My cousin and I took in a couple of muay thai, or Thai kickboxing, matches one night. Because of other commitments, we only saw a couple of the undercard bouts, not the main event, but it was still pretty entertaining. I think muay thai has been getting trendy worldwide over the past decade or so; there's even a reality-competition show whose Asian version replaces Western boxing with the sport.
Muay thai is known for being pretty brutal; take your average boxing match and add legal use of elbows, knees, shins, and feet. Also, while the sport has been around for a long time, safety rules like boxing gloves are a relatively new change. That said, the matches we watched were not particularly brutal, although a couple guys did land some kicks to the head. From our third-class standing area (maybe 100 feet away? -- neither ringside nor in some vague intermediate section), we didn't see any blood flying. Of course, we were also there on a lightweight night -- literally. The heaviest fighters scheduled were listed at 132 lbs, and the matches we saw featured guys weighing in at 112 and 123 pounds.
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