The next morning, I caught up with Bogdan, the 27-year-old from England whom Sakulrat had offered a year’s free training after he won his bout in the BBQ Beatdown. He had taken the deal, and now he was trying to figure out how he could make money in Thailand. At home he had worked in security, a strictly in-person field. Maybe he could do remote marketing or make money from sponsorships? He didn’t know, but his plan was to move forward.
“It’s a very drastic, final kind of change,” he said, dripping after a private session with one of the Thai trainers. “But this is life. We have to just adapt and move. That’s it.” He had come to Thailand two months earlier. When I asked him if earning a scholarship at Tiger had been part of his original plan, he said he never had one. This is the dream of training: That you will discover a knack you didn’t know you had, and it will reorganize your whole life. It is, perhaps, the bedrock of Tiger’s business.
Unlike Bogdan, most Tiger trainees come from the office class and tend to experience Phuket as a respite from life. I met several addicts in recovery, outnumbered only by people whose goal was to lose weight. Others were hardcore fitness enthusiasts, like Paulius and Jago, two 26-year-old Englishmen who had made the intensely 26 decision to train for three sessions each day. The experience reorganized their priorities in ways they found instructive. “Here you don’t have vices, because you’re just filled up day to day,” Paulius said. Jago cited thrifting. “You realize that’s actually not that important,” he said, “and it’s the happiest I’ve ever been in my life.”
I was making a different exit from life as I previously understood it. The night before my trip, I took an over-the-counter sleep medicine, shut my eyes and spent the next 10 hours more awake than I had ever been, watching the window turn from black to blue. My seatmate on the 14-hour flight from Seattle to Doha was a registered nurse who told me that some people — especially redheads — experienced this amphetaminelike “paradoxical reaction” to certain sleep aids. “You do kind of have red undertones,” she said. I identify as a brunette; it was like being told I had a food allergy and my eyes were too close together.
I had lain awake all night after Rawai and was now operating on less than six hours of sleep in the past five days. I knew that I was acting weird, but I wasn’t sure how. Bruised and knotted from Monday’s training, I suspected I was blowing the piece and compensated by conducting way too many interviews — talking, for example, to the prizefighter Suren Jaf, known as Jango, for several minutes about how jiu-jitsu side control had largely vanished from modern M.M.A.
