I thought fencing was a pretentious, so-called sport for snobs. But then I started poking around. Here’s what I learned.
At Frank Van Dyke’s gym, my first hour holding a sword was spent stabbing 14-year-old girls in the chest. Over and over, lunges and parries and ripostes, my thighs crying out in agony. And then, the payoff: The next half hour was nothing but sparring, brutalizing men and women of all ages on the gray rubber piste (the French word for the strip on which we duel). It was gratifying. There’s a sense of overwhelming power when you conquer an opponent with a blade — and don’t have to deal with the crushing guilt of having killed someone’s daughter in cold blood.
I felt a little silly just entertaining the prospect of doing something that used to get me put in time out. I never knew fencing to be a thing people “did.” The only sword fighters I knew were theater people and, synonymously, weird despite their athleticism. But that night, blade in hand, I stood next to a woman who may have babysat my mother and a boy whose babysitter I may have babysat. And then I stabbed them both.
2. Yes, there is a fencing scene in Las Vegas
When I first visited Red Rock Fencing Center, I walked into what looked like a cut-away of a quaint ’80s sitcom kitchen. Fencing kitsch flirted with mugs and dishes on racks beneath bright fluorescent lights. Overstuffed couches lined a whitewashed wall above a tile floor. I almost expected a cheer track when Head Coach Frank Van Dyke walked out and sat down at a dining table covered in fruit and Fiddle Faddle, shaking my hand with a reach that probably won him a few fencing tournaments. His blond hair matched the kitchen’s ‘80s aesthetic.
When he tells me there isn’t much of a “fencing scene” in Las Vegas, he’s only half telling the truth. There isn’t some underground league of stalwart defenders of the ancient sport of person-stabbing, and the scene isn’t large enough to defend Nevada with musketeerian force. But there are two schools — break-aways of an original main program — both with impressive followings and their own personalities.
3. Fencing is not as boring as it looks
Before January, modern fencing, as a spectator sport, puzzled me. It’s managed to be in every Olympic game since the Olympic revival in 1896. But to the average TV-watching American, the excitement levels out somewhere between “double dutch” and “chess tournament.” Two people in white suits bounce around a strip until finally one pokes the other, an older fencer named Michelle would tell me later. Over the course of a couple weeks, I’d learn the bouncing is to calculate distance and wait for the other white suit to step too close. The actual dance of the bout is heavily thought out and will be won with brain, not brawn. But the casual watcher doesn’t know that. And neither did I.
At Red Rock, Ava, the lady who crunches the books and runs the desk, turns into an Italian mother during Saturday Stab ‘n’ Grab tournaments (more on that later), insisting you partake in the kitchen finger food cornucopia. Past the kitchen, parents bring their kids and warm up by dancing around the rubber-slabbed floor of a sprawling training space, fingers pointed out like swords, trying their hardest to teach four-year-olds proper stance. It’s like a family reunion. With swords.
The Fencing Academy of Nevada is the Cobra-Kai to Red Rock’s Mr. Miyagi’s junkyard. That isn’t to say the smiling doctors I met at my beginning lessons at FAN were going to sweep the leg and kick my ass. But FAN is full of affluent characters and caters to traditional styles. Their space is intimate but professional, flags and trophies occupy every corner of the brightly lit room facing Rainbow Boulevard. Each time I attend, most of the conversations between staff are held in French. I smile and nod through coach Jaques Lacour’s thickly accented instruction, each sentence punctuated by a booming laugh and the swat of his sword. But under that joviality, this is a place for serious training. There is no Fiddle Faddle.
4. You can, in fact, go effin’ crazy with a sword in fencing
Just saying “blade” gets ahead of the story. There are three blades in fencing: Foil, Épée, and Sabre. “Every weapon has its own personality,” Van Dyke tells me one afternoon in the crowded sword room. “Say I give you a coloring book and said color the first page and give it back to me. If you gave it back nice and neat, you’d be a foilist, because foilists like rules, staying within the lines. If you gave it back and the page was scribbled all over the place, you’d be an épéeist, because épéeists don’t have rules. If you handed it back to me and the book was ripped in half and the crayons were busted, you’d be a sabreist. Because sabreists are generally crazy.”
