Monday - February 13, 2012

No Sense Being Piste At This Point

“Come fencing. Meet interesting new people. Stab them.”

This post started out to be a little paean to my old fencing coach, Neil Lazar, who died last week at the age of 91. Neil was a really great guy, and helped teach fencers their sport all across New York’s Southern Tier long after he retired. I haven’t seen the man in 14 years, but now that he’s gone I miss him.

Neil was involved in fencing since 1937. He was well-known in the sport of fencing and was a fencing master. Neil had a tremendous influence on fencing in New York, both in the city, where he was years ahead of everyone else in the colored uniform trend, and later upstate in the Binghamton and Owego area. He participated in the Empire State Games. He was nationally ranked in the top six in foil, eppe and saber. Neil was inducted into the National Fencing Hall of Fame in 2001. Up until about two years ago, he was still giving fencing lessons from a wheelchair, as well as giving impromptu lessons at Binghamton University tournaments. He touched the lives of many young fencers over the years, and will be missed terribly.

Neil was never happier than when he could show a kid the basics, and make a new convert to the sport. Well, not true. He was even happier when that kid was a slightly frightened but otherwise hot college girl, and he could work his magic and later send her away enthusiastic, assertive, and fearless. That was Neil at his best. Oh, and he trained our Olympic Team for years too.

Neil was about the happiest most positive guy I’ve ever met. I don’t think he had a temper or even knew how to frown.

Neil was instrumental in breaking the sport’s color barrier, training future Olympic medalist Uriah Jones back in the late 60s.



Neil at a party years ago with some guy who can’t ever shut up and some other people


The news of Neil’s death has taken a few days to work its way around the not-so small circle of those who knew him once upon a time. Alumni reach out to other alumni, and across the years and the miles all of who once dreamed with steel in the Southern Tier learn how our ranks are again diminished. Whether you were old enough to remember the place as SUNY Binghamton and the group as the Fencing Team, or whether you called it Binghamton University and you fought with the Fencing Club, you still knew Neil. Because, back in the very very beginning, I heard of him, found his phone number, called him up, and talked him into giving the college kids lessons, for little more payment than gas money. And he did, for close to 20 years. Thanks Neil.

The marked off area that you fence a bout on is called the piste. At a quality tournament, the piste is a special electrically conductive surface. It doesn’t carry any current, it’s just grounded so that attacks that hit the floor don’t register as valid hits. The photo at the very top of the page shows two fencers on such a piste. But it’s not just any old piste. That’s MY piste. One of two. In MY room. At MY university. And today I learned that they’re both gone, lost for nearly a decade, completely forgotten about. I am furious, but I know that’s pointless.

SUNY Binghamton had had an intercollegiate fencing team at some point up until the early 70s, when waning interest and budget cuts forced it out. The jackets, gloves, helmets, and swords went into a cardboard box in some storage room in the West Gym, and the ankle breakers got taken apart and thrown away. ( The piste used to live on a wooden platform a couple inches high, and was tightened by pinions at both ends. Think of it as a rack, the torture kind, only 3” tall and 50 feet long. If you stepped off the edge you were out of bounds, and quite likely you’d fall and perhaps break an ankle ). The pistes were roughly wound up and tossed on the pile.

Nearly 20 years go by and nothing happens. Then by perfect chance, 5 guys at the college meet one day and discover they all fence. So they start meeting up in the basement of the old gym building at night when nobody is around, to play at swords. Word soon leaks out and they get hauled in front of the head of the Athletic Department. “You can’t do this without permission! You could get hurt!” he admonished us “But you know, we used to have a fencing team here, and if the student government allows you to form a club, you’d be allowed, and you can even have the old gear if it’s any good.” And we did, and they did, and they did, and the group was born. Most of the equipment was rusted junk and moldy cloth, but we found the pistes and that gave us a dream. A dream of Someday, when we could be big enough to host tournaments and put them to use once more.

[UPDATE MARCH 4: I have since heard from several of the original members. The group was just 2 guys at first, then a 3rd guy joined. The first guy left after a bit, but two other folks joined around that time. The groups charter dates from Spring 1988, though they’d been messing about since Fall 1987. With a club strength of 5 - 3 men, 2 women - they went to their first competition in Spring 1988, and got some funding help for it from the university’s student government. By the time I joined them in the Fall of 1988, one of the women had left and the other one was wavering. I think 2 other people joined up when I did, and then 2 or 3 more in the Spring. We were very tiny in those days. I think we had an annual budget of $300 or something anemic like that, and it cost $75 to rent a van for the weekend. So it looks like the “official” birth date is Spring 1988.

