An interesting article on
Schermaonline.com about one of the greatest Hungarian masters
Janos Kevey.
http://www.schermaonline.com/scherm...order=1&thold=0
This article provides additional information about this fencing master from what can be found in Chapter 18,
The Burden of Gold, in
"By the Sword" by Richard Cohen.
Portraits: Fencing master Janos Kevey
(posted by al_bern)
Janos Kevey represents one of the most significant personalities in modern fencing.
He was born February 28, 1907, in Germany from German parents, but grew up in Hungary where his family emigrated when he was still a child, took up Hungarian citizenship, and adopted the lastname of Kevey from Kevevara, the village where they settled.
His first contact with fencing was while he was a student in the Fehrentemplon Gymnasium (high school). He then studied law and fencing while at the University. In college his maestro was Tomanoczy who came from the Fencing and Gymnastics Military School in Wiener-Neustadt. At the same time though, he had as fencing instructor also the Italian Maestro Armentano.
Because both fencing masters used different techniques, they both believed that their pupil had no talent whatsoever because what one was teaching him one day during a lesson, the other would criticize and correct the next day. Nevertheless, already in 1930 he won the individual championship of the School for Saber and Foil as a member of the University Club, qualifying for the University Games in Darmstadt. He won a saber team gold with his team mates Bela, Ferenc, and Sandor, over the great rivals, the Italians -- who had in their lineup Aldo Montano [grandfather of the current Olympic saber champion] who later became world champion in 1938 and 1947.
After he retired from the army in 1935 he joined the Royal Fencing Academy and Military Sports in Budapest and in 1937 he earned the diploma of "Professor in Fencing Arts in Three Weapons."
In 1947 Kevey was invited by the Polish Fencing Federation to become the coach of the national team with the task to build, after World War II, a strong fencing team from scratch. Kevey created the
Polish School of Fencing using his personal scientific knowledge, a never ending inventiveness, and establishing new training methods for foil and saber fencing.
Since Poland had then no fencing tradition, nobody opposed or criticized his innovative ideas. He transformed and developed with coherence and depth his empiric experience into a methodology by proceeding in a scientific way precisely and meticulously applied. He was convinced that the principles of sport modernization necessary to create a modern fencing school had to get inspiration from the dialectic principles of the German philosopher Hegel. Accordingly, what before was considered a strict domain of each sport, had to be open up in a multidiscipline environment. The experience of other sport disciplines and the scientific knowledge became the key of the Kevey method.
Kevey was particularly interested in the development of reflexes and the ability to react. According to the Hungarian master, the speed of reaction was the primary goal in fencing training, together with the development of the ability to concentrate.
Kevey took from various sciences, philosophy, psychology, physiology, and medicine, and applied this knowledge to the teaching methodology in general and the teaching of fencing in particular.
In his method, he theorizes:
- The "on guard" position according to the orientation reflexes theories by Buechler and Lorenz.
- The legs movement as an expression of instinctive behavior according to Lorenz and Craiggel.
- The attack system according to the dynamic of military history.
- Speed according to the learning of the conditional muscular reflexes studied in physiology.
- Acrobatic movements as used in other sports like volleyball, soccer, or alpine skiing.
- Method simplification from ice skating and from Gaussian theories used in math and statistics
Since he was mostly dealing with young fencers, he became also interested in generational conflicts and pedagogical issues. With his openness and availability to gather his pupils confidence, Kevey was able to create in his school the necessary family atmosphere He felt that "sportsmen too involved exclusively in their sport become nervous and cannot overcome the difficulties and the failures often resulting in losing their own self-esteem."
With the mediation of the Hungarian Fencing Federation, Kevey arrived in Italy in 1959, just few months before the start of the Olympic Games in Rome, with the task to provide new stimuli to the Italian National Saber Team. He made the Club di Scherma in Turin as his Italian base of operation. There, he would start training his students early in the morning between 6 and 7 am, before school, and often three time a day.
Note: He was known in Poland to make his fencers swim in the winter in the icy waters of a lake, and in Italy to make them carry heavy backpacks while hiking the Alps in the on guard stance. 
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