Each weapon comes with its own set of rules. You can slash and stab with the sabre. You can only stab the torso with a foil. Épée, Van Dyke tells me, is the real dueling sword. First person to stab (no slashing) someone anywhere gets the point. With foil and sabre, there’s “right of way,” which means the attacker who made his advance first gets the point. Right of way is given to the opponent if he parries, or blocks the attack. The defender has a chance to riposte, or return blows. In a nutshell, you’re taking turns for every time someone blocks the other — an unusually polite rule for something based on an instrument of death.
5. Fencing is like chess. With swords. And sweat.
It took a lot of the primal nature out of a very kill-or-be-killed instinct, the give-and-take of right of way. On my first night of open sparring, I got caught up in remembering to attack, parry, riposte instead of stab, stab, stab. But as the night wore on, it started to make sense. Swat-clink-swat. Swat-clink-stab. I landed a fast hit on Doctor Allen from Santa Cruz after he made a cocky advance. A light flashed and a loud beep indicated my point. He was surprised. I was ecstatic. And in that moment I realized why, for a sport that’s so boring to watch, people fence. The speed. The tactics. The mental game of chess you play with every opponent, Bobby Fishering each one using their own proclivities as a weapon. I was sweaty and triumphant, equal parts D’Artagnan and Jack Sparrow.
I would only score one point the next day. Because Stab ‘N Grab, the elimination-style mini-tournament Red Rock holds every Saturday, isn't sparring. This is for glory. This is for temporary ownership of a trophy, a little plastic fencer Van Dyke affectionately calls Pierre Ripostee. At that point, I’d only fenced foil — and even so, it was one of two weapons with which I would not land a single blow. It didn’t help that it was against Joe, who, in 1991, won the Ohio Intercollegiate Open as an undergraduate. “For me it’s an all-body, all-mind sport,” he said. “It’s operating on so many levels within you.” He’d proceed to beat me 5 to 0.
I thought I’d have sabre in the bag. While finesse and brains were important, more important were speed and strength. Brawn over brain, which sounded up my alley, considering my lack of understanding the rules and surplus ornery young-guy spirit. Against Van Dyke, I walked away with zero hits and one bloody knuckle from a shot to my bare and ill-placed hand. Overall, a defeated scenario. But I had found my weapon. “I look for how well you balance,” Van Dyke tells me later about how he pegged me as a sabreist. “The more you balance, the quicker you’ll excel. Next is how quick you are with your hands, and lastly, how unafraid you are.”
As he’s describing to me the way his students pick their weapons, it becomes clear to me, indirectly, how broadly different walks of life are represented here. While the trend in fencing is affluent East Coasters, doctors, and other representations of the one percent, not all fencers are WASPy blue-bloods from New England. Joe, the former fencing champ, is an IT specialist from Ohio who returned to the strip when he decided he’d train to fence professionally; Ryan, the 25-year-old CSN student/retail clerk, fenced for the exercise and people he met through Red Rock; the gaggle of senior-aged fencers whose energy and flexibility I could only hope to have at their age. The youngest trainee I met was Parker, a 7th grade sabreist who wanted to get a scholarship to college for fencing. “I didn’t want to do team sports because I would just get frustrated with my team,” he said. “Doing an individual sport made it so if I lost, the blame was on me which made me determined to do better.” The personalities were as wide-ranging as the ages. Geeky shy kids who’d been into sword-fighting and decided to give it a shot. Empty nesters looking for something to keep them busy and fit. Twenty-somethings who’d been training for years, some on the Olympic warpath.
