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8 Favorite Moments From The Golden Age

Added 2025-07-14 07:54:00 +0000 UTC

One of the most beautiful things about the Golden Age of Muay Thai is that aside from the incredible skill of the fighters and the depth of talent, the sport was filled with style, sanae (aura, charm) and expressiveness. Some of my favorite moments from their great fights are about the fighters and how they presided over the ring.

This is a small compilation of clips, taken from the fights of some of the greatest of all time, which I was able to cull together off the top of my head. I didn't go looking for standout moments, rather, these moments have stuck in my mind and heart from watching Golden Age fights for many years and, when I thought to edit little clips of them, the search was simply, "which round was that?" because of how indulible they were for me.

Not "sick moves"

A lot of what made the greatest fighters, the greatest era, was little things like this. For me, the great standout moments in fights are almost never a "sick move" or, even more rarely, a knockout. More often than anything, it's swagger. That swagger might be expressed through a series of strikes, in the case of Karuhat's elbows, but even then the series of elbows just put the context around the most standout one, in the replay, where he points at the cut and fixes his shorts. That's the moment; but all the elbows create the story being told. Same with Lamnamoon chucking his mouthpiece to come after Kaensak: you have to see the fight play out a little, the frustration and the stalling. My memory of the Namkabuan leap back into the ring is of his re-entry; but including the bookends of strutting by both fighters really ties it together. What I mean is, these moments stick in my memory as these incredible expressions; maybe like how you would quote a movie, just isolating out the one line, without the context, and it's still funny or scary. But it sticks with you because of the context. It isn't a diamond in a pile of stones (as many highlights, I feel, today are), but rather, it's the part of the diamond that you kneep running your thumb over. The whole thing is a gem.

And this comes from traditional narrative scoring, and the art of telling a story in the ring, the sense that its about establishing dominance, not about "damage" or KOs, although both happen. It's very human fighting though so very intense.

What's amazing to me, is that when I've referenced some of these moments to the Legends who performed them - or even, in some cases, to others, who weren't part of the moment - they all recognize them, immediately. Ocassionally they'll reference another moment from the same fight, or recall their favorite moment from the same fighter. It honestly is very similar to quotint a movie, or an actor, or a series of books together.

So, this is a short playlist of 8 of my favorite moments from the Golden Age, in no particular order. I hope you all enjoy, and the links to watch the full fights, so you can find your own "quotable" moments.

If you'd like to watch the fights these moments are from, here are the links:

Karuhat vs Lamnammoon: watch here

Hippy vs Karuhat watch here

Namkabuan vs Matee watch here

Yodkhunpon vs Namtaothong watch here

Kongtoranee vs Panomtuanlek watch here

Kaensak vs Lamanammoon watch here

Samransak vs Chamuakpet watch here

Karahat vs Chatchai watch here

Looking Deeper, Diving Into the Library

We've been very fortunate to document the muay of many of these fighters so far, so you can get to know their personalities and their style, the aura of their fighting better and to save it for history as well. These are their sessions in the Muay Thai Library: