Dave Leduc - The King of Lethwei

You might recall that earlier in the year there was something of a Lethwei push in the MMA sphere after UFC Fight Pass inked a deal with World Lethwei Championship. It all geared up towards World Lethwei Championship 9, where Dave Leduc beat Seth Baczynski for the inaugural WLC cruiserweight title. It is undeniable that Leduc has done a marvellous job of marketing himself as a legitimate world class fighter, and the sport of Lethwei as the manlier alternative to Muay Thai. Leduc is apparently one of Myanmar’s most prominent celebrities and married his Russian model bride in a televised ceremony there earlier in the year.

Recently Leduc continued to make enemies as his assertion that Lethwei is the hardest striking sport in the world pissed off British Muay Thai great, Liam Harrison. The back and forth between the two was about what you would expect—Harrison pointed out that Leduc fights nobodies who are half his size, while Leduc insisted that “The threat of headbutts changes the inside game completely, so you have to protect against a whole new limb: the 9th limb aka the head.”

So the Muay Thai fanbase and the surprisingly large Lethwei / Leduc contingent have been going at it on social media and in the forums ever since. Some Muay Thai nerds believe that Leduc would get outclassed in a Muay Thai match with the much smaller Harrison or Buakaw. Some believe Harrison couldn’t cut it in Lethwei. Trying to assess the evidence even handedly, this writer feels that it is fair to say that Leduc was not a top tier Nak Muay, and that Lethwei is very clearly suffering from a weaker competitive pool. Myanmar is an exceptionally poor nation and while plenty of Nak Muay in Thailand are paid a pittance for their work, Lethwei has always seemed especially exploitative. Yes, there can be astonishingly large differences between forms of kickboxing—think of the contrast between Sanshou / Sanda and American Kickboxing for instance—but Muay Thai and Lethwei seem among the most closely related. On the one hand there aren’t heaps of big name Nak Muay and kickboxers flocking to fight in the brutal sport of Lethwei, but on the other hand Leduc is probably not calling for World Lethwei Championship to get him Simon Marcus for his next opponent.

Pissing contests to do with rule sets are tiresome and in that regard Lethwei vs Muay Thai is just a momentary break in the thirty year argument over kickboxing vs Muay Thai. But shift the focus from which is better or more “real” to how those rule sets affect the dominant styles and you have yourself a fascinating area of study.

The Art of Nine Limbs

The two most significant considerations in Lethwei are the use of ropes or hand wraps with no gloves, and the legality of the head butt. While it is tough to read Leduc’s line about “a whole new limb: the 9th limb aka the head” without rolling your eyes, there is some truth to the idea. The head butt is a game changer in other combat sports where it is almost universally banned. In Western boxing, the head butt is illegal and stiffly punished but also ubiquitous because of its value in causing cuts.

Other fighters have become good enough at sneaking it in that they can use it to stun their opponent and score blows in the aftermath. The “cheeky nodder” to left hook pairing is a marvellous one that every young man should know in a scuffle. The top of the head is used to stun the opponent—whether you’re going to them or ducking down to intercept them coming in—and they are jarred into a perfect position for the left hook.

But in every other sport the head butt is a low key, underhanded weapon. No one is actually out there trying to knock you out and the difference can be considerable: imagine trying to sneak a punch into a wrestling match illegally and how much less oomph you could put into your blow.

One of the peculiarities that has resulted from Lethwei rules is the whipping form of head butt. Watching Leduc and other Lethwei fighters use this has been an eye opener because it runs against a lot of my established knowledge on butting. Butting as I know it is about getting your chin down and using the top of your head to strike into the opponent’s face. It is a game of getting lower. But that is an understanding that I have built through training under rulesets where the head butt is prohibited. In boxing the purpose of the head butt is to open cuts. In mixed martial arts it is more common to see the butt used as an intercepting weapon, but in either case the butt has to be hidden in small motions. In Lethwei the butt is legal, but it is a known threat, and so it has to be snapped in quick—often not at the face and not with the intention to cause cuts.

Leduc can be seen performing the kind of headbutt you would be confident in drawing over from boxing or kickboxing experience—using the top of his head into Cyrus Washington’s eye socket to cut Washington up.

But in Lethwei the whipping headbutt provides much of the new threat of that “ninth limb”. If you are quietly worrying about CTE and the martial arts, this move might give you nightmares. Even watching Leduc do it on a pad or bag is uncomfortable. However in the art of hitting opponents in the head, results matter more than side effects ten years down the line. If you can catch an opponent in the temple with a quick snap of the neck there is no reason that it would be any less jarring than a short left hook.

Above is Leduc dropping Lethwei legend, Tun Tun Min very early in their third meeting with a pair of short, whipping headbutts. While the threat of the “ninth limb” might be overstated in some regards, those poo-pooing it as a slight change might be surprised by the difference it can make. Leduc’s first few fights in Lethwei see him awkwardly holding in clinches and often keeping a palm pressed against the opponent’s head to prevent them from nutting him. At its best it seems that the whipping headbutt can be used between pummelling for grips and unbalancing the opponent in the same way that hitting can facilitate easier guard passing on the mat.

But as Harrison pointed out, headbutts aren’t magic. If you obsess over them and try to treat them like any other strike you can end up throwing your opponent’s favourite target into their striking range over-and-over. When Tun Tun Min began hurting Cyrus Washington with butts on the inside, he started entering behind his head too, and soon Washington timed him with a back elbow that knocked Min unconscious. Bizarrely enough, Tun Tun Min actually won this fight because of the strange way that Lethwei’s rules are applied. Min was given time to come around and the fight was restarted, with him stopping Washington in the fifth round.