7. Fencing aficionados are self-conscious of the sport’s boring image
That week, I visited the Riviera hotel-casino for Duel in the Desert, a local fencing tournament that often acted as a qualifier for larger competitions. The room looked more like the end of a particularly sparse consumer expo, and from what I could tell, I was one of fewer than 10 who wasn’t a coach, judge, or participant. The box seats were empty. The only chairs were occupied by fencers waiting for the next bout. It became clear fencing is for fencers the way magazine writing is for magazine writers. “It’s mostly fencers and people who know what fencers are doing who watch,” Van Dyke says to me after the tournament. “People very rarely come off the street to watch fencing.” But if fencing can’t be marketed to a wider audience, it could be the death knell for fencing as an Olympic — and collegiate — sport. “In my opinion, without fencing in the Olympics, there would be no NCAA fencing program,” Van Dyke says. “Without that, there would be no college fencing scholarships.”
In 2009, the FIE (in English, the International Fencing Federation) cancelled men’s épée and women’s sabre events from the 2012 Olympics, a worrying omen for fencing just becoming an et cetera in the list of dropped Olympic sports. The reason, according to Van Dyke, is commercialism. “Fencing on the amateur side is very blasé,” he says. “There’s no blood. There’s no pummeling. The MMA has that, the sensationalism. There’s no sensationalism in fencing because no one is getting beaten up.”
8. Fencing marries meditation and violence
A week later, I returned for the sabre introduction lesson. My inner thighs were still rough from the previous week. I could hear Van Dyke’s explanation of the proper lunge as he half barked, half lovingly explained the difference between a foil riposte and that of the sabre. The next hour was spent the same way: attack, parry, riposte. Lunge, block, head-slap. I destroyed a whole mess of teenagers and a couple moms. And I understood why guys like Ryan, who’d wipe the floor with me later that evening, loved it. “After working out an hour on the strip, I’m calm,” he says. “I’m calm when I’m out there. I’m calm afterward. I get the endorphins from the exercise and my mind works out as well. It’s like a good conversation while getting good exercise. It’s incomparable to anything else in my life.”
And maybe that’s why it’s going to continue to be played, regardless of what the Olympics committee decided. Fencing works your body like yoga, ballet, and boxing combined. It’s not a dainty class designation for snobs. It’s not the kind of thing where the biggest man wins. More than anything else, it feels great. “I do it because it’s fun,” says Michelle, who went on to be the senior class champion in women’s épée at Duel in the Desert. “I didn’t even realize I was losing weight.” It’s more than just a sport that can’t seem to be shaken from the longest-running sporting event. It’s that deceptively difficult sport you’ve wanted to try since seeing your first pirate, musketeer, buccaneer or violent English aristocrat movie.
9. You can be humiliated by a 7th grader — and get hooked on the sport
It wouldn’t have been so humiliating, the deft stab to my chest, if my attacker hadn’t been half my size, age, and vocabulary. But in the time it took me to square my feet, a tiny, masked bottle rocket of seventh grade fury was already upon me, sabre outstretched, the ten feet of rubber landing strip that used to stand between us now at his heels, leaving little more than the green “hit” light above my attacker’s head and my sweat soaked into the thick bib protecting my throat. The bout was over as soon as it began, a big grin very clear through Parker’s mask as he saluted me, signaling my departure from the strip.
My assignment was to shine light on the fencing scene in Las Vegas. Something that, beyond whatever swordplay you might expect at Treasure Island, was bound to be fairly limited. In a city where guys in TapOut shorts beat each other senseless at the MGM, this was the classic, distant relative, the French brother-in-law twice removed who married MMA’s sister after she went abroad to France. Weeks after my first lesson, my legs ached in a way they haven’t since high school soccer season. But I can’t stop. After this story hits the printer and you read this line on a glossy page, I’ll still be on the piste, sabre drawn, trying my damnedest to beat that 7th-grade bottle rocket.