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American Fencing Potentialities
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December 1940
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5
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6
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AMERICAN FENCING POTENTIALITIES
IT IS ESTIMATED THAT there are between 100,000 and 150,000 fencers in the United States. This seems like a good number to anyone who has given little thought to the sport or who has any realization of the size of this country. To hear someone from Europe admit that there are probably more fencers in the United States than there are (or were) in any one country of Europe makes you feel that the United States is doing well by the sport and that we have arrived as a fencing nation. Nothing is more ridiculous.
There are approximately 131,000,000 people in the United States which means that only 1/10th of one per cent or one person in 1,000 knows anything about fencing. The membership of the A. F. L. A., according to the latest records, approximates 1,200 which means that only one person in 109,000 is sufficiently interested in organized fencing to join the League. When viewed in this manner, fencing is still a little-known sport in the United States. The fencer is still an American sports curiosity.
Fencing has certain characteristics in its favor; characteristics which should make the sport popular. In the first place, fencing is fun for the beginner as well as the expert. The rawest neophyte gets a kick out of fencing from the moment he is introduced to the sport. Secondly, no one has ever learned or mastered all there is within the sport. One cannot become surfeited with the sport or gain the feeling that there is no more to learn. There is a constant lure to learn more, to perfect one's game, to fence better and better. Finally, there is no age limit for learning or practicing the sport. The oldsters remain as enthusiastic as the youngsters and there is nothing so satisfactory as seeing the pleasure a man of say 40, 50 or even 60 gets from his fencing when he is introduced to the sport even at those ages. In various ways it attracts and holds the interest of the youngster, the youth, and the man.
On the other hand, the sport has certain drawbacks. It is a gregarious sport and therefore has an urban rather than a rural following. It is best taught by example rather than by individual study and here enters the need for a teacher or a professional fencing master. Few can afford the luxury of an individual teacher and therefore clubs are formed by the amateurs or Salle d'Armes are provided by professionals wherein one can obtain professional instruction. This limits the sport to cities or schools which are large enough to support a professional.
With these latter thoughts in mind we must now revise our statistical comparisons. We can no longer look upon 131,000,000 Americans as being potential fencers. We should immediately delete our rural population and limit ourselves to 62,800,000 total white urban population. To be on the safe side we will further limit this to the 93 cities having a population of 100,000 or more. Here we find 33,000,000 total white population. We'll cut this by 50% to eliminate all those too young, too old, the halt, the blind, and the urban Americans whose only exercise is in reading the sport section of the newspaper. This finally leaves us 16,500,000 as a potential market. If half of these would try the sport we could hold the interest of 10% of them. That would give us 825,000 fencers with 1% or 8,250 becoming members of the A. F. L. A.
Why are our estimates of potentialities after all of this concentration and after liberal exclusions still between 6 and 8 times as large as our best estimates of actualities? The answer lies in lack of professionals.
The professional is the bottleneck of the sport. Without the professional you do not develop fencers and without the fencers you do not attract the professional. In other words, there is a vicious circle within a bottleneck; a horrible thought.
There are approximately 280 professional fencing teachers in the United States. Masters, provosts, teachers, instructors, and poseurs, they are scattered throughout the United States and upon their shoulders lies the responsibility for maintaining and spreading the sport. They are concentrated in the urban areas along the two coasts and in the middle West with occasional exceptions in some cities of the South. Many of them are located in schools and colleges where their teaching is confined to those educational centers. There are nearly 30 of them concentrated in New York City. Los Angeles and San Francisco have about six professionals apiece with every other city getting along with anywhere from one to three, if any.
The professional's life is not an easy one. His living must depend upon the collective return from many pupils. This can be accomplished through a private fencing room, generally called a salle d'armes or an academy where pupils pay club or individual fees sufficient to support the club and its respective proprietor, the professional. On the other hand, the professional may become the employee of an established club and work for a fixed salary on a contract agreement. Such a club may be devoted exclusively to fencing as is The New York Fencers Club or it may be an athletic club or Y. M. C. A. where fencing is just one of many sports provided for its members.
