En Garde!

To strike another person with a sword is an outrage. It’s an aggression from the gut – an act more riling to the viscera than the sight of a pigskin at the end of a field or a baseball swatted into the bleachers. It is, in the most literal sense, an attempt to make another person bleed.

That is what Peter Brand wants to do to me.

Brand is the head coach of Harvard’s fencing team, and he trains young men and women to stab – and to slash, parry, riposte, and lunge – in blindingly quick and legally permissible ways. He’s very good at what he does. So good, indeed, that last season Harvard won its first ever NCAA fencing championship, a stunning achievement, considering that just seven years ago – the year Brand arrived – the program finished last in the Ivy League. Today, with the school’s fencing program nearly 120 years old, the sport is no longer just indulged; it’s perfected.

It’s early fall, and as he prepares for the new season, Brand has agreed to give me a demonstration of his coaching skills on the white fencing strip outside his office. He’s a trim, gray-haired gentleman whose gentle brown eyes are softer than might be expected in a swordsman, but when he dons his leather fencing jacket, he looks convincingly martial. "First, salute your opponent," he says, brandishing his 35-inch saber. I hold up mine. It looks and feels very much like a car antenna. "Then, salute the official." He waves the blade at an empty wall. "Now engage!"

I’m standing a good 15 feet from him, but about two nanoseconds pass before I feel a crack on the crown of my steel-mesh helmet; it’s painless, but hard enough to jar my frontal lobe. "What happened there?" he asks, amused. His accent is difficult to place, but it’s tipped with something foreign. I want to tell him that he hit me, damn it, but I mumble that he lured me into his feint. He had offered his shoulder as a target, I attacked (as he knew I would), he stepped out of reach of my swing, then, quick as a whippet, he dashed back to pop me on the brainpan. I barely had time to blink. My first thought is how thrilling it would be to repay him for the lesson, preferably with a wallop across the temple. I scramble back to the starting position and raise my weapon again, a daft grin spreading under my mask, as we get ready for another round.

Fencing, I realize at this moment, is fun. Like boxing or tennis, it’s a clash of individual wills. Unlike those sports, it’s got swords. (Swords!) Reason enough for it to supplant baseball, in my opinion. But that’s a long way off, and there’s a lot to learn – about sabers, about camaraderie, and, most of all, about what you have to do, in this obscure corner of college athletics, to be a champion.

1. Pick a coach who was raised on a kibbutz.

Brand has come a long way with the program. But even before his arrival, he had covered quite some distance on his own. An Israeli immigrant, he is the son of an Auschwitz survivor and a Czech physician. He was born in Jerusalem and grew up on a kibbutz near the Lebanese border, a stone’s throw from the Golan Heights. This was before 1967, when the Six-Day War permanently altered daily life in Israel, and the idea of a socialist utopia patiently nursed among the olive groves didn’t seem wholly lunatic. "They were Marxists, essentially," says Brand, 53. "Everything was collective. There was no private property. You didn’t even own the clothes on your back. I remember when my parents bought me a bicycle, it was immediately taken to the center of the community and shared by everyone."

Brand never forgot his experience of communalism. But his family moved on, first to Cambridge for a year, where his father worked as a researcher at Harvard, then back to Israel and a northern town called Safad. It was as a schoolboy there that Brand first picked up a saber. "Fighting with swords is something every kid is attracted to," he says. With a well-funded government sports program to keep him armed, he launched his fencing career, which he would continue after moving with his family back to the United States (he qualified for the US Junior Fencing Team in 1972). He shifted to coaching in the early 1980s, and, at 30, took a job as an assistant at MIT and stayed for 10 seasons before becoming the head men’s and women’s coach at Brown University. There, he led the women’s squad to two New England collegiate fencing titles and the men’s team to one, and his fencers regularly qualified for the individual NCAA championships.

When Brand arrived at Harvard in 1999, he had an idea about how to turn the program around, but he knew it wouldn’t happen overnight. "Being a true communist," he jokes, "I gave myself a five-year plan."

The plan was simple: Lure the best talent he could find to Cambridge. "The coaches here didn’t spend much time recruiting," Brand says. Dangling the carrot of a Harvard diploma, he persuaded blooming maestros, including Tim Hagamen, now a senior, and Emily Cross, a junior, to join him. Brand considers Hagamen to be the best saber fencer in the country. Cross, who has won two world junior titles, is the top-ranked female foilist in the country. Both are from Manhattan and picked Harvard over the traditional fencing bastions – Notre Dame, Penn State, Ohio State, Columbia, and St. John’s University in New York – despite the possibility their fencing would suffer at a program that, at the time, was less than elite.

