Professional Fencing League

[alessandro]

Hi, i saw this website (http://web.archive.org/web/19980523190724/www.profence.com/main.html) and i think they are trying to make something like this in Mexico.

So please share your experiences on how did PFL went, if it work, if it is still working, if they really aired the shows, etc.
Any information is apreciated.
Thanks.

[Christopher J Umbs]

The brainchild of Maitre Adam Crown - it died like a dog since no other professionals were interested. Much like I suspect the USFCA classical and historical program (also headed by M. Crown) will do as well.

Chris

[edew]

The old PFL (as per the archived website) was started by Alan "Blake" Blakeborough, not by Adam Crown, for all I know.

Well, I do know, because I was a member of the PFL and did earn money (one of the few who did). I think the idea was (and could still be) good, but the implementation didn't work out. Another issue was that most fencers didn't know Alan. He seemed to be a fly-by-night operator to some degree. If it had been a more well-known fencing personality (even better, a coalition of fencers), then I might have taken off.

[latenight]

So what actually led to the demise? It looks from the old site like it was a pretty big group of fencers.
-L-

[Pommel]

Business ventures have a way of going sour when you swindle your supporters/sponsers and fail to pay athletes. At one time Alan's KOS empire had the largest facility dedicated solely to fencers in the nation, as well as the PFL. He had media attention. Everything was great except for the mismanagement and, some allege, unchecked expansion that spread the resources too thin. Anyway, good old Hudson-Berkshire division has been pretty emaciated since. It's really only turned out decent sabre fencers recently, and that's from one club out of a division that includes a huge part of NY, part of Vermont, and a little of Massachusetts.

Chris is right, Adam Crown was involved with the PFL in some fashion, though I'm unclear on it precisely. Really surprising considering the ideological differences that no doubt existed between a classicist like himself and Blakeborough. I know at least a couple years ago he was running dry tournaments for money purses in Ithaca.

Alessandro, I think if anything the PFL proved that it could make it, but the mismanagement spelled its doom. If you're serious about what you're doing remember that you need to dop things legit, and make sure your athletes get paid.

[edew]

The number of fencers who actually showed up to the first event (January in Saratoga Springs, NY...brrr...) was smaller than the number of people who signed up. The level wasn't bad at all, with several strong Canadian fencers and at least one fairly strong US fencer (Al Carlay).

Then the number really dwindled in February, partly because not everyone could take a weekend off a month to fly out to Saratoga Springs. I think the schedule (once a month) was too ambitious for the numbers. If they had five events throughout the year, it would have worked.

Also, Alan didn't pay everyone who won some money, and they were upset. As were some of the referees who were guaranteed $100/day (or some such amount). Those things worked against the continuation of the program.

I actually tried to attend the April event and even sent in my $100 entry fee. But, I took the sorry-*** airline, Tower Air, from SFO to JFK and was stuck in Colorado Springs, CO for 12 hours because of a broken warning signal which forced us down to Colorado Springs. Colorado Springs isn't equipped to handle 747s, so we had to wait for them to get a special towing bar from Denver airport. I left a day early to have the opportunity to get to Saratoga Springs at a leisurely pace. Instead, I arrived at JFK at 7PM the night before the competition. Except my bags were routed to BWI in Washington, and then trucked up. my bag didn't get to JKF until noon the next day, 3 hours after check-in at Saratoga Springs, 150+ miles away. (Actually, the competitions were moved from Saratoga Springs to some dumpy city south of SS, closer to Albany.)

Anyway, so that whole trip was a pain in the major *** . On my way back home, I first found out that my flight was delayed a day. So, I stayed over at a friend's house for an extra day. I arrived at the airport, JFK, at 3PM (the next day) to drop off my rental car. I waited for the planned 7PM flight. I couldn't go to the terminal because it was closed (huh?) so I waited at some other airlines' terminals. At 6-ish, I went to the Tower Air terminal, only to be told that the flight is delayed to 9PM.