From the point of view of many professionals a contract to teach at a school or college is the most satisfactory. Here, the fencing teacher is employed to teach fencing as one of the athletic activities of the school. Here he works under attractive conditions with little restrictive supervision and need not operate under the constant worry that his activities are returning a financial profit to the institution that is employing him. He does have the disadvantage of knowing that his pupils will be lost to him after a few years, four years at most. He also knows that no top-notch fencer can be developed in only four years. Therefore, he is constantly faced with the feeling of being unable to complete the work he has started.
Many professionals combine two or more of these activities. They operate their own salle d'armes and have a contract at some school or athletic club for the remainder of their time.
With the approach of summer weather comes the closing of schools and the lessening of competitive activities at clubs. The professional must find means of supplementing his income during the summer. There are a limited number of ways of doing this. Some of these are summer camps, summer theatre groups and resorts.
Throughout the year all professionals are in a position to supply fencing equipment to their pupils. They profit from this either through manufacturing or importing the equipment themselves or acting as an agent for an equipment concern. They may also be in a year-round position to profit through exhibitions at a charge for such appearances.
At one time, Europe was our only source of supply for fencing professionals. That source of supply still exists but now we have the native professional developing from domestic sources. In the past the native professional was generally an amateur who turned to the sport after achieving considerable success as an amateur competitor. This is no longer necessarily true. Such professionals as Castello, Grasson, Greco, Santelli and Vince have intentionally trained young men to become professionals without their entering the amateur field at all. Furthermore, they have assisted these trained boys to find professional positions in various parts of the country. Then too there is the environmental professional. He is usually an amateur keenly interested in the sport who finds himself located where fencing is little known. In order to continue to enjoy the sport he teaches it to others and soon finds himself engrossed in the teaching angle and eventually turns professional.
Finally there is the fencing professional who more or less had the sport wished upon him. He is generally interested in athletics, is a physical education coach or holds some similar relation to general sports. Fencing is added to the curricula through demand for the sport and he learns the sport in order to teach it.
Thus by one means or another America has today gained the services of at least 280 men and women who claim to be in a position to teach fencing. Many of them are doing a wonderful service to the sport and it is to them that the amateurs owe a debt of gratitude. They teach the sport to many new beginners every year and send them forth with at least the basic principles upon which to build the deeper appreciation of fencing that is gained only after many years of practice and experience. They separate the chaff from the wheat, working hard with all at the start only to separate the lazy, indifferent dabblers from the earnest, ambitious enthusiasts and help the latter on toward the finer expression that ever lures the true swordsman onward.
It is to them that we assign the major job of introducing fencing to that 825,000 group of potential fencers. It is no small task and one which their own numbers can never encompass. However, here again we mention the old familiar cycle of more fencers, more masters, more fencers, more masters. As amateurs are developed into better fencers, some will become interested in professionalism and take their turn at developing other amateurs. It is a self-creating proposition without even so much as a hint anywhere of having reached the saturation point. We have just scratched the surface to date. Looking backward we have gone far. Looking forward, we have only just begun.
When assigning the job to the present professionals we know that they stand ready to perform their task. The amateurs can help immeasurably. They stand 150,000 strong. If each brings one more potential fencer to his teacher and exposes him to fencing it would take only the most elementary understanding of arithmetic to appreciate what this would mean. Cries of "More fencing teachers!" would ring out from all across the land. A supply would develop to meet the demand. There would be no alternative. We have already seen the momentum of such movements in the past ten years.
It has surprised The Riposte itself during its five years of publication to witness the growth and spread of fencing throughout this country without any promotional fanfare whatsoever. It has been the healthy growth of a healthy sport, finally being recognized by Americans as an exciting, intelligent, low-cost exercise.
—D. E.
