Bruce - The Fencer
HISTORY
Bruce’s fencing career started in the boarding school in 1971. Bruce realised that he was too short for rugby or other sports, but still he wanted to find a sport where he could fulfil his aggression, but where can also use his brain and get rid of the “raging hormons. “Through fencing I learned to get the aggression out without being violent”, says Bruce. He took up foil and he started to fence for the school team. Two years later he was offered to become the captain of his team, but, just like in the case of Steve Harris and West Ham, at that age Bruce was more interested in chasing girls (surprise surprise) and having a beer down the pub. Bruce quit fencing and it wasn’t until the ‘Piece Of Mind’ Tour with Iron Maiden when he re-invented himself and started to train more seriously than in his teens. On the following couple of tours, Bruce brought his foil with him wherever the band went and tried to train as much as he could and entered many competitions to gain more routine. Bruce said that his peak was in 1989 and one of his best results was in 1989 where his team represented Britain in the European Championship.
Even though Bruce is normally right-handed, he often becomes left-handed when he is fencing. (I have seen him fencing with both hands - not at the same time of course). The reason for that could be that left-handed fencers have more chance to win as the majority of people are right handed and it’s a bit more difficult to adjust your style to a left-handed person. However, according to the statistics, about 70 % of the top fencers are left-handed.
The following bits and pieces are from various magazines and TV shows that reported about Bruce’s fencing activities or interviews Bruce about fencing. They are in chronological order, and each time I named the sources after the quotes.
Bruce has been trained by very good coaches over the years, among them were Emil Beck (Germany) and Zsolt Vadásszfy in England, the latter of whom was born in Hungary.
QUICK BITS
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“In LA Bruce managed to come 6th in a fencing competition. He has been interested in this sport for a few years now and whenever he happens to be in one place for more than a day at a time he goes into the local fencing club to sharpen up his weapon.” (Fan Club Magazine No. 9)
- “Bruce flew out to Spain to take part in a fencing coaches course” (Fan Club Magazine No. 14)
- […] “I did spend two weeks at an off-duty Catholic Boarding School, sleeping in a box with no hot water on tap until 7.00am and no heating whatsoever…”
But why?
- “Fencing, my old china plate…Sport of Kings, doctors and the unemployed, or, as was the case for six months, me. They actually asked me to teach people and even gave me a piece of paper that said so.
- And did Bruce get to teach a lot of people when he was n’t asleep in his, uh, box?
“Oh no,’ he breaks into a grin, ‘I was on a quest, of course, you know, the Grail, the Holy Shroud, tournaments, jousting, fencing, the Esso Open, the Shropshire open…the BAR’S OPEN! Let’s have a drink.” […]
[…]”I traveled with a mate of mine called Justin-we were out crawling around the international fencing circuit, picking up tournaments here and there. We went to Antwerp, Paris, Bonn, Bad Durkheim…” Where? “Bad Durkheim!” he cries, with an expression that says, obviously you know Bad Durkheim?”
Well, doesn’t everybody?
“Me and Justin stumbled into Bad Durkeim somewhere in Germany on our travels. They had a fencing competition going on there so we entered. It was brilliant,” he smiles.
“We slept on the Calais Ferry Terminal floor, ended up on a troop train to Cherbourg with a thousand very smelly French sailors. And when we finally got to Bad Durkheim [the one and only…] we got invited to dinner with the town mayor.”
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“… after Donington I’m going to have 5 or 6 days off, and my coach is taking the under 20 [ years old] British fencers to Budapest, so I’m going to Budapest with them.” (MTV’s Metal Hammer, 1988
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“I spent four days fencing on the week before the Budapest, I lived at my friends’ house, and we trained. During those days I didn’t live in a hotel, I didn’t need a bodyguard, I took the bus and the underground, I went down the pub – life was much happier then. I was able to speak to people whom I otherwise couldn’t have spoken to.” (form a Hungarian magazine in 1988)
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“Another plan dear to Bruce is a centre for young people to introduce them to fencing.”
Bruce: “I want to start it next year. I have to find the premises. It won’t be London because there is so much going on there. It would get lost as just another minor sport. I would set up somewhere in north London. I’d like an old warehouse and try to attract a sponsorship deal. I won’t throw money at it. The West German Government spend twenty-five million marks a year on fencing. They take school kids who live in fencing centres for 6 years and all they do is fence and go to school with their own tutors. They have all their equipment and board paid for by the State. The Sports Council does zilch in comparison with that sort of investment.”