9PM passes. Flight is now delayed to 11PM. At 2AM, we move from the now-closed bar to the waiting area. We board the plane at 4:30AM, but they still can't take off because the restrooms haven't been cleaned out, and there's no ground crew at JFK at 4AM in the morning. We took off sometime around 5AM and get I back to SF at around 8 in the morning. Ugh.

That's the story of my last attempt at fencing a PFL event.

[alessandro]

Hi.
Thanks for your info.
In the website they talk about a contract with ABC, is it true?
you got to see fencing on TV?
how was the program like?

[edew]

Like most things with PFL, they were all partly true. (No doubt they had to get some permissions to use the ABC logo on their website, but there were no television cameras at the first event.)

[Crash55]

To call Blakeborough fly-by-night is awful kind. He left NY one step ahead of the law. He tried starting the World Fencing Federation in SC afterwards but that folded as well. Alan was a good salesman (in the best used car tradition) but his business skills left something to be desired.

Maybe it would have worked with better business skills. Make sure you cna pay both teh fencers and the vendors. Vendors have been known to chase down people wearing Kinghts of Siena patches. I also think a better location would have helped. Saratoga Springs isn't bad but Mechanicville was horrible. The building was down right disgusting.

During his time up here he did build up the division quite a bit. I believe he even got some award from the USFA for recruiting. He also caused trouble and devision. I think only a couple of the fencers that started under him are still active.

[edew]

That is, unfortunately, true. The Hudson-Berkshire division was one of the fastest growing USFA divisions in the mid-late 90s. Then, in a span of a year or so, it just evaporated.

The business skills (rather, marketing skills) was seriously lacking. For example, the "Rebellion" motif for the PFL. Why rebellion? Who, besides Alan and maybe one or two of his KoS folks, really felt like rebelling against USFA (and the FIE, and the USOC, and the IOC)? Why not just make it different with acceptance and all-encompassing? Embrace your "competitors" instead of alienating them.

Second, the website was full of grammatical and spelling mistakes. Jay Choi, who webmastered the site needed some basic English skills. You can't call yourself a "Professional" anything if you have amateur copy.

Third is logistics. The operations part of running the tournament left a lot to be desired.

[Crash55]

I know all about the division evaporating. At present I would say the division is still declining. There is almost nothing left in the southern part and only four or five active clubs. I came back to fencing in Fall of 97 so I caught just the tail end of KoS. I missed most of the fighting in the division but got to see it all fall apart.

A good friend of mine had a front row seat for the whole thing (inlcuding calls from the USFA president). After practice on Tues we talked about the PFL and Blake. The rebellion part probably came from Blake not being thwarted at his earlier goal of taking over the division (and eventually the USFA itself). Some of his supporters still claim that he was forced out of amtuer fencing thus the formation of the PFL. With such mindsets "rebellion" probably seemed like a good mindset. Trying to encompass everyone would have been a much better business idea.

Jay Choi was one of Blake's students so he probably did teh site for free. Though I wouldn't be surprised if somehow Jay wound up paying Blake for the privelage. Jay was going to RPI with his parents paying everything before he joined up with Blake. He then left RPI to fence, his parents pretty much disowned him and he wound up working as a short order cook. Jay shows up at a couple tournaments a year still.

I agree though a site for a "Professional" anything needs to have a professional look. It is not soemthing you gie to one of your students cause they will probably do it for free. I have to admit Blake did do better with his WFF site and Black Card fencing.

I only made it to one tournament at Mechanicville. It was a team tounramnet of some sort. What I remember the most was the horrible building. It was hard to find and in despicable condition. The fecning area itself was fine but if you wnet down the hallways a bit you would think you were in a third world country. Not the sort of place to present a good image.

You would think that people would learn from the mistakes made by Blakeborough but no. We have one club that is trying to reach out into schools and get students in the Blakeborough manner. However they are missing the marketing and logistics issues. Their main salle is always dirty, noone unlocks the place till just before a tournament starts, and the people running it often appear to be hunover, drunk, high or all three. Not the way to set teh correct image. After the Saratoga NAC certain people wanted us to send emails or letters to the local media about their coverage or lack thereof. The suggested text used improper grammar and didn't sound at all polished.

