This is my personal view, and part of my own shift toward traditional combat sports like Lethwei.In July 2001, three American fighters travelled to Yangon for the first international Lethwei event, and all three lost. Wikipedia's history of the sport names them as Shannon Ritch, Albert Ramirez and Doug Evans, and says they fought Burmese opponents under full traditional rules, with Evans taking on the openweight champion Wan Chai. The visitors were professionals. The rules were the ones Myanmar had used for generations, and they gave the home side an edge no ranking could measure.How many generations is the part nobody can pin down. Burmese martial arts sit under an umbrella term, thaing, which researchers trace in its earliest form to the 12th century and the Pagan kingdom. Carvings on temples and pagodas around Bagan appear to show pairs of men locked in combat, which is why the same entry says Lethwei is potentially over a thousand years old. Lethwei Fighting Championship, the promotion behind LFC 1, goes with a thousand years on its own sport page, so read that figure as the promoter's wording and a reading of the carvings. Nobody has a documented birthday.In ancient times, the entry says, matches were entertainment, open to any man whether noble or commoner, and they were fought in sand pits instead of rings. Fighters wore no protective equipment, only hemp or gauze around the hands. There were no draws: a bout went on until one man was knocked out or could not continue. Under British colonial rule the sport went through years of suppression, and it was revived later under General Ne Win's nationalist government.The modern rulebook is younger than most people expect. Kyar Ba Nyein, who boxed at the 1952 Olympics, is credited with setting the first modern rules and regulations, after he travelled to the Mon and Karen states, where the sport was more actively practised, and brought fighters back to compete in Mandalay and Yangon. In 1996 the Myanmar Traditional Lethwei Federation, a branch of the Ministry of Health and Sports, added modern rules for the Golden Belt Championship in Yangon.The Americans' result stood for three years. In July 2004, at the second event to headline foreign fighters, the Japanese mixed martial artist Akitoshi Tamura knocked out Aya Bo Sein in the second round and became the first foreigner to win an official match against a Myanmar Lethwei fighter.
How a bout works
Lethwei is fought with nine limbs: fists, elbows, knees, shins and the head. The promotion's sport page sets that against boxing's two weapons, kickboxing's four and Muay Thai's eight, and calls it the only major combat style that permits the headbutt. That rule has a price. Wikipedia says the ruleset makes Lethwei difficult to sanction outside Myanmar, and as of 2022 it lists eleven places where the sport is legal, Myanmar included, with the United States represented by a single state, Wyoming.There are no gloves. The entry says fighters wear only tape and gauze on their hands, wrapped in front of officials who endorse the wraps, and LFC adds that the wraps must sit at least an inch below the knuckles so the striking surface stays bare. Before and after a bout, according to LFC, a fighter performs the Lekkha Moun. Wikipedia describes it as a challenge made with courage and respect, a cupped right hand clapped three times against the hollow formed by the bent left arm, and says the gesture is inspired by birds of prey such as the eagle. LFC says every fighter on its roster is contractually bound to perform it.A traditional bout runs three, four or five rounds of three minutes with two-minute breaks, and championship fights go five. If nobody is knocked out, the entry says, the fight is rescheduled or called a tie. LFC's rulebook puts the same point differently: traditional contests often end in a draw, and its ruleset for events outside Myanmar answers that with judges and scorecards, the second of seven changes it lists.
How it reached a bigger stage
The way onto a wider stage came through promoters more than through one-off wins. In July 2015 ONE Championship put its first Lethwei fight inside a cage, a dark match in Yangon between Phyan Thway and Soe Htet Oo that ended in a draw under traditional rules. The next year the Canadian Dave Leduc beat Tun Tun Min in Yangon, when Tun Tun Min could not continue after a knee injury in the third round, and became the first non-Burmese fighter to win the Lethwei Golden Belt. In April 2017 he defended it in Tokyo against Adem Yilmaz, which the entry calls the first Lethwei world title fight between two non-Burmese fighters.Myanmar's own promoters moved in the same years. The Wikipedia entry for the World Lethwei Championship, a Yangon promotion it dates from 2015 to 2021, puts its first event on 3 March 2017 and says its chairman was inspired by the success of ONE Championship's events in the country. In 2019 the promotion broadcast WLC 7: Mighty Warriors live on UFC Fight Pass, which the Lethwei entry calls the first Lethwei event shown internationally. Frank Grillo had already travelled to Myanmar for the 2018 Netflix documentary FightWorld, and Leduc was a guest on The Joe Rogan Experience in 2019.The WLC's run ended in 2021. LFC's home page says Lethwei has been fought for over a thousand years and "remains the only major combat sport without a professional global stage."
What LFC 1 is
The official LFC 1 logo.LFC 1: The Legacy Begins is set for 14 November at the Hexagon Complex in Yangon, and LFC bills it as the inaugural event and as Myanmar vs The World. The man behind it is Nick Chapman, whom a May Philstar column by Bill Velasco describes as the founder of LFC who also ran Bareknuckle Fighting Championship in Asia. In August, LFC announced that the Myanmar Lethwei Federation had appointed Chapman its International Commercial Representative and endorsed LFC's mission to take Lethwei to the world. LFC says it spent more than eighteen months on groundwork before the first fight.The event page lists nine bouts. The main event is a catchweight fight at 168 pounds between Bruno Soares Fontes and Kyaw Lin Htet, and the co-main event is a welterweight bout between Abolfazl Mehrazaran and Tun Min Aung. The card opens with a women's strawweight fight, Danielle Lee Ashfield against May Thazin Htoo. Doors open at 5:00 PM and the first fight is at 6:00 PM. Cards change, so the event page is the version to trust on the night.LFC 1 will be fought under traditional Lethwei rules, LFC says, and the promotion's own official ruleset, published on its rules page, starts from LFC 2. That keeps the two-minute revival rule for the inaugural card. By LFC's own comparison, traditional rules let a knocked-out fighter take two minutes to recover and return once, and the new ruleset removes that. LFC's sport page says the same of its flagship events in Myanmar: a fighter knocked out in the first four rounds gets two minutes to rise and fight on. LFC's schedule lists LFC 2 for Thailand in December and LFC 3 for the United Kingdom in March 2027.The press conference and public face-offs are on Friday 13 November, late morning, at MRTV4 Yay Kuu Studio 2 in Yangon, according to LFC's Facebook event, which says the broadcast channels and live pages will be announced there. The watch page lists a free-registration stream on the LFC website, YouTube and Facebook Live, and broadcast partners through an Inverleigh and Unbeaten partnership, and says full broadcast details come ahead of launch. The channels are the one detail still missing.LFC says tickets for LFC 1 are on sale through Eventickat, the booking page its event page links to.
