No hedging: Former fund manager bets all on MMA taking Asia and world by storm

Chatri Sityodtong knows the fight game thrives on a good back story.

So let’s take his own as a starting point.

Not so much raised into poverty as plunged into it when the Asian financial crisis of 1997 hit, Chatri’s father – who had cast his lot into Thailand’s real estate market and lost everything – left his family behind and his teenaged son had to work the city’s street markets to help them make ends meet.

Chatri wasn’t, by his own admission, a great student but still managed to make his way to Harvard.

Broke – again – by the time he got there but determined to succeed, he picked up his MBA, living on US$4 a day while working any job he could find, and the end result was a Wall Street hedge fund worth around US$500 million.

The constant for Chatri throughout this journey was a dedication to the martial art of muay thai – the driving force in his life, he says, and one that gave him the discipline to deal with the troubles that life threw at him.