It was mentioned before that we should try and include instead of exclude people. This division right nwo is pretty well split between the saber fencers and everyone else. There is little to no
cross competing and only two tournamentsthis year are three weapon. The current recruiting effort is focused on just saber. Not surprising considering it is a saber only club but not good for expanding the base fo fencers. People from othe clubs hae offered to help with the other weapons but have been rebuffed.

I think I drifted a bit off subject. I would just liek to say that anyone who tries another professional league learn from the lessons of the PFL and Blakeborough. Salemanship by itself is not enough. Take into account, marketing, logistics, money, and politics. If not it will likely fail and your division could turn into a wasteland like the Hudson Berkshire.

[oiuyt]

I won't comment directly on the H-B situation. I live close to the Eastern border and have been to several H-B tournaments at the club closest to where I live in the past, and know a bunch of the people but I don't know the inner workings of the division and moved to this area after Blakeborough and the PFL were already gone.

That said, is recruiting new fencers a responsibility of a division or of the clubs in the division? Seems to me that the most workable way of viewing things is that the clubs should be the front line in getting more people into the sport. It's fairly likely that it should be high on any division's priority list to help support this effort (whether through sponsoring beginning level events, helping maintain the flow of recruiting ideas, whatever) but it seems hard for an abstract entity such as a "division" to do much directly in this sense.

It can hardly come as a surprise that what efforts Beaches Sabre Club (or more to the point, Sabre Outreach) makes are directed at creating new sabre fencers. If I ran a foil-only club I'd no doubt be directing any new fencers I'd found or developed into foil. This is one aspect where three weapon clubs have a nice advantage over specialized clubs -- not every prospective fencer is suited for a given weapon, three weapon clubs can give newbies more options.

Doing outreach work and recruiting new fencers is hard. It takes a lot of work and may or may not show direct returns over any given timespan. That said, it's also one of the main things that drives our sport.

College-based clubs may not have the ability, time, or incentive to do widespread recruiting of would-be fencers (or at least not out in the community, they usually DO do a lot on campus) but any or all of the private three weapon clubs in a division should see that such efforts are nearly required and, in any case, show direct dividends in terms of number of members, caliber of fencers both in that club and in the surrounding area, and in the finances of the club in question.

Perhaps this should spawn a new thread, but do people have suggestions regarding recruitment? I think general threads like this have been started in the past and withered fairly quickly. Mostly it comes down to having the time to do the work of getting out there and making the sport visible.

How about suggestions for how a division can help support such recruiting efforts? I supposed we could take a page out of the national office's book and offer a reward to clubs that get the most new members. Are there other suggestions? Does your division do anything that could fall under this category (either directly, as the reward system mentioned above, or indirectly, such as making sure that there are novice events)?

I'm sure that there are things that I'm missing, probably both just ideas that no one's implimented before and things that other divisions are actually doing. Let us know what's going on in your area, what works, what didn't work, what sort of worked but is now not being done or wasn't fully done just because whomever was pushing it ran out of time.

Just as a parting shot at the PFL (and to make SOME of this post on topic ) -- if you're running a "professional" sporting league do you have a sample prize money list on your website where all of the people are Mortal Kombat characters? I mean please....

If a PFL type thing WERE to get started and actually work it's much more likely to be a circuit of events like the Duel in the Desert and the Hawaii Open (both of which already give cash prizes) than a set location in upstate NY. I could see there eventually being enough such events that an unofficial circuit got set up and then eventually a PGA-type association to go with it. One of the keys to being able to boost the prizes to the point where it becomes worth traveling across the country is that someone needs to spend the time, money, and effort involved in learning how to get a good televised program out of an event. The next step of actually GETTING such a show on-air is another big one, but one that just takes money. Having something worth putting on air (and I DON'T mean the fencing, that should already be high enough caliber) seems like the hard part here.

Okay, that's risking splitting my post into two completely different topics. I'll stop now to avoid further confusing the issues.

-B

[Crash55]

Blakeborough contacted me and claims that I am in error about soem things. Though he was not quite so civil. Since I have no desire to spread falsehoods I asked him to correct me. I am waiting for his reply and will post any pertinent corrections here.