#47 Silapathai Jockygym - Master of Teep Distance (64 min)

3x Rajadamnern Champion

When you watch Silapathai fight you'll see an incredible proficiency of the teep, mixed in with expertly timed explosive moments. He uses the teep over and over again as a tempo and space setter. It seems very simple to write it on paper, but when you’re watching it, it's an incredible feat of essentially juggling his opponent with timing and angles and fakes that keep his opponent at the distance he wants them at, all the time. Even if he’s fighting anotherFemeu fighter, who isn’t trying to close in on him continuously, he’s always using that teep to be like, “not yet, not yet, not yet,” and then BAM! lets you in and lands a huge point. He has won 3 fights by KO with the spinning back elbow, which requires an IQ for timing that’s just unreal. He was 3x Rajadamnern champion at 122 lbs. Rajadamnern was the stadium known for its celebration of technique. If you aren't familiar with him, this Lawrence Kenshin highlight is a nice introduction.

The Jocky Gym fighters definitely have a style that you can recognize. Both Silapathai and Saenchai learned from the same Arjan (Pipa) and you can see similarities in how they move, evade, fake and snipe huge points on their opponents. They both have the same open angle teep from Arjan Pipa too, the one Silapathai teaches me in this session. The Jockygym has a long heritage of unreal femeu prowess, Somrak, Saenchai, Lerdsila, Silapathai, to name a few. You can watch a fight between Silapathai and Karuhat (here), which was a 5 round kicking war. Nothing but kicks, it was amazing. Silapathai won - it's something to out-kick Karuhat - and I asked Karuhat why the hell he would play a kicking game with Silapathai. “How else was I supposed to fight him?” Karuhat answered. I just stared at the back of the car seat where Karuhat was sitting; totally. Silapathai forces his opponents into his game with that distancing with the teep, and then he can play off of that and look just absolutely incredible even against elite fighters. And that headkick he teaches is just otherworldly fast… like, stupid fast. No other legend I've trained with in the Library has so precisely preserved exactly as he fought. Usually fighters expand or move along a theme after their fighting is over, so when you train with them you kind of get a continuity of their greatness. But with Silapathai you feel like you've stepped right into a 1990s OneSongChai video. You can go from this session and watch his fights on YouTube and see exactly what he is teaching, and how he used it. I encourage you do to so.

At some point in this session, while playing with the bag, Silapathai notes that I’m much stronger on my right side and asks why. I told him I’m naturally Orthodox but fight Southpaw. He smiled and said, “same as me,” but he fought Orthodox. So, I’m not sure if he’s naturally left handed and fights right handed or if he’s able to switch, or what he was referencing there. He mentioned his fight against Lakhin, so we’ve included that fight here. Silapathai’s teep in that fight was beautiful. You can see what it looks like for a very dangerous fighter to just be juggled by femeu expertise.

  Things to look out for:

1. How to be flexible: he moves so fast and is unpredictable and evasive because of this bend he has in his knees. And he’s on the balls of his feet all the time, with a “sprinter foot” on his back foot where the toes are facing forward. Even when he pivots off to a completely different angle, his foot is always in that position, ready to spring. Sometimes he has a very wide stance and “water-skipper” moves, sometimes he stands with his feet very close together waiting for his opponent, ready to teep.
2. Get out of the clinch: Silapathai doesn’t like clinching, but he’s incredibly good at nullifying and turning/throwing. He keeps his elbows in close, like T-Rex, to keep inside position and immediately turns to the side to nullify the opponent’s knees. It’s about distance, just like his teeps, but staying really close.
3. Impossible dodging: when I asked him how he would fight Muay Mat (punchers) he just smiled and started doing these barely-out-of-the-way head movements and counters that were way too fast for me to imitate. It’s in his feet and a little bit in his shoulders, but the idea is to just barely be out of the way of the strike while keeping your opponent right on the end of your punches.
4. Monkey Teep: Kevin and I call the toes pointing outward on a teep the “monkey teep,” and that’s how many of the Jocky Gym fighters do it. Silapathai makes a point about this early on and chastises me throughout when I get lazy and don’t really turn the knee/toes out. This is great for teeping the leg (which he does a lot) because it gives you a bigger target, but it also creates an angle with his hip that makes every strike he throws look exactly the same from the start of it. Is it a teep? A kick? A head kick? I don’t know!
5. He makes a big deal about turning my shin into his bellypad on kicks. That’s essentially turning the hip, the way most people say, but he doesn’t focus on the hip but rather thinks about twisting the shin in. It’s an interesting distinction to me because some folks have a hard time turning the hip but thinking about the shin instead might achieve the same movement just by moving the focus.
6. Head kick: this one is a bit tricky, because it looks like a “question mark kick,” which starts low in a fake and then comes up, but he doesn’t really fake low first. However, he brings the foot higher than the neck and then drops it down into the spot behind the ear, so the foot acts as a kind of counter-weight or hammer. He shows me a few times that the contact point is the top of his foot and he makes a point as well about stepping out with the standing foot. But damn… it’s just so fast and hard to see. He even complains that he’s old and out of shape so it’s “slow” now, but it’s still too fast for me to do anything about it if he wants to land it on me.

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