Brand also needed assistant coaches to mold this talent. He turned to Gamal Mahmoud, a former national epee coach for the Egyptian Fencing Federation, and Guogang Wen, a former coach of China’s national team. Both are world-class instructors with lifetime tournament experience and have played a significant role in the Harvard program’s rise. Wen doesn’t speak much English, but Brand says verbal communication doesn’t matter in this sport. "French is the universal language of fencing – riposte, parry," he says. "The rest can be done with gestures."

2. Choose your weapon wisely.

There’s a sentiment among fencers that one’s choice of weapon, like one’s choice of hat, is an explicit reflection of personality. A good fencer can’t understand his weapon until he understands himself. A Harvard fencer understands both.

Three types of swords are used in the sport, which evolved from 16th-century rapier fighting, when cumbersome broadswords were made lighter to meet the needs of the quick, unarmored duelist. The most popular weapon is the foil, a rectangular blade that developed out of a nobleman’s training sword and that scores a valid hit, or touch, when the point is delivered into the area between the opponent’s groin and shoulders. To score a touch, the foilist needs to have the "right of way," meaning he needs to either initiate an attacking move or successfully block (parry) his opponent’s attack and respond with one of his own (a riposte). He can’t just lash out in the hopes of impaling an oncoming body. "It’s the most thoughtful weapon," says senior Sam Cross, a Harvard foilist and the brother of teammate Emily, adding that "foil people are small and wiggly."

The second weapon is the epee, a stiffer, heavier blade that is wielded against the whole body, feet included. As with the foil, only the tip can score, but a greater amount of pressure must be applied for a touch to register. Epee bouts also discount the "right of way" rule, allowing fighters to strike each other simultaneously or when on the defensive. This makes for a more freewheeling bout, but also a riskier one, so epee fighters must learn caution. "They’re usually bigger and taller," Brand says.

The saber is the most modern of the blades. A descendant of the 19th-century cavalry sword, it differs from the other weapons in that it is for thrusting and slashing, and, since its practitioners maintain the conceit of being mounted, the saber is directed solely above the waist. "It’s quick and aggressive," says Brand, himself a master saberist. "You get some pretty wild people fencing with it." His saber team is a melange of body types, but they have one thing in common: a taste for the attack. The weapon’s reputation was so ferocious that women weren’t allowed to compete in international saber competitions until the 1990s. The first female Olympic saber bout was in 2004. (Men’s fencing has been part of the modern Games since they began in 1896; women’s foil began in 1924.)

3. Think like Garry Kasparov. Move like Jackie Chan.

To win a bout, a fencer has to score a certain number of touches (five in initial rounds; 15 in elimination) against the opponent within a designated time. No matter how acrobatic the contest, the fencers are confined, sumo-like, to the dimensions of the 14-meter-by-2-meter strip (about 45 feet by 6 feet), or piste. To the general observer, the action is simply a blur. Fencing time is different from regular time. The decimals in fencing time – the near-instant connection between a twitch of the blade and the end of a bout – are so minute that they can’t be registered by the untrained eye (electronic sensors on the fencers’ outfits and swords register touches). Jeff Bukantz, captain of the 2004 US Olympic fencing team, says the blades can move at 100 miles per hour. Unless you know what to watch, it’s about as lucid as Tom Menino’s syntax. Within the blur, though, a trained eye will see a great deal of thought.

" ‘Physical chess’ is the way it’s often described," Brand says. Cindy Bent Findlay, a spokeswoman for the US Fencing Association, is probably closer to the mark when she calls it "chess on speed." Fencing is a tactical sport. Like football, it requires planning, subtlety, and, ideally, a little ESP. A good fencer thinks ahead of the current action, deciding on, say, a simple riposte to follow a parry. But unlike football, the playbook is enacted in milliseconds, in the midst of whipping metal, and it changes utterly if one’s opponent, say, leans slightly to the left.

"There’s not enough time to react, so you have to plan in advance," Hagamen says. "You have to develop a plan for each bout and then think about what to do during the next touch." He considers for a moment. "It’s kind of like rock-paper-scissors."

