The history of a fencer, part I.

I started fencing at age thirteen (sixteen years ago) at Rochester Fencing Centre, (it's now the Rochester Fencing Club.) It is a great club, one of the best in the country. The reason that it's such a great club is that the training regime there is freaking TOUGH! Mandatory practice was Monday through Friday from 4-6pm. And like I said that was just the mandatory practice. As I got a little older I'd go right from school and get to the club around three, warm up, get a lesson, work on footwork or bladework, and then start practice at four. From four to four thirty was all footwork and god help you if the head coach was leading footwork. If he was it meant you were lunging until your legs were cramping, doing footwork suicides until you couldn't breathe, and if you didn't work hard enough he'd have you do it again and again until you met his expectations. Did it hurt? Yes. Was it worth it? Yes.

Before I started fencing I'd done all of the usual sports kids do, i.e. baseball, soccer, etc. I was by far the worst athlete out there. I had zero coordination, no fitness to speak of, and I didn't enjoy being sweaty. To make matters worse almost everybody in my family was an athlete of some kind. My Dad was a pretty good tennis player. My Mom was a good runner. My Step-dad lettered in three sports in high school, was a pitcher in college, and was recruited by the Yankees and Pirates (He had just started a family though and turned them down). Both of his children were all-state swimmers who earned athletic scholarships to college. So with all of this competitive drive and talent surrounding me I was the chubby kid who would rather read a book than play catch. In fact, throughout sixth grade I opted out of recess so I could stay inside and read. All of this lethargy had serious repercussions though, I was forced to take remedial gym class.

For most people gym class is kind of a joke. You play dodge ball, run around a bit, do some jumping jacks, and then it's off to art class. Well not for me. I was a magnet for dodge balls. I tripped when I ran because I walked on the insides of my feet and had to wear special shoes. Jumping jacks made my belly shake. Gym class sucked. In it's infinite wisdom, the school realized how difficult this all was for me and so they decided to help me out by adding two extra gym classes to my weekly schedule. And not just the ordinary hellacious kind of gym class, but remedial gym class. For the uninitiated (and for your sake I hope you are) remedial gym class consisted of the special-ed kids and the fat kids running wind sprints and playing a game with a parachute and Nerf balls called popcorn. If video of this every made it to youtube it would climb to the top of the viewing charts. Just imagine the comedic gold of fat kids being chased by retarded kids. It's horrible and not at all PC but I was one of the fat kids and I can't help but laugh at it now. And the reason we were running was because a couple of the special ed kids bit, hard. Ah, the irony of a fat kid becoming a food source.

When I was twelve I switched schools and decided to completely change my life. Thankfully over the summer I'd had a growth spurt and so was not longer the pudgy kid. I was now the stick figure kid, and I still am. I reasoned out that in order to get some kind of balance in my life between brain and body I would have to learn a sport and actually stick with it,and it had to be something that nobody I knew did. This was because I knew I was going to be terrible (at least at first), and because everybody else had a head start on the normal sports. I thought about different martial arts but the idea of being kicked in the face didn't exactly thrill me, and brain damage wasn't high on my list of priorities. Driving through the city one day I saw a sign that said ROCHESTER FENCING CENTRE (RFC). Fencing! Of course! Nobody knew anything about fencing! I begged my parents for months. The were dubious. After all I'd quit every other sport pretty much right after they'd bought me my equipment. Also I don't think my Mom was to thrilled with the idea of me fighting in any sense of the word. She'd grown up in the 60's outside of San Francisco and was so nonviolent she didn't like me even having water pistols (She had "accidental" ran over my .44 magnum squirt gun.) And lastly, did they really want their son learning to fight with swords from someone who couldn't spell "center" correctly? (Turns out centre is the French spelling, but I never saw a french person at RFC so go figure.) Eventually they relented and for my thirteenth birthday present I was allowed to try fencing. I think they figured they had gotten off easy and this would be another thing I'd walk away from in a few months. Little did they know that it was the beginning of a huge investment in time and thousands upon thousands of dollars.

