Saensak Muangsurin: The crafty punching of the 'World Collapsing Southpaw'
This article is part of our “long article” requests through Patreon! A huge thank you to Alteroc (@crwate01) for this excellent topic suggestion.
In an effort to learn more about combat sports, Alteroc laid out an article format that covers three athletes from a specific sport:
An all-time great
A specialist
Someone “weird”
This article covers #2 for Muay Thai
When imagining a Muay Thai fighter you will likely conjure up a graceful fighter, a master technician, a svelte and speedy multi-faceted operator. Even if the first fighter that came to mind was Dieselnoi, you will see a master of his craft, and one whose subtlety in the clinch game allowed for a mastery of knee striking, a graceful brutality in spite of his style.
Perhaps you’re thinking of Samart, Chamuekpet, Saenchai, or perhaps you’re thinking of the first fighter in this series Vicharnoi: highly-technical operators who were masters at sending bone to bone with maximum effect.
You probably won’t be thinking of Saensak Muangsurin.
The Puncher
Saensak (born Boonsong Mansri in 1950) was a Muay Matt fighter (puncher) in a sport that covets every body part other than the gloved fist. He was known by many nicknames (‘Pink’ being one of them, and ‘Saeb’ which Google literally translates to ‘Bastard’) but ‘Devil’s Shadow’ and ‘World Collapsing Southpaw’ better illustrate the fear his punches carried with them. He was a puncher in an era of fledgling technicality, wasting opponents with the one padded part of his striking anatomy.
He was such a puncher that he was thrown to the wolves as a professional boxer, setting a record which still stands today (tied by Vasyl Lomachenko in 2014) of winning a world title in the shortest amount of time: three fights back in 1975, a title he successfully defended eight times in two years over two reigns. His boxing career left him blind in one eye and suffering with health issues in later life, and an expensive divorce left him destitute. He sadly died aged 58 in 2009.
Despite being known to Western combat sports fans for his record-setting boxing career, we must not dismiss Saensak as a Muay Thai stylist: contrary to other big punchers in Thai boxing—such as Veeraphol Sahaprom and Sagat Petchyindee—Saensak was not able to accrue the same level of technical acumen, but he was not a boxing convert due to being a poor fit for Muay Thai either.
A large, unwieldy fighter with little athleticism, Saensak relied on one of the true iron chins in combat sports history and a rugged physicality. Considering the ceiling for Thais in terms of weight, this light welterweight should be seen as George Foreman transplanted to Muay Thai, with abnormally heavy hands leaving opponents in poses that animators utilising rag doll physics engines would find unrealistic .
But of course there was some technical nous to his game, or else he never would have been able to compete with the high-level fimeu (technical) fighters in his era. Let’s investigate how this caveman fighter was more sophisticated once you give him a longer look.
And if you want some background music to listen to while you read the rest of this, why not give some Thai music a spin? You can listen to songs about Saensak here and here
Muay Thai Champion
Saensak won the 140lb Lumpinee title, and although this weight class is not known for its depth amongst top flight Thais, he still faced some of the greatest Nak Muay of his day. He was also awarded the ‘Sports Writers Fighter of the Year award’ for 1973: a prestigious accolade that has been won by fighters such as Saenchai, Samart, Dieselnoi, Chamuekpet, and Sangmanee.
So clearly Saensak was better than the sum of his parts, but let’s see how he managed to utilise his weapons against more skillful fighters than himself.
Although we can see on film that skillful ‘Muay Fimeu’ fighters such as Poot Lorlek were able to circumnavigate the terrifying Saensak (who won just one out of four contests with Poot) we can also look at film of him destroying equally skilled fighters. Some of the fighters he flattened were top class fighters such as Sirimongkol and Kongdej, both renowned for their toughness.
The example for this piece will be a fighter even greater than those two: Vicharnnoi Porntawee, who was the all-time great covered in part one of this series.
Early on in the fight, Vicharnnoi and Saensak battled for lead hand position, both probing and feinting to try and establish their range. This was something Vicharnnoi was particular adept at, busying his opponent until their defence became untenable. Vicharnnoi was trying to gauge Saensak’s distance when throwing his powerful back hand, and see what reactions he would look for to throw it, and Saensak was trying to do exactly that: feint Vicharnnoi into a position where he would be able to land his best punches.
Saensak tried a different tact, throwing a big body kick to try and take Vicharnnoi’s mind off of the punches. The smarter fighter was a step ahead of the game though, throwing a lead leg kick and stepping back out of range, then darting in with a straight right when Saensak tried to close the distance. In this instance, Vicharnnoi had managed to pull off what Saensak was trying to do himself: divert his eyes with a kick, then explode with a punch.
Vicharnnoi continued with his leg attack, the benefits of which were twofold: first, it stopped Saensak getting set to get his punches off. Secondly, it caused him to be more aggressive so the round would not get away from him. For a master of range and timing like Vicharnnoi, this early tactic made sense.
