Fencers Celebrate Centennial in Style

On the night of January 8, 1889, across the Charles River on Brattle Street, the Harvard fencing club--the first collegiate fencing club in the United States--gathered for its premier meeting.

To commemorate the centennial of its program, the Harvard fencing teams are holding a series of events in Cambridge this weekend.

The Crimson hosts the 92nd Intercollegiate Fencing Association (IFA) Championships at the Malkin Athletic Center yesterday and today. Harvard, along with Yale and Columbia, was instrumental in establishing the IFA back in 1894. Following the conclusion of the meet today, there will be a formal dinner dance at the Hyatt Regency Hotel. And tommorrow, the 1989 varsity team will challenge the alumni in the annual Varsity-Alumni meet in the recently-renovated fencing room in the MAC.

Obscure Passion

The participants are unusually passionate about this rather obscure, unpopular sport filled with strange, hard-to-pronounce European names. "It is combat, and there's romance to it," says Arthur Phillips, the number-one foil fencer on the Crimson.

Phillips stresses that fencing is both mental and physical, more so than any other sport. "You are constantly watching the other guy. You are constantly guessing what you're going to do and second-guessing how he's gonna react. And all the while, you have to be an athlete. It's not just brute athleticism."

Phillips feels that the men's team was not as consistent this year as it should have been, finishing with a 5-6 record. "Everybody's pretty disappointed with that," Phillips says.

The women's squad, meanwhile did very well, concluding the season with a record of 17-3.

Branamir Zivkovic, the head coach of the Harvard team, on the other hand, says that the team did "not bad at all." He stresses that the current varsity men are extremely young--three freshmen, four sophomores and only two seniors fence on the varsity team. Zivkovic mentioned that he was a little disappointed that the men lost one meet by only two touches. Winning one more meet would have given the team its 100th victory in its centennial season. The women's team, however, did manage to clinch their 100th victory this year.

You'd Never Recognize It

The sport of fencing has changed dramatically since that night 100 years ago. George Kolombacovich, one of the two head coaches on the Columbia team, points out that the sport is "much, much more athletic today and more physically demanding. The technique was 99 percent of the game."

Zivkovic agrees.

"It is not a sport of grace anymore. It is a more active and demanding sport," Harvard's coach says.

He points out that the electrical scoring devices have also radically changed the way people fence. He still feels, however, that fencing is "10 percent physical and 90 percent psychological."

Zivkovic, a former Olympian fencer from Yugoslavia, said that the sport is not very well-known in the United States because of the lack of teachers. As a matter of fact, Zivkovic's six predecessors who have coached the Harvard team in this century have been from France or Yugoslavia.

Zivkovic hopes that most of the young people currently fencing will form their own recreational clubs in the future. After these young fencers go through the graduate school and establish themselves in the professional world, he hopes that fencing will "hit them again."

"Wherever they go," Harvard's fencing master says, "it will never leave them."