FIGHTER COMPARISON

How to read these numbers

A Lethwei record is not the clean ledger a boxing record is. Sandpit-era bouts were often unrecorded, festival cards kept no sanctioning paperwork, and fighters from that period almost certainly fought more often than any surviving count shows. Where official numbers do not exist, the records here are career-stage approximations rather than sanctioning-body totals — so treat a win column as a shape, not a scoreboard.

KO percentage is calculated against wins, not total bouts, so it answers “when this fighter wins, how often is it a finish?” In a sport with no judges in its traditional form and a draw as the default outcome, that figure says more about a style than a win-loss line does — a low KO rate on a long record usually means a fighter who went the distance in an era when going the distance was the norm.

Comparing across eras is the biggest trap. Traditional-era fighters worked under knockout-only rules with no scoring safety net; modern WLC-era fighters fight under a tournament ruleset with judges, weight-class discipline and a two-minute injury timeout. A cross-era comparison is a comparison of two different sports as much as two fighters — the rules chapter and the judging guide set out what actually changed.