Fencers Club instructor Peter Westbrook, a six-time Olympian and bronze medalist, established the club’s Peter Westbrook Foundation aiming to draw inner-city kids to the sport. Here, he demonstrates for a group of students during a recent session.
Good swordsmanship as Chelsea fencing clubs spar
By Barry Paddock
New Yorkers who have ever considered taking up the sport of fencing have a uniquely ample opportunity to indulge their curiosity in Chelsea.
For the last decade the neighborhood has been home to the oldest fencing organization in the western hemisphere, the Fencers Club, while an upstart club just blocks away, Empire United Fencing, already boasts Olympic members. Together the two clubs are drawing young and old to the neighborhood from the five boroughs—and far beyond.
Both clubs are rife with the sounds of panting, occasional grunting and the clang of metal against metal as fencers execute chasing attacks, lunges, counterattacks and dodges. They wear knickers, plastic breastplates and cross-hatched masks that make them resemble beekeepers. Their modern fencing swords have electric wires running up the fencer’s sleeve and into the floor or ceiling; when the sword makes contact with an opponent’s, lights on a console flash, indicating a hit.
“You’re oblivious to any aches and pains,” says Paul Oratofsky, 64, of the sport’s rejuvenating qualities. “The adrenaline takes over of trying to hit them before they hit you.”
Malcolm Miller, 9, who lives on Central Park West, agrees. “I really don’t think there’s anything better than it, or anything ever will be better than it,” he says. “In video games you’re playing as someone. In fencing, it’s you.”
The Fencers Club, founded in 1883 and located for the last decade at 119 W. 25th St., has over 200 members ranging in age from 7 to 80. Silver-haired James Melcher, 68, has fenced for 47 years and heads the club’s board of directors. Even he struggles to explain the sport’s strange allure. “Fencing is the most artificial of sports, the least natural,” he says. “The better you are, the lighter you hit—not hack like a woodcutter, but cut like a surgeon.”
Margaret Lu, a teenage fencing phenomenon, says, “I always feel like an author when I’m fencing. A writer can say something that seems random, and it later turns out to be important. Lull them into complacency with a repetitive movement, then surprise.”
Lu fences at Empire, which opened its doors back in September at 145 W. 30th St. The bulk of the new club’s clientele—100 children and teenagers, plus a small adult recreational program—followed the club’s coaches from their previous jobs: Olympian Jed Dupree, 28, as well as two Empire coaches, broke away from the Fencers Club.
But unlike Empire, the Fencers Club is a not-for-profit enterprise. “They think they can make money off the sport,” Melcher, the Fencers Club’s board chairman, says of his new competition. “I doubt that’s the case. It’s so expensive—the rent, insurance, paying the coaches. We’re just trying to bring fencing to people.”
Although it’s for-profit, Empire has egalitarian ideals of its own. “No one can come in here with a lot of money and get extra instruction,” coach Sean McClain, 32, says. Members pay an up-front fee, motivating them to show up for all group lessons to take full advantage of their payment. The Fencers Club, meanwhile, offers both group and private instruction.
Both clubs charge a similar fee for yearly membership, with various discounts available depending on age and special programs offered for young fencers looking to break into the sport who otherwise might not have had the chance.
Once inside, fencers use one of three kinds of swords: the foil, épée or saber. Épéeists can hit their opponent anywhere on the body; foilists can strike only the torso; and saberists can hit anywhere from the waist up. Each of the three styles has its own sword, which start at about $50, including a unique blade and hand guard.
At Empire group classes overlap so younger kids can see older kids in action, but on Saturdays fencers of every age and level fence together. Here, even the older, competitive fencers don’t mind training with 8-year-olds. “You need younger people looking up to you,” says Canadian Olympian Josh McGuire, 24, “and older people for you to look up to.”
McGuire started fencing at age 6 in Hamilton, Ontario, and today he is rated the best foil fencer in Canada and the 16th best in the world. The Canadian government is paying him to prepare full-time for the next Olympics, so he moved to New York six months ago to train at Empire.
Empire owners and coaches Dupree and McClain met on the fencing circuit as children. McClain’s last competitive battle, in 2004, was against Dupree, with Dupree emerging the victor. The pair built Empire’s sleek interior mostly themselves last summer with loans from friends and family, and the club boasts a sprung bamboo floor to reduce injuries.
