Martial Arts Must Be Called by Its True Name

In Chiang Mai, on a rainy afternoon, a young editor pushed a short command toward me: “Write something about martial arts.” I asked back: “Which one?” He went quiet. I asked again: “Boxing, MMA, kickboxing, Muay Thai, wrestling, sanda, or wushu taolu?” He stayed quiet. In that silence, I heard the sound of a great many bad articles being born at once. I have watched the ring for nearly five decades, long enough to learn that most mistakes in sports journalism do not begin with lies. They begin with a label that is too broad. “Martial arts” is one such label. It sounds grand, it sounds evocative, and it says almost nothing. Beneath it lie dozens of disciplines, each with entirely different rules, scoring, business models, and ways of treating the human body. Calling them all “martial arts” is like putting football, basketball and volleyball under one name and writing a single article about them. The reader nods, but learns nothing more. People forget the goals, but they never forget the sigh of the whole stadium that night. I think of that line every time I see someone write about martial arts without naming the discipline. Ordinary readers are not at fault for the confusion. They are placed in a market where everything is called by the same name. A viewer in Hanoi opens a phone, sees the line “martial arts showdown” and cannot tell whether they are about to watch boxing, Muay Thai or an MMA bout. Bettors fare worse: they stake money on a label, not on a ruleset. When the result arrives, they are surprised by what should have been made clear from the start. Muay Thai is the national soul-sport of Thailand, both heritage and commodity. In Bangkok, Rajadamnern opened in 2026 and Lumpinee in 2026; those two rings shaped how an entire nation sees a fight. But within the same word “Muay”, one can speak of the Wai Khru ritual before the opening bell, or of broadcast rights contracts, betting odds, and a schedule so dense that a fighter must enter the ring every two weeks. Those two stories sit under one label, and the lazy writer mixes them together. In Thailand, a Muay Thai bout at a local ring and a Muay Thai bout at an international event can differ astonishingly: the number of rounds, the scoring, the ceremonial music, even how the crowd reacts. I once sat at Lumpinee, where horns and drums led the whole stand, then went back to Chiang Mai to watch an international recording of the same discipline, and it felt like watching two different sports. Muay Thai has also travelled the world through concrete names. Buakaw Banchamek, twice K-1 World MAX champion in 2026 and 2026, is one of the figures who carried this discipline beyond Thailand’s borders. That fame cuts two ways: it opens markets, and it makes outsiders believe that saying “Muay Thai” is enough to speak about everything. Beside Muay Thai is boxing, with twelve rounds and four major belts; MMA, whose unified rules were standardised in the early 2000s; kickboxing, with a different pace and scoring; sanda, the combat form within wushu that permits kicks, punches and throws; wushu taolu, where routines are scored rather than fights won; and wrestling, where the story lies in the hold rather than the punch. Sanda and wushu taolu share the wushu roof, but one is combat and the other is performance. Internationally, the International Wushu Federation, founded in 2026, governs competitive wushu. Placing the two side by side in one article without distinguishing them is systematic carelessness. I once watched an editor merge three events from three different disciplines into a single headline, only because all three took place in the same city. The piece read smoothly. And it was wrong from the first line. I began writing in Australia in 2026, then moved to Vietnam. In 2026 I was inducted and received a French honour for literary work. Those milestones taught me one thing: the further you go, the more careful you must be about what you do not yet understand. When you stand between two cultures, you learn that a word can carry two meanings, and a label can hide two worlds. When a serious analysis returns an empty result, leaving only the single label “martial arts”, the most honest act is to stop. I divide the analysis of a combat discipline into eight dimensions, and each demands verified data before anything is said. The first dimension is technique and tactics. To speak of a fight, I must know who the two fighters are, under what rules they compete, and what their records show. With only the word “martial arts”, I cannot say this punch is stronger than that one, because in sanda a legal throw can turn the fight, while in boxing it cannot. The same movement, two frames of reference, two opposite conclusions. There is a chain of style comparison I always want to draw, but I can only draw it once I know the names. A strong grappler meeting a strong puncher tells one story; a sanda fighter meeting a Muay Thai fighter tells another, because the rules permit different strikes. That chain begins with a name, passes through a ruleset, and only then reaches prediction. Skipping the first step is building a house from the second floor. The