So, for all you Binghamton alumni that come across this post (I’ve already had the link emailed to me!) In the beginning: Fall 1987: Chuck Y. and Peter S.. Tony H. after that, mid-semester. Spring 1988: Emerson J., Janette A., Rainie M., Manny A. after that. First road trip to RPI. Fall 1988: Me, Adam F., Sean H., John J (aka “TT” for Thin Target). Somewhere between Spring and Fall ‘88 we got our first faculty advisor, Tom L., who still works at the university, and is keeper of the official history up to at least 2003. In Fall 1989 we moved out of the basement of the West Gym, which had a padded floor and a wooden indoor jogging track, and spent the next 15 years practicing in Room 59 of the West Gym (seen in the above picture), until a renovation project forced the group to become gypsies for a season. In the very early days we also used to travel over to the IBM Country Club in Endicott and fence with the 2 or 3 guys who would practice there. That club was shut down when IBM laid off thousands in the early 90s, and Stewie and Sean would come and practice with us on occasion. We also had a couple of community members as part of our group in the early to mid 90s, John R. being one of the notable members, and the other being the guy who - I think - went on to found the one of the local fencing groups, either Tri-Cities or Twin Tiers. Tom somebody? Steve? Sorry, memory fails me. He was in high school then. But it is nice to see that sport fencing grew quite a bit in the area after I graduated.]

Over the next few years I was the driver of the group, literally (I had the only car) and figuratively. A force to be reckoned with. I was a couple years older than the typical student, old enough not to let myself be pushed around. I went to meetings. I requested funds. I got the group a better budget. I trained the new kids. And once, thanks be to God and many cups of coffee, I sat through a 40 hour meeting with the student government and won us a couple thousand dollar grant when a long term accounting error was corrected which miraculously left more than $100,000 in the club fund. That got us enough money to buy some scoring machines, reels, and electric weapons, and after that we were on our way. Ok, I wasn’t always the only one with a car. We often took 4 or 5 carloads of folks to any given meet. But I put in an extraordinary effort during those years, and it paid off.

We repaired the pistes, polished them and repainted them, and put them to use. Soon we were hosting tournaments twice a semester, and travelling all around the state 6 or 8 times a season to go to other tourneys. And we plowed every dollar we made into even more equipment, to the point where we could outfit a new fencer in nearly full kit, and all they’d have to buy was their own glove. Not bad Drew, not bad at all. But at that point the University decided we were untrustworthy, and that it wasn’t right that a bunch of students should be storing several thousand dollars worth of equipment in their dorms. All our stuff had to be kept in the gym, but - oh, so sorry - they didn’t have any closet room to store it. So I went to more meetings, and got them to agree to allow us a 4’x8’ corner of floor space we could put our own locker in, as long as it could be pulled into the main storage room whenever necessary. Gee, thanks. So I rose to that challenge as well, and I built one. By hand, by myself, in the old horse garage in the backyard of the student hovel I was living in, in the dead of winter in Binghamton. I made it from 8 sheets of plywood and some 2x4s. And I built it strong. It was the first thing ever made to “Drewspec”, which means pretty close to bulletproof. Double doors, folding shelving, a solid brass closet rod that I salvaged from an old Endicott Johnson shoe factory that was being torn down, even hidden wheels underneath, and folding handles on the end. And the whole thing could be taken apart and loaded into the back of a pickup truck, which is what we did to get it to campus. Oh my, how the Athletic Dept. folks were pissed!! They thought that they’d stymied us good and proper ... because the truth was that they didn’t want club sports to exist. They all had College Jock mentality, even at this backwater school that had no football, and barely had a Tier III basketball team. It must have made them look bad that some upstart club full of nerds, Jews, Asians, and other dweeby geeks was sending their members to the Nationals and the State Olympics (aka Empire State Games), and placing high in the winning ranks. Ha, I remember their guy storming in with his measuring tape, outraged that we had built such a huge thing, which was actually half an inch smaller than the 4x8 space they’d allotted us. And his evil grin when he pronounced it would never fit through the door to the storage room and that one or two people couldn’t move it therefore it had to be taken down, only to watch me drag it down the hallway with one hand and into that room, over the door-sill, clearing the top of the frame by about a quarter inch. Measure twice, cut once, and don’t fuck with Drew. His expression? Thunderous. Dumbstruck. Priceless. One that I’ll cherish forever.

Good times. I left the Fencing Team in good hands when I graduated, 30 or 40 strong, with a closet full of top quality gear and the practiced ability to earn about 7 times more money per year than the student government would ever budget us with. And Neil as one of the now two coaches. They still exist and were still winning accolades in 2002 from the University. But I found out from the now retired faculty advisor that those pistes and my box “accidentally disappeared” over the summer in 2003. The never ending building program and the “varsity sports only” attitude had forced the team to become something like homeless people, sort of a wandering tribe of Israelites lost in the desert, storing the group’s gear in their dorm rooms exactly as the university forbade us from doing all those years before. And when nobody was around some errant or darkened soul laid them waste. They’ve since been handed the dirty end of the turd, and forced to have practices that don’t even begin until 10pm. “Nobody knows” where the stuff went ... today’s bunch doesn’t even know it ever existed, and that’s an awful loss, as those pistes were worth $6000 and pretty much irreplaceable. Heavy woven bronze, 100lbs per each. So maybe the club is back to square one, and history will repeat itself? Maybe.

Looks like the jocks won in the end; no good deed ever goes unpunished.

But once, I was a hero.

A cheek attack? Idiot!! Crivens, somebody is about to get a major riposte right upside his face!
Outdoor fencing draws attention and new members at Binghamton University’s Club Day event every fall



Holy cow Drew, keyboard overload! Can’t you ever shut up?
No.

Posted by Drew458     on 02/13/2012 at 12:16 PM   
Filed Under: • Miscellaneous •  
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