks of some kind of odd elitism. My guess is you saw a topic about fighting on HN and couldn't wait to tell us all that you trained.

Punches didn’t score as high in older Muay Thai, whereas they score equally under One rules. So you didn’t see as much straight hand striking in golden age fights. They certainly used them, but they didn’t count towards your points as much.

With 4oz gloves you don’t have as much to work with in your guard, so punches can slip through a lot easier. On the other hand they protect the hand less, so some fighters are more apprehensive throwing with them on. The small gloves definitely feel like they leave a lot more repeated damage to the face, whereas a clean headkick is probably going to result in a KO. Obviously neither are great if we’re talking about concussions!

I can only speak from my own experience, but I never enjoyed watching fights until I started training. Once I started training and began understanding the rule set, I started seeing what was going on. I don’t think that’s controversial, when you have experience in something your eyes are a little more open. Watching and training is for everyone though! Nothing elite about it all, just a lot of showing up and putting in the work. It’s definitely the hardest thing I’ve ever done physically.

> And the mention of your "untrained" friend being unable to enjoy a traditional Muay Thai fight the way _you_ can just reeks of some kind of odd elitism.

It's a pretty common thing. Sometimes highly technical music doesn't have that appealing an aesthetic to the average person, but to other musicians it's very impressive because of how hard it is to play, or how unusual it is on a theoretical level. There's lots of stuff in life that's like that. Isn't the appeal of most spectator sports partly buoyed by memories people have of playing those sports as kids or young adults?

I don't think it's hard to believe at all, nor elitist. Everyone has things they'll notice more details about because they have experience with them.