How does a fencer beat Goliath?

Fencing is nearly unwatchable. The things that are important are so subtle and interpreting them is equally difficult. For example, when is one competitor’s forte (the third of the blade closest to the guard) overlapping the others foible (third of the blade toward the tip)? Does a slightly lifted arm after a parry indicate a mistake or is it a provocation? Who is provoking whom? And there’s the footwork. And all of it is happening so quickly. Even if you’re an experienced fencer it can be a challenge to know what to watch when.

But if you do have an eye for what to look for it can be compelling. The final of the senior mixed epee event of the last tournament I attended was such an event. The eventual winner had had a mixed day at best. He’d lost a pool bout he should have won and his quarter-final and semi-final direct elimination bouts were precarious. The latter was won by one point with a toe touch, if I remember correctly. And then, he had to immediately proceed into the final against a well-rested opponent. Nevertheless, he focused and rose to the occasion, which is archetypical element of almost every sports story. What was more interesting to me, however, was how he won. To my mind the single most important element was the breadth and diversity of his game. Besides being an obvious advantage to him it was also a significant disadvantage for his opponent in an interesting way. Because, there were so many possibilities, his opponent simply had to think more and more often. That made him necessarily slower, as Czajkowski points out. It increased his latency period.

A related theme is the subject of Malcolm Gladwell’s article How David Beats Goliath, currently available in the New Yorker online. Gladwell focuses predominantly on National Junior Basketball for girls and one coach’s innovative application of the full court press. The theme is that the outsider, the underdog, can win if he or she is willing and creative enough to find an unconventional strategy and sufficiently diligent to apply it successfully (as it often requires more work). He mentions several other examples, T.E. Lawrence’s innovative strategy for defeating the Turks in WWI by not attacking Medina but by disrupting the Hejaz railway instead, a naval war gamer who used an AI program to surmount nearly insurmountable odds coupled with labyrinthine rules and conventions, and George Washington’s early strategy in the US War of Independence.

Needless to say, it’s a particularly appealing stance for me as a fencer. The problem is that fencing is very old, fencers are very clever, so they’ve institutionalized the idea of stepping outside of the ordinary. Finding something truly innovative is less easy than it might be in other endeavors.

The illustration is a cartoon T.E. Lawrence drew of himself for "7 Pillars of Wisdom," one the greatest and simply enjoyable books written in the 20th century.