Two Years After

It has been a while since my last post about my fencing epiphany and I thought it was high time that I updated you all (my five subscribers) on my adventures in swordplay.

For the most part, I have been concentrating on the French foil since 1998. I have occasionally dabbled in the use of other weapons, mostly the epée and saber and on rare occasions, the rapier.

Since my last post I have still concentrated mostly on the foil. That being the weapon most widely used at our fencing club. One thing I have tried to do was to travel around to other schools and clubs and cross swords with as many different fencers as I could. My travels took me to the other end of Missouri to Trovare Di Spada In St Louis where David Achilleus was gracious enough to fence with me for a while. Later on that same day I visited The Baited Blade, in St Charles MO, and met some wonderful people there, including Fencing Master Robert Mc Pherson and his protégé Emily Moore (who incidentally had studied under Maitre d'Arms Nick Evangelista, my own fencing master).

Later on that year, at White Hart Renaissance Faire I would fence with members of Five Rings Fencing out of Kansas City, including Fencing Master Mark Wickersham and several of his students. A year later, I would fence again with members of Five Rings Fencing, only I would play with rapiers (something I do not often do). Over a two week period I fenced three rapier bouts and I was trounced in the first two. What can I say? the rapier is not my favorite of arms. However I was able to prevail in the last encounter through careful observation of my opponent, who was tall, slender and left-handed. Remembering techniques I learned from Maestro William Franz, so many years ago I delivered a passatta sotto and finished the bout to everyone's surprise (see photo).

The passatta sotto is a maneuver where a fencer extends his or her point into an oncoming opponent while placing the left hand on the ground and simultaneously extends the rear leg into the lunge position, lowering the body so it ducks beneath the opponents thrust. A later version of this maneuver omitted the placing of the left hand on the ground and simply extended the arm backward into a type of reverse lunge.

Now this may seem like bragging, but my point in bringing this up is no so much that I had defeated an opponent who was younger, stronger, faster and more limber than I was, but that I had recognized an opportunity to use a very unique and risky maneuver that very often does not work in most fencing situations. To the casual observer, I pulled this trick out of my hat and won in a spectacular manner, but what was not visible to the masses (okay, the twenty spectators that were watching) was the many times in the past I had tried this very same maneuver and gotten stabbed for my trouble. Not seen were the countless hours of practice perfecting the move that would so often fail me. Had I lived in an earlier time, I might have borne scars from my failed attempts at the passatta sotto, that is, if I had lived through the experiences. I am fortunate that we live in such an age where experimentation can be done with the sword so that mastery can be achieved at a lesser cost to life and limb.

The real trick to using the passatta sotto was knowing when to use it. My opponent was at least six feet tall, he was left-handed and was attacking high to my outside line. Had I not been paying attention to what he was doing I might have just as easily eaten his blade.