And in the flurry of split-second adjustments, fencers must find a way to exploit their strengths. Emily Cross, for example, with her quickness and smarts, can launch into the offensive like few others – Brand says a fencer of her caliber comes around once every 50 years. Hagamen combines technique and efficiency. Whereas other fencers waste effort by, say, leaping too far back to evade an attack, Hagamen makes precise, economical movements. He also excels in taking calculated risks. When he feels a particular move is right for a situation, he says, "I commit to it 100 percent."

4. Prepare. Then prepare some more.

It’s a Monday afternoon, and 18 of the team members – nine men, nine women – are scuttling across the floor, practicing their footwork in the Malkin Athletic Center’s fencing room. Of the dozens of spots at Harvard that reek tradition, this hall of squeaking oak is one of the most pungent. Coats of arms hang above bouquets of tastefully arranged swords; previous teams stare out of black-and-white portraits that line the walls; fusty cabinets hold tarnished cups and news clippings of "100 Years of Harvard Fencing."

"Have an idea in your mind of what a perfect advance would look like," Hagamen orders his saber crew after the team breaks into groups. It seems as if the perfect advance looks like the cantering crouch assumed by the horseless knights in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Weaponless and dressed in gym clothes, the kids seem to be a different species than the bewhiskered duelists in the oil paintings that overlook their rituals.

Daily practice is a 2 ½-hour ordeal. On some days, the fencers run laps for stamina and lift weights to develop explosiveness in their lunges. "Mental capacity drops off considerably without proper physical endurance," says Brand. In addition to their physical regimen, the fencers prepare for tournaments by studying their opponents’ habits. A strong attacker, for example, may show reluctance to step backward and give ground. Spotting these tendencies can lead to cunning stratagems. Vladimir Nazlymov, Ohio State’s fencing coach, says Harvard’s fencers gain an edge because Brand emphasizes this analysis.

Preparation may be especially important for Brand and the members this season, which began last month. Last year, in dual meets, the men went undefeated and the women went 13-1. But not even Brand expects to repeat that this year. Graduation has robbed the team of both women’s co-captains and one of the men’s, and Brand recently learned that Emily Cross will need to leave the team in February to start training for the 2008 Olympics.

5. Embrace socialism.

Later in the afternoon, the Harvard fencers don their electrified vests and white jackets with their names stenciled on the backs. Cables run from under the backs of these jackets into the scoring machines, so that when the fencers move, the cords slap on the floor like fishing lines hooked to marlin. Watching a pair of saberists lunge back and forth – arms sprawling and bodies bucking like marionettes – it’s hard not to think that these people want to kill each other. Untrue.

"There’s a huge difference between us and other teams," says junior saberist Samantha Parker. "In other teams there’s infighting. Here, we eat together. We study together on the bus."

"Fencing is an individual sport," Hagamen says. "But, paradoxically, our greatest strength is our sense of team."

Bukantz, of the US team, has worked as a referee during Harvard bouts and says he has never seen a squad with Harvard’s esprit de corps. He attributes it to Brand. "Fencing, to him, is about life lessons," he says. "He’s almost like a parent." Emily Cross adds: "Peter’s really good at working with people."

Brand brings the team together over a lot more than just meals. "We’re very egalitarian," he says. "Communal" is perhaps a better word. Back when he hired his assistants, he gave his fencers a say in the process. Team members also screen potential recruits and help him decide which ones get added to the roster, and Brand asks his experienced fencers to brief the rest of the squad about upcoming opponents. In recruiting, he chooses fencers not only on skill but also on the blend of their personalities with the rest of the team. "It’s extremely difficult to get people who are academically viable and who are also excellent fencers," says Brand, who traces his approach to his upbringing. "But the most important thing is character. It’s critical that they’re great team people."

Last year, on its way from New Jersey to the Ivy League tournament at Columbia, the team was caught in a snowstorm, its bus getting stuck several times. Each time the wheels fell prey to snowdrifts, the members would clamber out, dig their sneakers into the slush, and get the bus back on track. The trip, ordinarily 20 minutes, ended up taking four hours. But the collective effort became a rallying point for the team, and it went on to capture the league tournament title.

"Fencing is perseverance," Brand says. "You’ve got to be dogged." It helps, though, to have friends pushing for you.