second dimension is a fighter’s condition and career age. The age curve, weight-cut risk, injury wear, camp quality — all need data. Without a fighter’s name there is no age, no weight class, no recent-form sample. Weight cutting is a life-or-death matter in both MMA and boxing; discussing it without concrete data is empty talk. The third dimension is organisation and events. A fighter competing for the UFC, for ONE Championship, or for a local ring presents three different stories about exclusive contracts, title fragmentation and cross-promotional opportunities. ONE Championship, founded in 2026, brought Muay Thai into a professional league system in a way quite unlike Bangkok’s traditional rings. Without knowing which system a fighter belongs to, every judgement about their career is guesswork. Exclusive contracts and title fragmentation are two forces pulling in opposite directions. One keeps fighters in-house; the other ensures the champion of one organisation never touches the champion of another. For fans, those are fights that never happen; for analysts, those are questions that never get answers without contract data. The fourth dimension is business. Revenue from ticket sales, from rights, from sponsorship, and the fighters’ share are four different lines in a table many refuse to open. Muay Thai in Thailand lives on both tickets and betting; in the international market, it lives on paid content and brand. Mixing the two models is the fastest route to writing wrongly about money. The fifth dimension is rules and governance. The unified rules of MMA, professional boxing rules, kickboxing rules, Muay Thai rules, sanda rules — different scoring, different doping controls, different weigh-in procedures. An article about a controversial decision that never states which rules apply cannot conclude who was right and who was wrong. The sixth dimension is health and career risk. Cumulative brain injury, weight-cut complications, joint damage, psychological safety after retirement — these are real risks, and my first principle is never to certify that a situation carries no risk merely because I lack data. The absence of data does not mean the absence of risk. The seventh dimension is public narrative and market expectation. A viral exchange, a call-out, an odds line — all can be measured when data exists. Without data there is no expectation gap to analyse, only a feeling. The eighth dimension is the industry’s transmission. From gyms and talent pipelines, through organisations and events, to broadcasting, betting and consumer markets — each link needs a concrete fact before a transmission path can be drawn. At the source are gyms in Chiang Mai or camps in Isaan, where a child may or may not become a champion, depending on how they are raised. In the middle are contracts and schedules, where fates are decided. At the end is the flow of money. Without facts, that transmission path is just a hand-drawn line. Eight dimensions, eight times I must give the same answer: “Insufficient information, cannot assess.” That is the most honest result an analysis can offer when its foundation is empty. The pause is deliberate. An empty analysis carries a value of its own. It is a mirror, showing where the information-gathering process broke: an article locked behind a paywall, a page of images without text, an encoding error that made the text unreadable. A serious writer does not fill that gap with imagination. They mark it, then go back to the source. Our industry rewards speed, not verification. Everyone wants a hot take before anyone else. But the most honest sentence in this trade is one nobody wants to write: “I do not have enough information.” Readers dislike it, editors dislike it, and the algorithm certainly dislikes it. I know the cost of not verifying. In 2026, at the World Cup in Russia, I mispronounced the name of goalkeeper Subašić three times in the first half of the Croatia–England semi-final. Online viewers mocked me. I blushed, then sat rewatching the footage for a month. Since then, before publishing, I ask myself: is the name right, is the figure right, is the emotion right. A misread name is easy to fix. A misnamed discipline makes the whole article wrong from the root, and nobody can fix it because nobody notices. I do not write to please the algorithm. I write so the reader trusts that when I say something, it has been checked. An empty label has its own appeal. It lets the writer speak about everything while carrying no responsibility for anything. But the quietest stadium is not the one where nobody comes. It is the one where everyone comes and no one dares to breathe. An article about martial arts that dares not name the discipline is silent in the same way. I have kept the rhythm for this team for four decades. That rhythm was never mine. The media revolution can change how we watch football, but it cannot change how we love it. The same holds for martial arts. Technology can bring the ring into the viewer’s hand, but it cannot replace a writer naming the discipline they are talking about. The next thing I will do is simple: whenever I receive an assignment about “martial arts”, I will hand back a question. Which one?