Coach Ekapol Chanthawong, seen with his grandmother, has drawn praise for protecting the boys during the ordeal.
Former monk, 25, seen as divine force, sent to protect the boys
The head coach of the Thai soccer team spent the morning of June 23 preparing his young assistant for an important task: looking out for the boys by himself.
Nopparat Khanthavong, the 37-year-old head coach of the Moo Pa (Wild Boars) soccer team, had an appointment that morning. Ekapol Chanthawong, his assistant, was to take the younger boys to a soccer field nestled by the Doi Nang Non mountain range, a formation with numerous waterfalls and caves that straddles the Thai-Myanmar border.
“Make sure you ride your bicycle behind them when you are traveling around, so you can keep a lookout,” he wrote in a Facebook message he shared with the Washington Post.
Ekapol coaches the younger boys, so Nopparat told him to bring some of the boys from the older team for additional eyes. “Take care,” he wrote. The hours that followed kicked off a chain of events that has riveted the world: a dramatic search and rescue that found the boys alive nine days later, huddled on a small, muddy patch surrounded by floodwaters. Attention has focused on the only adult, 25-year-old former monk Ekapol, and the role he has played in both their predicament and their survival.
Efforts underway to extract the boys have involved a swelling team of thousands of divers, engineers, military personnel and volunteers from all over the world — including Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
Diving them out was seen as too risky given the boys’ lack of swimming experience. But with monsoon rains on the way, rescuers were pressured by the weather and had to act. On Sunday, divers rescued four, and plans were underway to go back in for a second rescue early Monday morning.
As the rescue takes place, some have chided Ekapol for leading the team into the cave in the first place. A large warning sign at the cave’s entrance raises the risk of entering so close to the monsoon season, they say, and he should have known better.
But for many in Thailand, Ekapol, who left his life in the monkhood three years ago and joined the Wild Boars as an assistant coach soon after, is an almost divine force, sent to protect the boys as they go through this ordeal.
According to rescue officials, he was among the weakest in the group, in part because he gave the boys his share of the limited food and water they had with them in the early days. He also taught the boys how to meditate and how to conserve as much energy as possible until they were found.
“If he didn’t go with them, what would have happened to my child?” said the mother of Pornchai Khamluang, one of the boys in the cave, in an interview with a Thai television network. “When he comes out, we have to heal his heart. My dear Ek, I would never blame you.” Ekapol was an orphan who lost his parents at age10, friends say. He then trained to be a monk but left the monastery to care for his ailing grandmother in Mae Sai in northern Thailand. There, he split his time between working as a temple hand at a monastery and training the then newly-established Moo Pa team. He found kindred spirits in the boys, many of whom had grown up poor or were stateless ethnic minorities, common in this border area between Myanmar and Thailand. “He loved them more than himself,” said Joy Khampai, a longtime friend of Ekapol’s who works at a coffee stand in the Mae Sai monastery.
“He doesn’t drink, he doesn’t smoke. He was the kind of person who looked after himself and who taught the kids to do the same.”
He helped Nopparat, the head coach, devise a system where the boys’ passion for soccer would motivate them to excel academically. If they got certain grades in school, they would be rewarded with soccer gear, such as fresh studs for their cleats or a new pair of shorts.
“He gave a lot of himself to them,” Nopparat said.
He would ferry the boys to and from home when their parents could not and took responsibility for them as if they were his own family.
On that Saturday two weeks ago, Nopparat did not know where Ekapol would be bringing the young soccer team but thought it would be a learning experience for him to manage them on his own.
The older Wild Boars were having a match in the evening, he said, so he put his phone away. When he checked it at 7 p.m., there were at least 20 calls from worried parents, none of whose sons had come home. He frantically dialed Ekapol and a number of the boys in quick succession but reached only Songpol Kanthawong, a 13-year old member of the team whose mother picked him up after training.
He told Nopparat the team had gone exploring in the Tham Luang caves. The coach raced up there, only to find abandoned bicycles and bags at its entrance and water seeping out the muddy pathway. “I screamed,” he said. “My body went completely cold.”
Information slowly started to come out about the boys’ nineday ordeal before they were eventually found on Monday night, through letters and limited communication between the coach, the team and the rescuers who have been with them in a small cave chamber.
Friends, meanwhile, grow worried for Ekapol. He had the boys’ complete trust, and it is unlikely they would have set off exploring the cave’s chambers without him. “I know him, and I know he will blame himself,” said Joy, his friend at the monastery.