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He grew up tending buffaloes in a dusty corner of northeastern Thailand. He fashioned his first punching bag from stolen rice sacks stuffed with sawdust. He went on to become one of the most feared strikers in the history of Muay Thai — a two-division Lumpinee Stadium champion who helped introduce the ancient art of eight limbs to the Western world, one bone-crushing left hook at a time.

On a given afternoon beneath a diner on 38th Street and Fifth Avenue in midtown Manhattan, behind a door most New Yorkers pass without a second glance, the sounds of Thai ceremonial trumpets drift up through the floor. Down a flight of stairs, the walls are matted, heavy bags hang in rows, and a boxing ring occupies the center of a room that feels simultaneously like a gymnasium and a cultural sanctuary. The man who built this space — who filled it with wai kru prayers, handmade mongkons, and the full ceremonial weight of a martial tradition stretching back centuries — stands at barely five feet four inches. His broad smile and easy demeanor give almost nothing away. Then he turns toward a heavy bag and unleashes a left roundhouse kick that cracks like a rifle shot against the leather. Everything becomes clear.

This is Coban Lookchaomaesaitong, born Banlu Anwiset in Buriram Province on August 4, 1966. He is a former professional Muay Thai fighter whose record of 250 wins — 90 of them by knockout — across more than 270 professional fights over a 23-year career places him among the most accomplished combat athletes in the sport's long and storied history. He is a five-time world champion, a two-division Lumpinee Stadium title holder, and the man who delivered the only first-round knockout loss of Dutch legend Ramon Dekkers' entire professional career. Today he is a trainer, a cultural ambassador, and one of Muay Thai's most dedicated missionaries to the Western world. His story, measured from humble beginnings in the paddies of northeastern Thailand to a basement gym in midtown New York, is one of the more remarkable in modern combat sports.

Buriram Province sits in the Isan region of northeastern Thailand, a flat and sun-baked expanse near the Cambodian border where the soil is thin and the living is harder than in most of the country. Banlu Anwiset was born into exactly those conditions — the middle child in a family of seven, raised by subsistence farmers who kept buffaloes and worked the land from before sunrise until long after dark. Young Banlu's daily responsibilities included carrying water, tending crops, and above all managing the family's nine buffaloes, a task that would, in an unlikely way, give him his identity for life. It was an elementary school teacher who first called him "Coban."

In Thai, the word "ban" appears in Banlu's given name, while "co" derives from "cowai," the Thai word for buffalo. The teacher's construction — part nickname, part gentle joke at the expense of a boy who spent his mornings surrounded by livestock — fused into something that would one day be synonymous with knockout power. Americans would later add another layer to the name, dubbing him "The Cruncher" for the sound his strikes made against his opponents' defenses. He discovered Muay Thai at age eleven, not in a gym but at a local temple fair, where fighters were putting on exhibitions for small crowds and walking away with modest purses.

To a boy from a family with almost nothing, the sight of men earning money with their fists was less a revelation than a plan. He went home that day and stole two rice bags from his father — for which he was duly punished — stuffed them with sawdust and rice hulls, tied them to a tree, and began training. He wrapped his hands with silkworm thread. He mimicked the movements he had seen at the fair. He practiced after school, after his farming chores, in whatever hours remained before dark. His first competitive fight came that same year, at a local temple event. It ended in a draw. The small amount of money he received went directly to his family. His career, with that modest transaction, had begun.

Coban's talent was evident to trained eyes almost immediately. In 1978, when he was twelve years old and training at a local recreational center, a ringside physician named Sam Rhung Jong Gon watched him work and recognized something worth investing in. Dr. Gon became Coban's official sponsor and mentor, an arrangement that would change the trajectory of the young fighter's life. A year later, when Coban was thirteen, Dr. Gon arranged for him to move to a Muay Thai camp in Buriram called Lookchaomaesaitong, where he would live and train full-time for the next nine years under the tutelage of the camp's experienced krus. The development was rapid.

By the age of fifteen, Coban had already accumulated more than thirty-five professional fights. The provincial temple circuit, which forms the base of Thailand's vast Muay Thai ecosystem, had given him something few fighters of any era can claim: an enormous volume of competitive experience at an early age, won against opponents who did not hold back simply because the boy in front of them was young. He absorbed those lessons, and the losses that came with them, and kept fighting. At nineteen, fighting out of the Lookchaomaesaitong camp and competing at the 130-pound weight class, Coban won his first Lumpinee Stadium championship. Lumpinee is not simply a prestigious venue in Thailand — it is one of the two temples of Thai boxing, alongside Rajadamnern Stadium, against whose high standards the sport's greatest fighters have always been measured. Capturing a title there as a teenager from the northeastern provinces marked Coban as a genuine elite prospect.

