Fighter's Mind, A by Sam Sheridan Read Free Book Online Page B

art with a lot of weapon aspects), shoot wrestling (ground fighting, a precursor to modern MMA), and kali eskrima (Filipino stick fighting). Mark’s initial exposure to martial arts, with a broad background and the philosophical tradition of “borrowing what works best” from different places, would prepare him well for MMA.
    Mark originally opened a Multicultural Martial Arts center in the same place where the muay Thai gym is now. This was in 1992, a year before the UFC started and vale tudo was still a relatively unknown Brazilian tradition.
    Mark still wanted to fight, and he discovered and fell in love with muay Thai, spending time and fighting at the famous Sityodtong Camp in Pattaya, Thailand (for a long time, Sityodtong and Fairtex were the only camps that took on foreigners). It turns out we may have overlapped in Thailand, although we never met.
    Mark had been bit by the Thailand bug. “I went back to Boston, and two months later I was homesick for Thailand.” He trained hard, and fought well, and earned a place in the camp. Eventually, he was welcomed into the Sityodtong family by Kru (teacher) Yotong.
    In 1998 he turned his martial arts center into a Sityodtong muay Thai academy. Kru Toy, Kru Yotong’s son, would come and visit for a month at time.
    But Mark found another trainer who would have far more impact. He heard rumors of a Thai boxer who was working on some shady visa in a Vietnamese kitchen on Newbury Street. This was Ajarn Thong, with the fighting name Satsit Seebree, who had been a successful Thai boxer and whose family owned and ran a small camp in northern Thailand. Mark brought the Thai boxer into his home to live, and he laughs about it.
    “I had Thailand right here. I lived it in this little basement apartment in Somerville. Ajarn moved in with me and Marie [Mark’s long-suffering girlfriend and now wife]. I learned the language, he held pads for me every day, and I lived Thai style. The sink would get clogged and I’d find chicken feet in it, so I’d yell at Ajarn, ‘You can’t throw food down here, we’re below the street,’ but he’d swear he didn’t do it.”
    Mark is laughing hard now. “What, I don’t eat this, Marie don’t eat this, how’d it get in here?” It almost sounds like a sitcom setup.
    Mark continued to go back and forth to Thailand regularly. He fought in the world famous Rajadamnern stadium in April 2003 and won with a second-round TKO, on a low kick. “That was a high point for me, and Kru Yotong urged me to semiretire. I wasn’t going to go that much further, and I was more important as a teacher now, for preserving the art. I’m a conservator of muay Thai traditions and techniques.”
    A few years later, though, when Mark was back at Sityodtong, training and relaxing, something odd happened. “I’d been at the beach all day. I had a belly full of rice and a sunburn, and when I got back to camp I noticed all this commotion—and I knew somebody was fighting that day.” Turned out the somebody was Mark, fighting a Thai in an “exhibition” bout for Songkran, the water festival. He hadn’t been training to fight but he was assured repeatedly that it was only an exhibition.
    “So I called a friend of mine, Peter Hoovers, a Dutch guy who lives in Thailand—he knows everybody—and I asked him about it. He laughed and asked me, ‘Have you ever heard of a white guy fighting a Thai in an exhibition match? No such thing, you’re gonna fight the kid.’”
    Mark had actually been slated to fight this same fighter some years earlier. “He was an ex-military guy, had something like four hundred fights. I had nothing to bank on but being totally relaxed.”
    Mark jumped in the back of the truck with his trainer and went to the fight. “Right before the first exchange I knew it was on. You could feel the energy.” It was a real fight, no holding back. But Mark smiles.
    “It was probably my best fight ever. I kept chipping away at him, and in the third