New York Times

[Tomas N]

Hi Folks,

Here's a link to a NYT's article on fencing.

link to NYT

Tomas

[KShan5[PrFC]]

What an excellent article on two points. 1. It bashes the Yankees and 2. It praises fencing. Nice find Tomas.

[DHCJr]

I couldn't read the article, since you have to sign up, which I am not interested in doing at this time, but considering this is the New York Times, you might pass on the whole article to the USFA Media.

[Prizman]

December 13, 2003
SPORTS OF THE TIMES
New York Is Turning Out Champions, Five Floors Up
By GEORGE VECSEY

COUPLE of weeks ago, I was bemoaning the state of sports in New York. The Yankees have not won a World Series since just after the turn of the century. The Knicks and the Rangers are extravagant failures. The Mets? Echhh.

Then I received a few e-mail messages informing me that New York is not a total disaster.

Was I aware that one sports club right on the island of Manhattan is producing champions galore? Come on over, they said.

Bummed by the latest flops from the Jets and the Giants, I made my way to the Fencers Club of New York, established in 1883 — older, therefore, than any of our bumbling local franchises.

On a gritty block on West 25th Street, I took the elevator to the fifth floor to what I will now forever think of as the Loft of Champions.

There, parrying away on parallel steel-mesh strips were more champions than you could wave an épée at. Olympians, past and perhaps future. College all-Americans. National champions. Junior champions. Tournament champions.

It was like the good old days of Super Bowl rings and World Series rings, when the Big Apple was the Big Apple.

Also, honored in absentia was Brooklyn's own Keeth Smart, who earlier in the year became the first American fencer to achieve a world No. 1 ranking. Smart, 25, fences from here, too.

Not long ago, I was told, a young fencer from California wandered up to visit this mecca of his sport. Somebody said, "Hey, why don't you work out with Keeth?" — which is like a visitor to Yankee Stadium getting to play catch with Derek Jeter.

Not by accident is New York a center of fencing, a sport that requires a mix of intelligence and aggressiveness.

"People here are so self-assured," said Iris Zimmermann, 22, an Olympian at the 2000 Sydney Games, now on leave from Stanford University and originally from Rochester.

"You process a lot of things here," said her coach, Buckie Leach, who moved here from Rochester and is also a national team coach. "You have to decide whether to take the subway or a taxi. `Do I cross the street at this point or over there? Is that somebody I want to avoid?' You get to be in control."

Fencing in the United States has a long history, which includes Peter Westbrook, the 1984 Olympic bronze medalist from Newark, who began here and now bases his foundation for minority youngsters here. Also in the past generation, coaches from the former Soviet Union began flocking to West 25th Street, for the perfectly understandable goal of earning a living.

"Critical mass," said Rita Finkel, the club's first paid executive director, whose three daughters are all promising fencers here. She meant that there were enough coaches and world-level athletes to push one another to higher levels.

"We also feed the bottom end," Finkel said. "The kids are not overwhelmed by national fencers."

The nonprofit center has an intramural Battle of the Ages coming up; its youngsters against its septuagenarian regulars, who call themselves the Geezers.

Championship mass was at work on a mundane weekday afternoon recently. Zimmermann was working out with Leach. Erinn Smart, sister of Keeth as well as a former star at Columbia and a 2000 Olympic alternate, was working out, as was Kamara James, a former Princeton star.

James would have won a gold medal in the recent junior World Cup épée event, but, with the score tied at 14-14, a point short of victory, she felt she was awarded the winning point by mistake and asked for a replay. Her opponent then scored the winning touch, but James's sporting gesture impressed her peers from around the world.

Also present recently were three former all-Americans: Jonathan Tiomkin from St. John's and Jedediah Dupree and Dan Kellner, both from Columbia.

Kellner has come a long way since his first exposure to the sport — via a video game. Last summer, at the Pan American Games in the Dominican Republic, Kellner needed to beat his opponent from Cuba by 11 points in order for the United States to win the team foil competition. He won, 15-4, which is almost impossible at that high level.

That's the way it used to be in this town when Lenny and Mookie were young, when Paulie and Tino roamed the land, when Ewing and Richter owned the Garden.

Now the Mets and the Yanks have reached to Japan to try to upgrade their vastly different positions. Joining the Matsui exodus is Kornel Udvarhelyi, who turned down a national coaching position in his native Hungary to bring his wife and child to New York to work with the Fencers Club and the United States Olympic team.

Udvarhelyi will occasionally give commands in Hungarian — not an easy language to hear — just to shake up the normal fencing mix of English and French. "This is the sport of intelligent people," he said. To prove the point, the club is active in placing its fencers at the finest colleges.

For all the championships, the athletes are acutely aware of where they stand in the financial food chain. "Just the salary of one N.B.A. player would be great," Leach said, meaning for the overall budget, not for him. Between tournaments, Kellner does fund-raising for the club. Westbrook's foundation survives on donations.

The club is also supported by longtime members like Eric Rosenberg and Jeff Bukantz, whose father, Daniel Bukantz, fenced here for decades.