He would go on to win a second Lumpinee championship at 135 pounds in 1990, becoming one of the rare fighters to hold two divisional titles at the country's most celebrated stadium. In Thailand, where Coban's aggressive, punch-heavy style ran against the grain of a fighting culture that had long emphasized elegant kicking and the subtle tactical gambits of the clinch, he carved out a reputation as something different. His contemporaries in the country's elite rankings — Noppadet Sorsamroeng, Samransak Muangsurin, Orono Por Muang Ubon — were technically superb fighters in the traditional mold. Coban was all of that, but with an overlay of punching power that contemporary observers compared to having a sledgehammer in each hand. In Thailand, they called him "Fist of Mor Lam," a reference to the folk music tradition of the Isan region, because he often danced in the ring after victories with the rhythm of that northeastern musical style. The name was affectionate and earned.

Muay Thai is called the Art of Eight Limbs because it employs fists, elbows, knees, and kicks — all eight primary striking weapons of the human body — in combination with the clinch work and the Muay Thai plum, or neck tie, which allows fighters to control and damage an opponent in close quarters. In Thailand's domestic scene of the 1980s, conventional wisdom placed heavy emphasis on kicks and the clinch as primary scoring tools, with punches considered supplementary weapons less likely to impress judges. Coban built his game around a fundamental contrarianism toward that orthodoxy.

He was a southpaw — a left-handed fighter — who loaded everything into his rear left hand with a consistency and ferocity that placed him outside the norm. His left hook and left cross were not simply powerful; they were precise, arrived with deceptive timing, and could end a fight in an instant against even the most defensively skilled opponents. His right side served as a credible threat and a setup tool, but the left hand was the instrument of his legacy. What made him exceptional was not the power alone. Coban possessed what trainers and analysts have long called a "steel chin" — an ability to absorb punishment from elite strikers without having his equilibrium substantially disrupted.

Combined with his punching power, this created a particularly difficult problem for opponents: they could neither hurt him with their best shots nor survive extended exchanges when he landed his. His durability allowed him to walk through pressure, plant his feet, and deliver the kind of leverage-driven shots that sent opponents to the canvas. Coban also brought a physical toughness forged by poverty. He had trained without equipment as a child, running long distances in the countryside, conditioning his body with manual labor in a way that no modern gym regimen could quite replicate. His neck and core strength — products of years of hard physical labor before he ever became a professional fighter — made him naturally resistant to the whipsaw impact of head shots that have ended careers for better-equipped fighters.

The 1990s represented a turning point not only in Coban's individual career but in Muay Thai's relationship with the wider world. Thai fighters had occasionally ventured abroad before, but the international circuit was still nascent. Coban became one of the sport's first genuine globetrotters, traveling to Europe, Australia, and the United States at a time when such journeys were unusual for Thai fighters and represented genuine logistical and cultural challenges. In 1990, he traveled to Amsterdam, Netherlands, where he knocked out Dutch fighter Tommy van der Berg in the first round with a left hook that became a signature of his international debut.

In 1991, he collected championship honors in both England and Australia. That same year, he won a world title in France, adding to championships captured in Bangkok and the Netherlands. By the end of 1991, Coban held five world titles — a remarkable haul reflecting both the decentralized structure of Muay Thai's international sanctioning bodies at the time and the genuine quality of the opponents he had defeated to collect them. His US debut came on June 25, 1994, against Hector Pena, a celebrated American kickboxing champion nicknamed "The Aztec Warrior." Pena was publicly dismissive of his Thai opponent in the pre-fight period, mocking Coban's ceremonial Ram Muay from across the ring.

In the second round, Coban answered with a left hook that put Pena on the canvas and the matter, definitively, to rest. He moved to the United States permanently in 1994, settling first in North Hollywood, California, before eventually making his way to New York. His reasoning was partly pragmatic — Thai promoters had begun to regard him as too old for top-tier matchmaking in his early thirties — and partly forward-looking. He had watched too many retired Thai fighters struggle economically after their careers ended, and America represented opportunity that Thailand could not currently match.

No chapter of Coban Lookchaomaesaitong's career has been analyzed, celebrated, and debated more persistently than his four-fight series against Dutch kickboxing icon Ramon Dekkers. The four encounters, spanning 1991 to 1994, have been described by Muay Thai historians as the defining rivalry of the sport's international expansion era — a series that elevated both fighters' profiles globally and served as an argument, repeated across four bouts and three different countries, about the respective merits of Dutch kickboxing technique and Thai ring science.

