Brooklyn's newest hot sport is… fencing?
It's true. In the last few months, Brooklyn witnessed the opening of its second and third fencing facilities. The mini-wave began in 2003, when Rolando Balboa opened the pioneering Brooklyn Fencing Center, which is in an unassuming second-floor space on an industrial block on the edge of Carroll Gardens.
As the fencing coach at St. Anne's School in Park Slope, Balboa knew many of his fencers were interested in pursuing the sport year-round. But their parents were reluctant to allow them to make the afterschool trip to Manhattan, where the city's only clubs were. Spotting a niche, Balboa opened the center for a tiny clientele consisting mostly of students. Since then, its rolls have swelled to around 200 people. Of those, 30 to 40 are die-hards who participate in national competitions. Most are teenagers.
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Balboa, 42, is a native of Bolivia who immigrated to Queens as a teenager. Earlier this decade, he was in contention to fence in the Olympics for the Bolivian national team but his candidacy was mired in infighting among bureaucrats, some of whom opposed the selection of a non-resident on the national team. In 2002, he had a decision to make: train for the 2004 Olympics and run the risk of having his candidacy sabotaged, or launch the Brooklyn Fencing Center in earnest. He chose the latter.
Balboa is short and well-proportioned. His athleticism is apparent in the light, gliding stride with which he walks, the effect of which is accentuated by his silky nylon jumpsuit. On the Tuesday evening I visited the center, he showed an easy demeanor with his teenaged students but managed to cultivate an impressively disciplined atmosphere.
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In one room, a student jumped rope. Next to him, another student did very short wind sprints designed to exercise the fast-twitch leg muscles essential to fencing. In the next room, two sets of fencers faced off in practice rounds, refereed by another student.
It takes a special kind of conditioning to be in "fencing shape," Balboa told me. "Most people who are generally in shape, they maybe last 5 to 10 minutes and then they're totally done," he said. Five to ten minutes is the length of one match in tournament level competition. In the course of a day in a tournament, fencers have 8 to 10 matches.
Most fencing centers specialize in one of three types of fencing. The Brooklyn Fencing Center specializes in Foil, in which everything but the torso is off-limits and hits must be scored with the tip of the foil and not the sides. Each fencer wears an electronic vest that registers hits via an electronic box, to which each fencer is connected via a conductive rope. The device makes a beeping sound to signal a hit. This beep, along with the sound of feet touching down and foils clanging against each other, form the background soundtrack of the Brooklyn Fencing Center.
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Ella Prince is a plucky 11-year-old Brooklynite who is the youngest and smallest person here by a wide margin. Balboa and I watched her fence a college fencer at Duke University who is one of the center's proudest products. She clearly didn't match up, yet she didn't back down.
"She's a sweet 11-year old girl when you talk to her, but she's very aggressive on the strip. Your true personality comes out when you fence," Balboa said.
After her match, I asked Ella what she liked about fencing. Her reply was succinct and revealing.
"It's fun. I like competing against other people."
When we finished talking, I offered a handshake with my right hand. Her right hand was covered in her glove, so she shook with her left hand. Balboa explained to me that the left-handed shake is not only customary in fencing, it's mandatory. Before and after each match, fencers salute each other with their foils. After the post-match salute, each fencer must extend a left-handed handshake. If they don't, they draw a Black Card, which disqualifies them from the whole tournament.
Balboa went onto explain the intricate non-verbal language of post-match handshakes. This was similar to watching the Dog Whisperer decipher the postures and tail-wags of dogs. Some handshakes signal mere courtesy, some signal dominance and some signal a lack of confidence, Balboa said.
"There's a lot of psychology involved," he added.
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The most poetic description of fencing was proffered by Julian Fevri, 13, whose accelerated progress in just a year of lessons makes him one of the center's biggest prospects. The Queens resident described fencing as "two different types of methods interacting with each other. One fencer has one method, one fencer has a different one." Even when fencers have the same method, "they each have different interpretations of that method," Fevri said.
Probably not coincidentally, this description dovetailed with Balboa's contention that there are two types of fencers: technicians and warriors. Balboa classified himself as a warrior.
When I asked him why he loved fencing, he cited a specific moment in a match: When the opponent scores a hit and takes the upper hand.
"It puts you in a really unique position. You've made a mistake, and you can't blame anyone else. The question is: Are you going to deal with it or are you going to give up? You have to deal with it in that moment."