My first few months at the club I practiced two nights a week for about an hour a practice and got basic instruction from one of the more experienced saber fencers. When school let out at the beginning of summer I was invited to start regular practice at the club, which in the summer was two practices a day at two hours each, 4 days a week. These included weight lifting, footwork, drilling, bouting and lessons. It was a complete 180 from my sedentary lifestyle, but I was enjoying myself and could now run a mile without throwing up! The RFC was above a auto parts store and had/has? no air conditioning in a city with mid-80 temps and very high humidity in the summer. (I love seeing movies with fencing clubs in them and the walls are all beautiful wood paneling and it basically looks like an old library without the books. Real fencing clubs are never like this. They usually smell, often have poor ventilation, rarely have windows, and almost never have air conditioning. Except my current club, so in your face everybody else!) So yeah, I got over my not liking to sweat issue.

I started taking lessons from the head coach that summer and frankly he scared the crap out of me. He still does and I'm now a grown man with six inches on him and some training in Muay Thai and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu . Don't get me wrong, he's one of the best coaches in the U.S. and has generated fantastic results from his students. Also in his defense I've heard he's mellowed out just a little tiny bit. But at the time it was not uncommon to hear obscenities being screamed at little girls, masks being sent flying through the air into unsuspecting walls, and student's going to the locker room after a lesson to have a good cry (You did NOT cry during your lesson, it only made him mad.) This was also back in the day when you did not wear a jacket during your lesson. This was not for comforts sake. It was so if you didn't parry fast enough you would end up with a nice red welt as a reminder to parry faster next time. Or to keep your elbow in. Or to recover from your lunge faster. Or to keep you back hand from covering target. Or to keep your front knee straight ahead. B.F. Skinner would have loved to observe one of these lessons, they were a perfect demonstration of negative reinforcement. I'm not an advocate of this coaching style. It doesn't fit my personality or my beliefs, but he always got results and I never saw him make a student do something that they weren't capable of doing. In fact, you usually did things in your lesson that you didn't believe you were capable of at first because the extra motivation of pain avoidance pushed you that much further. That pretty much sums up being his student. He pushes you farther than you think you can go, then he pushes some more.

My first lesson with him is a blur. I remember standing at attention a lot, addressing him as sir (Later he asked my Mom if I'd been to military school), and getting smacked in my elbow because I had bad technique with my three parry. After the lesson was over I had a few marks but nothing serious and was pretty proud that I hadn't lost control of my bowels. On my second lesson I realized two things, one was that I was now definitely his student, and two was that he'd gone easy on me in my first lesson.

At the end of summer I was asked to join the elite team at RFC which meant I would practice every weekday and receive at least two lessons per week. I accepted and my whole life and the life of my family started to revolve around fencing. Grades were kept up not to maintain a good GPA but because if they dropped I wouldn't be allowed to fence. Christmas and birthday presents started taking on the form of fencing equipment. My parents left work early or stayed late to get me to and from practice everyday. And almost all of my friends were fencers. When you train with people day in and day out and sweat and bleed and win and lose and sometimes cry on their shoulder you find out what friendship really is. I'm not in contact with anybody I went to high school with unless they were a fencer with me at RFC.
In February of my 8th grade year I went to my first national tournament, Junior Olympics (JO's) in Colorado Springs. I fenced the U-15, U-17, and U-20. I don't remember my final places but I did pretty well for not having fenced even a full year yet (I think I made the 16 in U-15, the 32 in U-17, and got first rounded in U-20.). After this competition I was completely hooked. I was thirteen years old and missing school to stay in a hotel halfway across the country with my friends and compete in a sport that I loved with kids from all across the country. Is there anything better?

I trained harder and started to go to North American Cups (NACs). We got a new coach at RFC for sabre who was a former Junior National Champion in the Ukraine. A year later he went to college and we Got a former Junior Champion from Poland as our coach. A year later he went off to school along with most of the sabre fencers at RFC leaving me and my one remaining teammate. Our new coach was a fantastic fencer. He'd already competed for the U.S. in four Olympics and would go on to compete in his fifth while he was our coach. Unfortunately he didn't fence saber, he fenced foil and epee. I was doubtful as to the success of this arrangement. My first meeting with this coach didn't help much. At Jo's in Little Rock I was bent over looking through my fencing bag when somebody comes up from behind me and kicks me in the ass sending me headfirst into my equipment. I assumed it was one of my friends so I jumped up and spun around ready to smack him in the face, but instead of my friend there is this goofy looking guy standing there with a grin on his face. I of course immediately ingratiate myself by saying "Who the fuck are you and why did you kick me?" The grin remained and he said, "I'm your new coach, get used to getting your butt kicked." and with that he walked away. A few months later he showed up in Rochester and we started a whole new kind of training.