Dekkers, born in Breda, Netherlands on September 4, 1969, was known as "The Diamond" and "The Turbine from Hell" — the rare Western fighter who had earned the respect of Thai audiences by repeatedly traveling to Thailand to fight on Thai terms, against Thai fighters, in Thai venues. He was fast, technically accomplished, and possessed the kind of relentless forward pressure that made him enormously popular with spectators. Their first meeting came on April 21, 1991, in Paris, France. Coban knocked Dekkers out with a left hook in the first round. The punch was precise, timed perfectly off Dekkers' forward movement, and it sent the Dutchman to the canvas in what stands, in the historical record, as the only first-round knockout loss of Dekkers' entire professional career.

The significance of that detail cannot be overstated: in a career of more than two hundred fights against some of the most dangerous strikers on earth, only Coban's left hand put him away in the opening round. The rematch went to Dekkers by knockout — he returned the favor emphatically, showcasing his own finishing power. The third encounter, held in Thailand in 1992, went five rounds and ended with Coban winning a hard-fought decision, twice dropping Dekkers during the contest. The fourth and final meeting, held in Amsterdam in 1993 under rules prohibiting elbows — at Dekkers' request — ended with a tactical Dekkers victory, evening the series at two wins apiece. Controversy has swirled around the fourth fight for decades.

Coban has maintained in multiple interviews that he arrived expecting to fight a different opponent entirely, and that his mental and physical preparation was consequently compromised. The record reflects a loss regardless. But the broader point — that two elite fighters from opposite sides of the world split four fights, two knockouts each, in front of audiences from Paris to Bangkok — stands as testament to the competitive legitimacy of both men. The series is routinely cited by Muay Thai historians as among the finest head-to-head rivalries the sport has produced.

Coban fought his last professional bout on September 9, 2000, at the inaugural Warriors Cup of America event in California. His opponent was Danny Steele, an American kickboxing champion who had trained under Coban himself — a piece of poetic symmetry that was not lost on observers. Coban had not fought professionally in three years by the time he climbed through the ropes that night. He was thirty-four years old, carrying the accumulated physical history of more than 270 fights across twenty-three years. None of it seemed to matter particularly. He won by unanimous decision, ending a career that had begun when a fourteen-year-old boy from Buriram first fought on the provincial temple circuit.

Retirement from competition did not mean retirement from Muay Thai. After relocating to New York, Coban spent several years coaching at New York Jiu Jitsu in lower Manhattan and subsequently at Daddis Fight Camps in Philadelphia. In 2011, he founded Coban's Muay Thai Camp, housed beneath a diner on 38th Street and Fifth Avenue in Manhattan — believed to be the first Muay Thai gym in New York City operated by a Thai world champion. The gym represents something more considered than a typical training facility.

Coban is explicit — in interviews, in his curriculum, in the rituals he insists on maintaining — that Muay Thai is not a fighting system alone but a cultural totality. Teaching the kicks and the knees without the wai kru, the mongkon, the Ram Muay, and the historical and spiritual context from which those practices emerge is to deliver something incomplete. "I show them everything," he has said. "Technique, how to respect, how to be humble. Not be big-head, more humble. Take care of who is weaker. This is basic."

The gym's classes incorporate the wai kru as a standard element of training. He crafts mongkons by hand and instructs students in their ceremonial significance. He teaches Muay Boran, the ancient predecessor to competitive Muay Thai, which has roots in military combat and is practiced in a form closer to the full original technical system. He has also served as a referee for professional bouts under full Thai rules, including at events held at Foxwoods Resort Casino in Connecticut through the Lion Fight promotion, bringing his encyclopedic knowledge of the rules and his ring experience to bear in an officiating capacity.

In 2010, a decade after Coban's retirement and twenty years after its original closure, Camp Lookchaomaesaitong in Buriram was reopened. The camp's restoration was undertaken by Nipon Chotison, a well-regarded figure within the Thai Muay Thai community, and his son-in-law Namkabuan Ratchapuekcafe, a retired fighter. Coban has joined the effort in an advisory and participatory capacity, and the camp's stated mission includes the preservation of the ancient and authentic art and lifestyle of Muay Thai as it was practiced in the tradition that produced him. He now divides his time between New York and Buriram, maintaining his Manhattan gym while returning regularly to the province and the camp that first made him.

What does it mean to be Coban Lookchaomaesaitong today? It means occupying a particular position in the history of a sport that is currently experiencing its most significant moment of global expansion in decades. ONE Championship and other international promotions have brought Muay Thai to audiences in the hundreds of millions. The fighters competing today — Superbon, Tawanchai, Rodtang Jitmuangnon — are beneficiaries of an international appetite that was built, in part, by the generation of Thai fighters who traveled abroad in the 1990s and demonstrated, in cities from Amsterdam to Los Angeles, what the art could do at its highest level.