Saensak gambled by getting closer to Vicharnnoi, using his legendary toughness to walk through the kicks and throw his own heavy body kicks to try and sway the judges. It’s a risk because with all his weight planted he could have been easily swept, furthering Vicharnnoi’s claims to dominance and generalship and giving the puncher a steeper hill to climb. He also used a double-handed feint upstairs: parrying both of Vicharnnoi’s gloves simultaneously to distract him from a heavy rear leg kick downstairs, one of a ‘Muay Matt’ stylists favoured weapons. A stutter step then set up a big body kick, Saensak changing the pace of his attack to disguise it further.
When Vicharnnoi continued to build on his strategy, Saensak wildly bombed away at him: the superior technician easily slipped out the back door. Saensak did try to set up this attack: stepping in as he took a leg kick and throwing an overhand that herded Vicharnnoi into the right uppercut as Vicharnnoi circled away from his left. At this stage, he wasn’t quick enough to really catch up with the master.
In the second round, Vicharnnoi continued to control Saensak’s lead hand, not allowing him to find his range or get his timing down. He also looked like the superior puncher in the fight, timing Saensak with the right hand down the pipe again in a perfect example of an orthodox fighter keeping his front foot outside of his opponent’s. When he had Saensak thinking of the punch, he then attacked with a rear low kick, easily deceiving the comparative caveman.
Unlike Vicharnnoi using his punching attack to disguise his kicks, Saensak had to take the opposite approach: he started taking more risks, launching heavy kicks to the midsection and upstairs. Whilst Vicharnnoi was defensively astute enough to block or take the edge off these, they worked to offset his approach and cause him to be more aggressive. This then brought him into Saensak’s preferred punching range.
In the third round, Saensak showed his own intelligence: whereas early on his attempts to establish range had been stymied by Vicharnnoi’s control of his lead hand, in the third he controlled his opponent’s lead hand to set up a counter kick to the body. The pupil had become the master.
Then, anticipating Vicharnnoi would use the same setup for his right hand, Saensak timed it with a counter punch of his own, a right uppercut that looked clumsy but undoubtedly had the desired effect: for even lacking agility and refinement, Saensak was not without nous.
Then, when Vicharnnoi anticipated the right hand counter uppercut again, Saensak instead feinted quickly with his dangerous rear hand to set up the powerful uppercut—jarring Vicharnnoi—and the coup de grâce of his left cross finishing the job.
This is not a fighter’s lights being switched off: this is an elite Nak Muay Thai giving up the ghost, genuinely hurt from perhaps the heaviest hands to ever land in a Bangkok ring. It also shows how Saensak adapted throughout the fight, managing to bring his heaviest weapons into the fight against an opponent perfectly suited to diffuse them.
This is how he fought against top level Thais though. Against lesser fighters, Saensak was easily capable of using more tools than just his low kicks and heavy hands.
Defending Thailand
The September, 1974 issue of Black Belt magazine details a challenge tournament between Nak Muay Thai and foreign ‘Chan Tung’ stylists. Apparently a hybrid of Kung-Fu and Tae-Kwon Do, these Singaporean fighters were just many in a line of invaders who tried to demonstrate their superiority to the Thais. Other such challengers were Karatekas from Japan and Kung-Fu fighters from Hong Kong.
The main event saw the reigning ‘Fighter of the Year’ Saensak defending Muay Thai’s honour against Singapore’s ‘Tae Yien-Chen’, who was nicknamed ‘Black Killer’ due to allegedly killing someone with a chop a few years before. No joke: the move parodied in the Austin Powers movie as a ‘Judo Chop’ was supposedly the murderous weapon of choice for the ‘Black Killer’, a precursor to the ‘McDojo’ videos that bring forth sniggers from hardcore combat sports fans today.
Black Belt reported that the Thais were so conscious of this apparently murderous fighter that he was forced to wear gloves. My assumption is that this is not true: rather, these fights were merely contested under Muay Thai rules.
Yien-Chen must have been a natural tough guy if nothing else, as unlike the rest of the gang of martial arts bandits he brought with him to Bangkok—in front of thousands of fans at Rajadamnern Stadium—he was the only man to survive into the second round.
In the first round, not much happened. Saensak exploded in the second:
The Thai moved in with heavy body punches, driving the Chinese along the ropes into the corner. A high left kick to the jaw felled Tae, who at one minute and 20 seconds into the second round, had lasted longer than any other non-Thai stylist in any of the recent grudge matches.
Twenty thousand fans came to the Rajadamnern Stadium to watch what one Chinese visitor called, “Yet another disaster”.
In prose as well as on film, Saensak was a quintessential pressure fighter who used his punches to get the job done, whether it was to finish elite Thais or set up brutal head kicks against over matched foreigners. If you ask Muay Thai fans to provide a list of the hardest punchers in Muay Thai history, he will never be far off the top of the list, a true specialist who used all the weapons of the science of eight limbs to get himself in position to launch gloved cannonballs at his opponents. For this, he is a true specialist in a sport full of them, and should be respected not just for his achievements in the world of western boxing, but for his proficiency as a Muay Thai fighter.