But the roughly 300 members of the Fencers Club are content with fluorescent lights and a painted cement floor inside their space. Oratofsky, a fine art photographer and software developer, has fenced since he was 17 and is a consultant for the club. “Some of the world’s strongest fencers have come through here,” he says, “so it’s just very seasoned. Things accrue with experience. Somehow the club takes on a patina.”
One Fencers Club instructor, Peter Westbrook, is a six-time Olympian and bronze medalist. An African American father and Asian mother raised him in Newark’s public housing projects, so he established the Fencers Club’s Peter Westbrook Foundation aiming to draw inner-city kids into the sport. In this special program, families pay just $25 a year for their children to train under Westbrook, and his Saturday morning class draws over 100 mostly black and Latino kids.
But not everyone is sold on the sport immediately. “Why is my mother signing me up for a ‘Three Musketeers’ course from the 18th century?” says Kyjah Coryat, 13, of West Harlem of her first impression of the sport. Today, however, “I basically live here,” she says.
“If you don’t work hard, we tell you to get your ass out of here and come back next year,” says Westbrook, who is fit and trim at 55. “We’re not looking for free riders. I’ve got to raise the bar. We create Olympians. We create world champions.”
His then voice softens with wonder. “We love the kids so much. I give them hugs; I give them kisses. We build character, and we develop so much pride.
College-age fencers serve as Westbrook’s assistant coaches, leading 100-plus kids in performing 60 jumping jacks while counting in perfect unison. Peering down from the walls are sword-wielding, sepia-toned portraits of the likes of Harold Van Buskirk, U.S. epee champion of 1927.
The kids also advance, retreat and lunge in unison. They freeze on the lunges, and coaches adjust their position, lifting an arm or bending an elbow. “I think some of you all are still sleeping,” one coach remarks.
Parents watch from benches lining the walls, on which a long list of prestigious college programs that participants have gone on to hang above their heads. Most top colleges have fencing teams, and there’s not a large pool of fencers to draw from, so scholarships are plentiful for strong fencers.
Finally Westbrook takes command of the group, now seated on the floor before him, spending a few minutes drawing stories out of the kids. He wants to know what they’ve been up to since they last met. One kids excitedly reports she’s been to a party with other young fencers. “I love it when people go to parties together and mix,” Westbrook responds. Later he explains his philosophy to Chelsea Now. “I need you to heal yourself to become a better person,” he says. “Fencing is a microcosm of how you feel about yourself. If you feel sh—y about yourself, you can’t fence well.”
Gil Santiago, a Chelsea architect and designer, stumbled upon the program when he saw people leaving the club’s building with fencing equipment. He then signed up his son and daughter. “I had the image of an Errol Flynn movie and the discipline of a bygone era,” he says.
Santiago’s 12-year-old daughter Kira’s fencing skill and dedication qualify her for more free lessons during the week. She says the sport allows her to take out all her anger. “I get really pissed off,” she says, “because I don’t like people poking me with swords.”
David Grant, a legal assistant from Soundview in the Bronx, brings his girlfriend’s 10-year-old son to the program. He coordinates with the boy’s grandmother to get him to the lesson by 9 a.m. every Saturday and then back home. “He goes home and practices it on his sisters with broomsticks,” Grant says. “We feel it’s important to have something steady like this.”
At Empire United, parents are equally devoted. Mona Lu drives over an hour from Greenwich, Conn., to take her daughter Margaret to lessons. A couple of years ago she was looking for an activity to occupy her son, who loved Star Wars and wanted to use a lightsaber. He tried fencing, and Margaret tagged along.
“I was raised a girly girl,” Margaret says. “I wanted to do something cooler than play with dolls.” Her coach initially had to tape the sword to her hand because she didn’t have the strength and coordination to hold it properly. After her third lesson, she returned home to make a dramatic announcement: “I told my mom this is what I want to do for the rest of my life. I’m not going to do this half—I’m going all the way.”
So Margaret quit soccer, horseback riding, basketball, tennis and gymnastics. She went on to fence in competitions in Paris, Slovakia, Hungary, France and Germany—all at the tender age of 13.
“I’m mostly a normal girl,” Margaret says, “but I feel different because I know what I want to do. I want to be a coach—I haven’t told my coach that yet. Possibly help him run a fencing club.”