Coban was among the first of them. His willingness to fight outside Thailand, to take on Western kickboxers under rules that sometimes disadvantaged Thai stylists, to compete in countries where the judges were unfamiliar with the scoring nuances of the sport he had mastered — these were not trivial choices. They required a particular kind of competitive courage and a genuine belief that the art of eight limbs was worth presenting to the world without compromise. His record of success in those international engagements, punctuated by the Dekkers rivalry that captured the imagination of fans on three continents, helped establish the credibility of Thai fighters abroad in a way that influenced the sport's subsequent growth trajectory.

He carries that history lightly. At his gym on 38th Street, he teaches beginners how to kick without losing their balance, corrects the hip position of intermediate students working the heavy bag, and occasionally demonstrates — with the casual authority of someone who has thrown hundreds of thousands of strikes in the course of a career — exactly what a left roundhouse kick is supposed to sound like when it lands correctly. The crack of it through the bag sounds like a door slamming shut on an era, and opening, simultaneously, on whatever comes next.

• Professional Record: 250 wins (90 by KO), 20 losses, 270+ total fights (1980–2000)

• Lumpinee Stadium Championships: 130 lbs (1985) and 135 lbs (1990) — two-division champion

• Five International World Titles: Netherlands, France, Bangkok, England, and Australia (1990–1991)

• Career-defining rivalry: Coban vs. Ramon Dekkers (2–2), widely regarded as one of the greatest rivalries in Muay Thai history

• International Pioneer: Among the first Thai fighters to compete extensively abroad, helping globalize the sport in the 1990s

• Cultural Legacy: First Thai world champion to open a dedicated Muay Thai gym in New York City (Coban's Muay Thai Camp, est. 2011)

• Camp Legacy: Camp Lookchaomaesaitong, Buriram — reopened 2010 after 20-year closure, preserving authentic Muay Thai training and culture

A man who once made his training equipment from things he found on a farm has spent the second half of his life building something more durable than championships: an institution, a tradition, and a living transmission of one of the world's oldest martial arts. In a basement in midtown Manhattan, the trumpets play, the students bow, and the heavy bags absorb what they can. Some things, apparently, travel well.

1. Wikipedia — Coban Lookchaomaesaitong https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coban_Lookchaomaesaitong

2. Siam Fight Mag — Coban Lookchaomaesaitong — Career 1980–1990 https://www.siamfightmag.com/en/coban-lookchaomaesaithong/

3. Siam Fight Mag — Interview with Coban Lookchaomaesaitong (2010) https://www.siamfightmag.com/en/coban-lookchaomaesaitong-2/

4. Cooper Squared — From Bangkok to New York: A Muay Thai Champion Settles Down in Manhattan (2017) https://coopersquared.com/2017/09/11/from-bangkok-to-new-york-a-muay-thai-champion-settles-down-in-manh attan/

5. Full Contact Fighter — Legendary Muay Thai Champion Coban: Showing NYC The Beauty of His Fighting Science http://fcfighter.com/legendary-muay-thai-champion-coban-showing-nyc-the-beauty-of-his-fighting-science/

6. Grokipedia — Coban Lookchaomaesaitong — Comprehensive Biographical Entry https://grokipedia.com/page/Coban_Lookchaomaesaitong

7. Alchetron — Coban Lookchaomaesaitong https://alchetron.com/Coban-Lookchaomaesaitong

8. Prabook / World Biographical Encyclopedia — Coban Lookchaomaesaitong https://prabook.com/web/coban.lookchaomaesaitong/2515632

9. Wikipedia — Ramon Dekkers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramon_Dekkers

10. Hemmers Gym — Ramon Dekkers Biography http://hemmersgym.nl/en/ramon-dekkers

11. Muay Thai Citizen — Remembering Ramon Dekkers https://www.muaythaicitizen.com/ramon-dekkers-the-diamond/

12. Evolve MMA — The Life and Times of Muay Thai and Kickboxing Legend Ramon Dekkers https://evolve-mma.com/blog/the-life-and-times-of-muay-thai-and-kickboxing-legend-ramon-dekkers/

13. Bloody Elbow — Gods of War: Ramon Dekkers https://bloodyelbow.com/2012/11/23/gods-of-war-ramon-dekkers-muay-thai-knockouts-highlight-best-kickboxe r-fighter/

14. Embracing the Grind — Ramon Dekkers Fights Part 3 — Dekkers vs. Coban Series Analysis http://www.embracingthegrind.com/p/ramon-dekkers-fights-p3.html

15. The Performance Enhancing Blog — Coban Lookchaomaesaitong — Technical Fight Breakdowns https://performanceenhancingblog.wordpress.com/tag/coban-lookchaomaesaitong/