DEALING WITH FAME A YEAR LATER
Fame has not changed ‘Wild Boars’ after Thai cave rescue
AFOOTBALL team comprising mostly poor or stateless teenagers entered a tourist cave complex in northern Thailand a year ago on a day trip, accompanied by their coach.
They emerged 18 days later to global acclaim, courted by film producers, authors and talk show hosts eager to tell the remarkable story of a daring operation that rescued them from the flooded depths.
Most of the 12 “Wild Boars”, as the team was known, still live here, once a sleepy backwater but now inundated with selfie-snapping tourists.
They still play football — their coach who led them down the Tham Luang cave complex continues to run training — and they share the same basic homes with their families.
But life for the team has taken an extraordinary trajectory since they were rescued, led out of the cave heavily sedated by teams of expert divers.
They have signed a film deal with Netflix, travelled the world, and had their story chronicled in books, documentaries and a pipeline of films.
But their new-found fame has also forced silence on them, as the boys and their families can no longer talk freely about their ordeal — the result of exclusivity contracts that ban them from speaking to the press.
The boys were on a day trip to the cave complex on June 23 last year when up-country rains flooded the complex via underground waterways.
They were feared dead until two British cave divers negotiated a series of narrow waterways and corridors and found them on July 2, trapped in a damp chamber, 4km from the entrance.
It was then that Adul Sam-on, aged 14 at the time, became one of the stars of the drama.
He was thrust into the limelight by his gracious “thank you” spoken in English to the British divers who found the group, emaciated, cold, but alive, nine days after they went missing.
With the anniversary of the start of the saga this Sunday, those close to the Wild Boars said fame had not changed them.
“He’s an ordinary person just like before,” Adul’s friend Aman Sommol said from his school.
Adul and several other Wild Boars now play for the Ekkapol Academy, a new club founded by Coach Ek, as he is known.
As he runs drills Ek smiles at the visiting media, but bound by Netflix’s gag order he cannot talk about the cave drama.
Coach Ek also now heads a media company which will act as the go-between for the production houses, the boys and their families.
Rumours have swirled about payments to the boys — US media has pinned the number at US$100,000 (RM414,000) for each.