Greetings my Yaw-Yan family!
Early this month, I was with MuayThai NSA President Kru Robert Valdez who happens to be a former Yaw-Yan fighter with over 5 victories under his Yaw-Yan record both national and international. We were discussing MuayThai under the Olympic Council of Asia and Yaw-Yan suddenly became part of the discussion.
We feel that Yaw-Yan should start making its own image...starting of course with the uniforms. I recently saw some of our fighters from Makati Ardigma using a longer kind of uniform and that I think is quite interesting rather than the generic kickboxing shorts. We also saw our senior fighter Louie Mateo of Yaw-Yan Baguio wearing the "Bahag" and that is yet another very interesting concept.
We should also start incorporating the Bolo punches and Yaw-Yan arsenals into our own tournaments...let's refrain from joining mixed styles striking competitions to avoid being tagged as a kickboxing style.
We also noticed the videos in the internet featuring our NEW fighters. Pardon me but I find the fights very "un-Yaw-Yan" so to speak. It does not in any tasteful way show the world what Yaw-Yan is...it only shows the uncontrolled and most of the time "Bara-Bara" techniques of our opponents...thus dragging our fighters into a similar scenario. One watching a video tagged as "Yaw-Yan Fighter" will find it very difficult to understand which one is the Yaw-Yan fighter unless of course announced as winner after the fight. The videos show our new fighters winning over their opponents but did we win the respect of the viewers? Did we manage to show the viewers how distinct our art is? Read comments from other fighters worldwide and the answers to these questions will come from them.
Let's start making a distinct image for Yaw-Yan... it's been almost 4 decades...maybe we can stop showing the world how tough we are or how effective our style is versus other styles. Maybe we should start showing the world what Yaw-Yan truly is :)
Wanlu