Some pay the exorbitant ticket prices and suffer with the New York teams, all below their standards at the moment.

"I'm a Giants fan," Erinn Smart said. "But I like the Yankees, too." Then she asked, "What is Derek Jeter really like?"

Very impressive, I told her. However, his four world championship rings are getting old. At the Fencers Club, the championships just keep on coming.

[Zelda]

What an amazingly cool article!

[Tomas N]

In case the article posted is taken down, you can join the NYT for free and view it there. They start charging for older articles, but recent stuff is all available without charge.

Tomas

[Tireur]

Hate to be a stick in the mud, but........


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[KShan5[PrFC]]

But we are citing it came from the New York Times. Just one giant quote. Nothing wrong there.

[Inquartata]

I wonder if thier copyright protects their copyright statement. Which Tireur just reproduced for us.

For shame, T! I'm sure their lawyers are searching you out even now!

[jeff]

Any lawyers on the board to tell us what "fair use" lets us do? Not the ROW lawyers... Great article though.

Funny, when I fenced on the "steel-mesh strips" there the first time, I was surprised to learn they weren't grounded strips. "Hey, a hit to the floor registered".... "That's okay, we know, we know"

[Tireur]

I think, between the two, they'd let the statement slide.

Bet you copy software too. Shame on you

[Tireur]

But we are citing it came from the New York Times. Just one giant quote. Nothing wrong there

It's not about attribution, it's about copyright.
People who make their living that way, me included, are very serious about it and violations are expensive. It they registered it, it's $150,000.00 plus costs.

Granted, not gonna take a hit on this probably, but..................

[blue_falcon]

Originally posted by jeff
Any lawyers on the board to tell us what "fair use" lets us do? Not the ROW lawyers... Great article though.

Funny, when I fenced on the "steel-mesh strips" there the first time, I was surprised to learn they weren't grounded strips. "Hey, a hit to the floor registered".... "That's okay, we know, we know"

To quote US legislation :

§ 107. Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use
Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include —

(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;

(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;

(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and

(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors.

[Tireur]

That's right. It's just not a part I generally deal with.

I stnad corrected....

[pkt]

Blue Falcon,
Did you come to the CSC#2 in Vancouver?

Did you all hear about that Alexander Graham Bell might have been a fraud: Phillip Reis, a German developed a working 'telephone' before Bell did.
http://atcaonline.com/phone/Reis2.html

Bell won the battle because of his association to powerful and rich peopl. As a result, he got the patent for telePHONY, not the telephone. I think that's a hint of the truth.

PK

[blue_falcon]

Originally posted by pkt
Blue Falcon,
Did you come to the CSC#2 in Vancouver?

Did you all hear about that Alexander Graham Bell might have been a fraud: Phillip Reis, a German developed a working 'telephone' before Bell did.
http://atcaonline.com/phone/Reis2.html

Bell won the battle because of his association to powerful and rich peopl. As a result, he got the patent for telePHONY, not the telephone. I think that's a hint of the truth.

PK

Unfortunately, I did not go to Vancouver for elites. I'm NOWHERE near that level -- I just occasionally stab people in my salle

However, I do have friends who were there!

Yes, the Bell thing is somewhat controversial. But, at the time, I'm not sure if US legislation is as "fair" as today's legislation. And, as you may possibly realize, the world is not fair and money DOES talk, especially back then!

Actually, I've had a look at the website you pointed to and I've also had a look at the original Bell patent. I think one of the reasons the court may have thrown out the Reis device is because Reis' own description shows that his device did NOT cover what Bell claimed to have been his invention. If you will look at the end of the Bell patent, the crux of Bell's invention is that "the receiver is set in vibration by the employment of undulatory currents of electricity". This means that Bell is saying that his device works by using (from the website) "smooth, continuously varying current". The Reis device, by his own description (which was wrong but that's immaterial to the issue at hand), worked by what was essentially an intermittent current. So, there's good reason to say that what Reis invented is NOT what Bell invented and, as such, Bell got there first -- Bell created a device where "the receiver is set in vibration by the employment of undulatory currents of electricity".

What a lot of people do not understand about patents is that the "monopoly" that one gets is NOT what is described in the body of the document. The "monopoly" is really defined by what are called the "claims". These are one sentence (admittedly convoluted) descriptions of what the inventor deems to be inventive in his/her invention. According to Bell's claims, he invented this device that used the continuous current. Since Reis, by his own admission (even though it was wrong), said that HIS device used intermittent current, then the Reis device was NOT equal or even close to the Bell claim.

Clear as mud?

[Steven_Rockwell]

COUPLE of weeks ago, I was bemoaning the state of sports in New York. The Yankees have not won a World Series since just after the turn of the century.

Oh, for crying out loud. The century is only three years old and it's only been two years since the Yankees had the World Series. When they have gone as long as the Cubs and Red Sox have gone without the title, then New Yorkers can come complaining.

[Inquartata]

Originally posted by Tireur

Bet you copy software too.

No...although if I knew how....