I'm going to refer to this coach as Grin. For those in the fencing world it won't take much effort to find out who Grin is, but I don't want to be held liable so his name here is Grin. Grin is a freaking excellent coach and the emotional opposite of my first coach, lets call him Yell. If Grin taught me anything it was that fencing, and life in general, is a game and meant to be played. If you can't have fun, what's the point? Not to say that he didn't make us work our butts off in practice, but where Yell would yell at you to work harder or smack you with a weapon, Grin would motivate you by making you want to beat him so damn bad you had to choke back tears of frustration when he'd crush you in a game. There are few things more aggravating than being beaten by a impish man with a grin who because he's beaten you makes you refer to him as "King". And all the while he made it fun. Grin wasn't great at teaching saber technique, but damn my footwork got really good through his coaching. Almost all the footwork drills I do with my student's now are the same as the ones Grin did with me. They focus not only on the technique of footwork, but also on maintaining a flexible mind and the tactics of distance and timing.

After two years of working with Grin and fencing the same teammate every single day for two hours I graduated high school and was recruited by Penn State (WE ARE, PENN STATE!). When I joined the PSU team as a freshman they were three time NCAA Div 1 consecutive champions and had already won five NCAA Championships that decade. The problem was that many of their top fencers had graduated the year before and my class was a rebuilding year. Not many people really expected much from us except our teammates and our coaches. Right from the get go it was made clear to us by our teammates that if you were a good fencer your primary responsibility was to the team. You did not miss practice. You did not skip lessons. And you definitely showed up to every fencing party. One of the great things about the team was it didn't matter so much how long you'd been on the team. What mattered most was how good a fencer you were and how committed to improving you were. There were people on the team that weren't very good and didn't really try and it didn't matter if you were a freshman and they were a senior, you could ignore their bs. The funny thing was it was these people who were always telling the freshmen to carry their bag or chug their beer! WTF! Practice at Penn State was tough but not as tough as RFC. I went there thinking how I was going to be getting crushed at practice and dieing during physical conditioning but really it wasn't bad. The reason being it was me, one other freshman, and two sophomores for saber. That's it. The other freshman was a really solid fencer from Atlanta who became one of my best friends and constant practice partner, I will refer to him from now on as DB (He knows why). In fact, usually it was just him and I for saber at practice (Except for the time it was only me because he was hung over from playing street fighter for shots.). Out of the other saber fencers, one was kind of a pot head who ended up quitting the team because he was called up for a drug test and would have failed. And the other had been switched to saber from foil, but had to redshirt that year. So that left me and DB. Surprisingly, at the end of the year we managed to qualify a full team for NCAA championships. NCAA fencing is different from fencing at NAC's. It's team based rather than individual. You have three fencers and an alternate per weapon. Those people will fence members of another team scoring 1 point for their team for every bout they win. At the end of the meet the team with the highest points wins. At NCAA champs it's like this but every bout you win counts as one point for your team and everybody fences in a huge round robin over the course of two days. At the end of the competition the team with the highest number of points wins. Not only this but men's and women's results are combined so there is no Men's NCAA Team Champion and Women's NCAA Team Champion, just The NCAA Team Champion (school) and individual champions who were the leaders in points in their respective weapon and who won two direct elimination bouts starting from the top four. Anyway, miracle of miracles we qualified a full team and went to Notre Dame for NCAA Championships.

The great part is that Notre Dame were our chief rivals and we'd defeated them the last three years to win NCAA Championships. Now we were on their turf and they had a strong veteran team. Pretty much everybody thought they'd pull out the victory and Penn State's streak would end. Everybody but the fencers and coaches of Penn State. You know the saying "going into the lion's den" well that's what we were doing. The thing was though, we were the lions. We were lions going into the den of Fighting Irishmen. Granted they were Fighting Irishmen, but nobody wants a lion in their den. They have a tendency to eat people or at the least bite off limbs. So long story short we won 149-147 and I finished in 6th earning 2nd Team All-American Honors. Never before or since have I ever experienced so sweet a victory.

End of Part 1