American Fencer - Modern Lessons from an Ancient Sport by Tim Morehouse

Author:Tim Morehouse [Morehouse, Tim]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780984733330
Publisher: Acanthus Publishing
Published: 2012-10-15T04:00:00+00:00

It would be a learning experience, I told myself. It was a step on the path to closing the distance. Time and money were immaterial compared to simply basking in the superhuman glory of the world’s elite fencers, even as they dismantled me. I went through my preflight checklist, dialing in my strategy for the first point. The director said Allez!

Touya eats newbie fencers for breakfast—we are his version of Wheaties. The reality of this match was that Touya had more than twice my ability, experience, technique, and speed. But here’s the thing: while I was certainly a newbie, my technique wasn’t necessarily on the newbie continuum of expected fencing skill. My ungainly technique—the funky angle of my feint cut—wasn’t necessarily a less-skilled version of Touya’s. It was different. I’m sure there were, and still are, holes in my defense and inaccuracies in my attack, but they aren’t in the expected places.

It’s like poker: you can trust top-notch opponents to play logically, their actions giving clues to their cards. But it can be harder to play against unskilled opponents—if they’re playing willy-nilly, who knows what their hands hold?—and they certainly can’t be trusted to act logically when you’ve played them into logical spots. Likewise, a strange fencer is sometimes a dangerous fencer. Later I would learn that an ungainly newbie fencer only succeeds until he has been “solved,” at which point the initially promising results can take a nosedive. But for now, the gist is this: I took Touya to 13-13 in my first international competition. I would attack, miss, then, without really seeing his blade, raise to block my head and catch Touya’s blade on the way, hitting him with the riposte. Mid-match, Touya started stretching, jumping in place a bit—he’d imagined this match would be his warm-up, the start of his tournament, and now he was trying to get the blood flowing before it was too late.

It worked. Touya took the final 2 points and the win. But I walked off the strip into a new world. Truth be told, it was mostly luck that made it such a close match. But in terms of closing the distance between being a New York City public school teacher who’s asleep on his feet in the evenings and being a competitor in the world of elite fencing, it was huge. I remembered watching perfect, superhuman Olympians skate the 1984 Winter Olympics. I remember one Saturday in eighth grade meeting Olympian Peter Westbrook for the first time and being awed. Now I’d nearly beaten a recent Olympian at the top of his form in an international competition.

It gave me more than confidence—it gave me real belief. Not the kind born of ignorant bliss and wishful daydreaming, but the kind of belief brought by actually getting in the game and taking away something positive.

After I was eliminated, I watched from the stands, paying attention to how fencers at this level moved. The typical U.S. fencer tends to be immediate. We take big steps and launch big attacks, running down the strip at opponents.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.