TOWN
Sport
Blade Runners A fencing school on Greenville’s Northside quietly keeps a centuries-old sport alive / by Jennifer Oladipo // photography by Levi Monday
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blunt sword sits sheathed on our fireplace mantle because I couldn’t think of anywhere else to put it. My husband, Jarrod Orange, won it as the first-place trophy in a small fencing tournament at Greenville’s Knights of Siena Fencing Academy, where he’d taken up the sport six months prior. The win was surprising, but the academy’s very existence was the real shocker. Boasting a national championship and a founder, Alan Blakeborough, with a countrywide reputation for professionalizing fencing, the school somehow remains invisible to much of the community. The Knights of Siena gym on Rutherford Road is one of four locations in
the Carolinas founded by Blakeborough. It operates out of a nondescript brick building neighbor to an auto repair shop and what appears to be a defunct motel. Blakeborough brought his fencing schools to the area after successful runs in New York and Florida. The Greenville location spawned the 2006–2007 National Sabre Team champions (the first winning team from outside of California or New York) and groomed several successful NCAA athletes over the years. Yet it’s also home to a community of regular folks who found and fell in love with the sport long after their school days ended. “Star Wars, pirates, or knights in shining armor,” says Blakeborough, explaining the common motivators for people to take up fencing. “Or they’ve seen fencing on TV. I had a student who fences for NYU now because she saw fencing in The Parent Trap.” My husband turned out to be one of the romantics. “It’s something about the chivalrous, Old World kind of thing you can still access in modern times,” Orange says. “Plus, it’s a sport where I can still be competitive for a long time.” It’s true: fencing offers a lively yet sustainable workout for aging bodies. At 35, Jarrod could compete nationally in the one of five veteran categories, the last of which is for players 70 and older. Knights of Siena’s roughly 30 students range in age from seven to 54, and their backgrounds are just as diverse. Everyone fences everyone else, using whatever assets they have. Hal Roach, a 54-year-old attorney who has been fencing less than a year, cautions against assuming adolescents are less challenging. “They will beat you within an inch of your life, and not even break a sweat doing it,” he says. “They’re these tiny little people who will just slash you to ribbons.” While Blakeborough says fencing maintains the lowest injury rates of any Olympic sport, bruises are definitely part of the experience.
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