Fairtex San Francisco Smoker
December 19, 2006 by nopstar
This weekend I popped over to the Fairtex San Francisco Smoker. This is the first time I’ve been since it opened. I’ve visited a fair few camps in the States as well as in Bangkok. I have to say as far as Muay Thai camps go, it’s pretty nice. Like many of the Chinese restaurants in my hood, they have the obligatory plasmas screens to class the place up. I thought they were going to be running a live video feed of the action, but instead we were bombarded by Fairtex commercials, and some Tata Young infomercial.
The fights were actually quite good and very entertaining. They alternated between Muay Thai and MMA. In the picture below you can see Gilbert Melendez holding down the ring. (Gilbert is fighting in this years Pride New Years event. Best of luck Gil). I ended up corning 2 of our guys with Jongsanan and Enn, kind of an interesting experience. One of our fighters went up against a kid from World Team USA. Overall it was a decent fight, however it would have been nice if someone would have informed us before the fight, that his opponent only wanted to go 2 rounds. We might not have told our fighter to pace himself in the second round, if we knew it was going to be the last round. Jongsanan turns to me “Who the fuck does two rounds?” classic.
Anyway, the highlight of my day was when Anthony Lin the President of Fairtex was kind enough to let me put my grubby mitts all over the WBC belt.
Your smoker guys. You should know how many rounds before the bout kicks off.
If he’s an experienced kid and your guy is an old experienced man then 2 rounds sure makes sense to me. How about if he didn’t train and asked to do only 2 rds before accepting the fight? How about if he’s got an injury and just wants to fight anyway? Can understand frustration of not knowing but I guess that’s who the f— would fight 2 rds. If you’re getting hit, hit back!
aren’t the rounds set before the match takes place? also, i saw that match and no offense to the fighter, but he looked pretty gassed after the 1st round.
Greetings from the Bangkok,
Thanks for commenting, to “Anonymous #1 ” yes it is our responsibility to know the rounds, I but figure anything out of the ordinary would have been announced. Still that’s no excuse…
To “Anonymous #2†I’m sure he won’t be offended… he’ll be the first to admit that he’s rarely prepared. Personally I wouldn’t get into the ring if I wasn’t 100%, but that’s just me… Rob on the other hand, he just sucks it up.
To “I guess†point taken, I’m just of the ilk that you should meet the minimum bar of competition. If you didn’t train, or you’re injured then don’t compete. If you’re your out of shape and still feel the need to compete, then go in knowing your going to have to get through 3 really hard rounds… shit it sucks, but it is what it is.
There are a lot of smokers that just go two rounds. Why go three if you are in there just for experience, it doesn’t make sense. It’s just a smoker… geeez
I was giving the rules and taking care of many things during the smoker and it was made plain as daylight that this fight was only 2 rounds. After this was announced I asked if they wanted 3 rounds but they said 2 was ok. Only until the last bell sounded did the complaints start.
It’s a smoker, there’s no real winner unless someone gets stopped, so don’t worry about it. Just fight and get drunk afterwards and be happy!