stab {The gift of}
1. It’s fun to stab 14-year-old girls
I thought fencing was a pretentious, so-called sport for snobs. But then I started poking around. Here’s what I learned.
By m a x p l e n k e Portrait By S a b i n o r r
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
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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
Companion | MARCH 2012
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2/23/12 7:41 AM