Falling with Style

Dave Leduc is a peculiar chimera of parts as a fighter. Having trained in various martial arts such as an Ottowan Jeet Kune Do offshoot called “Fangshendo” and Sanda, Leduq brought some odd looks with him when he began competing in Muay Thai in 2013. Among them is the “Leduc kick” which is essentially an awkward side kick to the face, delivered when the opponent is lifting their lead foot up to check. Leduc slow-motion telegraphs his right low kick, stepping in to put his right hip on the centre line as he does so, and then brings the knee all the way through—shooting a side kick up the middle.

Leduc fights at around 80kg—about 175 pounds—but is tall and rangey for his weight. This has lead Leduc to develop some of those familiar habits that seem to come naturally to rangier fighters. He fights behind long push kicks, particularly off the lead leg, and leans back into left hooks whenever his opponent closes to attack him: what could be described as the Rockhold School of Boxing. Though lead leg kicking into lean-back punching can just as easily be identified with less disaster prone fighters like Semmy Schilt or even UFC women’s strawweight champion, Weili Zhang.

Leduc’s Lethwei run—just eleven fights so far—began tentatively. In his first matches against Too Too and Tun Tun Min, Leduc seemed to want to use his length and fight more conservatively. Against Too Too he was able to use jabs and front kicks to pick the Burmese fighter apart.

In his first fight against Min, however, Leduc seemed to struggle with the shorter fighter’s ability to close. Each time Leduc kicked he was quickly sent back with cut kicks to the standing leg and Min swarming into his chest.

Often when he is caught along the ropes you will see Leduc attempt to wildly elbow off them. The great Muangthai is perhaps one of the most effective elbow strikers you will ever see but in trying to reach an extra inch or two on each elbow he will violently whip his head back and leave his chin up in the air—Leduc does a lot of that too.

One of the measures that Leduc found mixed success with against Min’s constant charges was the back elbow. Similar to Tony Ferguson, when Leduc gets out of position he prefers to steer into the skid and spin through for the elbow, rather than struggle to get back on position. Sometimes this works very well, as when he caught Min in the brain stem in their first fight.

Other times it proves disastrous as when Min caught Leduc turning in the same fight.

It is a testament to Leduc’s gameness that the successful elbow above came a minute or two after the disastrous one. Leduc was a rag in the wind for much of that first fight but he never gave up trying to knock Min out.

The teeping and back elbowing is Leduc’s game in a microcosm: he tries to fight smart and use his length, and then gives it up and dives in to try and elbow his man anyway. There are some parallels to be drawn between Joanathan Haggerty and Leduc—though Leduc’s style is a little less polished and clean as he often loses his stance or runs ahead of himself where Haggerty remains a crisp technician. Both use a “pick at range, enter to hurt” sort of gameplan, and both do their real hitting with their elbows. Haggerty’s famous closer is the overhead / chopping elbow, which he often glides into with a feigned teep.

But where Haggerty is often sniping opponents with the elbow when he enters, and uses a great right straight which helps to disguise it, Leduc throws an arcing, round elbow that can be seen coming a mile off. That is because Leduc’s intention is often to close to the clinch—the elbow is the artillery barrage to cover a slow charge towards the opposing trench. Think of the right hand lead that Fedor Emelianenko and Gunnar Nelson use to initiate a clinch, and then make it blunter and uglier.

Of course, should the opponent not adequately block or evade the elbow, there is a good chance of knocking them out. As when Leduc knocked out Tun Tun Min in their third fight—though Min was again given two minutes to come around and continue the fight.

More often though, Leduc will use the elbow to enter clinches and from there he can score headbutts—as was the case in his first knockdown of the third fight against Tun Tun Min—or attach a collar tie and attempt more elbows, as he did against Too Too.

So committed is Leduc’s closing elbow that against Seth Bacynski he actually threw himself through the ropes. Interestingly, out of all of Leduc’s opponents it was Bacynski who refused to stand there for the elbow. Retreat is the answer to most problems in mixed martial arts because the gloves are so unreliable and tying up can be giving the opponent what they want. But because Bacysnki would flee each time Leduc attempted to enter the clinch behind his right elbow, Leduc was able to shift through into a stepping left hook which dropped Bacynski twice.

This particular shift seems so committed but also makes a great deal of sense—the elbow is obvious but demands a response: if you cover or slip, you fall into a clinch, if you retreat the opponent can shift through and catch you with longer strikes on the exit. I believe there is also the possibility for a more defensively savvy boxer to use this in mixed martial arts as the right elbow can just as easily be turned into a “folding guard” as the opponent backs away. Think of Jon Jones’ work against Glover Teixeira along the fence, where each elbow created a high shoulder cover on the same side in its wake.

While Dave Leduc’s marketing has helped the cause of Lethwei greatly, it seems as though the sport is in a similar place to bare knuckle boxing. Yes, there are interesting adjustments that need to be made for the ruleset and it would be fascinating to see great kickboxers compete under these rules, but at present it is just one big name and not a lot else. Just as Jimmy Sweeney is fighting almost exclusively semi-retired MMA fighters, and Artem Lobov and Jason Knight are the main stars of BKFC, Leduc’s last fight was against an MMA fighter past his sell-by date, and he has just started teasing a Diego Sanchez lethwei turn. It seems as though all that is needed is for Leduc to beat one fantastic Muay Thai name under Lethwei rules—something that should be doable given that most top kickboxers are considering getting mauled in MMA just for the money nowadays—but whether that risk is more valuable than his current celebrity seems to be the hang up.