Working Title:
Attacks in Preparation
You might be wondering just who the heck I am and why I wrote a short little
book about my first four and a half years as a
fencer. Really, I'm
nobody. I might never be famous, and if I am it certainly won't be because of
fencing. But if I have to sit through another
basketball player's
autobiography of how that new 70 million-dollar
contract just wasn't enough to feed his family, I'm going to
puke. You should too. There are real
sports out there-sports that haven't become more
cinematics than
substance, sports that don't get
lucrative TV and
merchandising deals with
athletes posturing as
role models for America's youth. Some days I think
America just about deserves role models like that, after how we've twisted what was good and right about sports and made it practically unrecognizable. To quote the recent movie
Frequency, "
Baseball just got too complicated."
So I'm going to tell you about
fencing, a sport I discovered when I was fourteen. A sport that dates back thousands of years, with its roots in
ancient swordfighting. A sport that requires
brains as well as
brawn, which is why it'll never be
mainstream. A sport that you can't
showboat in and succeed, because every move has to be calculated and executed perfectly. A real sport.
A sport that changed my
life.
Prologue: Camp
Freshman Year
Chapter One: Re-Education
Chapter Two: Snatching Defeat
Chapter Three: "Home"coming
Sophomore Year
Chapter Four: Downward Spiral
Interlude: The Eye Poke Incident
Chapter Five: Hitting Bottom
Chapter Six: Thunder
Chapter Seven: Lightning
Junior Year
Chapter Eight: Transitions
Chapter Nine: Humilations, Punishments,
and Changes in Formation
Chapter Ten: Winter Wonderland
Chapter Eleven: Journeyman
Interlude: RimRod at the Junior Olympics of Fencing
Senior Year
Chapter Twelve: Command and
Control
Chapter Thirteen: Hopping
Mad and Mad Hopping
Chapter Fourteen: Home Stretch
Chapter Fifteen: End of Line
Chapter Sixteen: Summer Days
are Here Again
Chapter Seventeen: The
Show
Epilogue: And So It Continues