Bruce spends at least four days a week training. “At weekends I try to go for a competition and I might train five times for that. I spend two or three hours a session on those days. So I spend around 12 to 15 hours a week training. That’s activity time and doesn’t include getting undressed and showering. So that would take up my evenings from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m.” […] ” One thing that takes up my time is starting a small company to import fencing equipment from China and selling it here. I’ve bought a calculator – my first one! It’s always better to have too much to do. And there’s still loads of things I wanna do.”(Metal Hammer, 1988)
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“Bruce has set up his own video Production company called ‘Duellist Productions’, you may also have read about his work with Wrathchild. He has also established
Duellist Enterprises who will deal with mail order fencing equipment.” (Fan Club Magazine 27)
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“I have always wanted to take up martial arts. I wanted a sport where I could fight with someone! If I had had the chance, I would have taken up boxing, judo or karate, but now I’m happy that I chose fencing. I have been a fencer for 15 years and I am quite good at it! I used to be ranked 7th in the national ranking list. It was only because most top fencers didn’t fence that year because it was the year after the Olympics. [1989 – Reka] This year [1992 – Reka ] I am ranked about the 17th which is the official ranking list in Britain. This is another Olympic year, and everyone will virtually kill to get Olympic points. Unfortunately I couldn’t because you have to be in the top 5 for that.” (Metal Attack, 1992).
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“[…] and I took up fencing. The image I had of fencing was a bit more rowdy than actually how it turned out to be, pretty spontaneous, pretty straightforward and also very precise. And I really enjoyed it. It exercised the bits of my brain that other sports didn’t even get to. So that’s what I did, and I carried on with it.” In this TV programme Bruce showed a couple of trivial things in fencing like ‘parry’, ‘fléche’ and ‘reposte’ with the help of another fencer called Dave. “There’s always something you can learn. If you fence with a beginner who has never picked up a sword before, you can learn from him, because he’s gonna do it differently than somebody else. I found it quite interesting in this sport.”(Super TV, Agenda, 1994)
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“The bloke who did all the fight sequences on ‘Star Wars’ used to be the British national fencing coach. The guy who taught me was taught by him.” (Kerrang, 1996)
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In 1996 Duellist Enterprises took part in sponsoring sabre fencer James Williams at the Olympics in Atlanta. Williams made the last 32 and ended up to be the 27th. (from rec.sport.fencing)
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“On another note, Dickinson, who is a bona fide fencing champion, is sponsoring fencer James Williams, the U.K.’s only representative in this year’s Olympics… ” from www.rocknet.com
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The following two excerpts are also form the The Bruce Dickinson Well-Being Network:
Bruce on the subject of fencing: “Fencing is physical, mental and spiritual. It devours you, from the deepest bottom of your soul to the tip of your toes. Everytime you enter a game you offer the opponent the ability to crush your ego. And if it’s an important match then it’s more important than life and death. Mentally, fencing is fiercely brutal and humiliating.”
Bruce on his own style of fencing: “I’m an aggressive defensive fencer. Since I’m rather short I have to try and get the opponent to make mistakes all the time. I am irritating, very intense and energic.”
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Shockwaves: I remember when you first quit Maiden, you were quoted as saying, “I may just take a break from music and devote myself to fencing.” Are you still big into fencing? Bruce: I really haven’t had any time to do anything like that. I optimistically bring my fencing kit with me on the road, hoping to squeeze in some time, but naturally it just sits in the bag and never gets touched (laughs). (from www.hardradio.com, 1998)
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“Q: Have you kept up doing anything with fencing over the years?” Bruce: “Not as much as I would like. However, there is a fencing club here in France, and I’m planning to go and reinvent myself, albeit very embarrassingly” (interview with dr. Metal, November 1999)
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“Q: Are you still fencing?” Bruce: “Yes, I am. And, believe it or not, I’m in Paris right now and I can’t bloody find anywhere to train! I am obviously not trying hard enough! But I’ve got a record to do, so I guess that’s my excuse.”(interview with Stephanie Kuschner, December, 1999)
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“I officially retired from competition in fencing in 1990. I still do it for fun, and now that the kids are getting older it will be much fun.” (from a live chat at www.twec.com in 2000)
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The latest news on Bruce and fencing is that he was going to fight with a Briazilian professional before Rock in Rio III., 2001. (Source: Brazilian newspaper.)
DUELLIST ENTERPRISE
The Duellist story began on the 25th of July 1988 in Chiswick, London. The company was founded by Bruce Dickinson, multi-millionaire and lead singer of the rock group “Iron Maiden”. Bruce was a competitive International fencer who travelled round the globe. Slinging his guitar on one shoulder and throwing his fencing bag over the other, he fenced in more salles than arguably anyone else. Bruce quickly realised that his beloved sport was screaming for him.
Bruce started the company with the intention to provide the UK fencing population with products as good as that available on the continent but at an affordable cost. Enthusiastic reports about the quality of the equipment soon spread to far corners of the earth. Duellist’s reputation for quality and excellence established us as one of the fastest growing companies in the market. The frequent launch of exciting and unpredictable products has helped us gain a world-class reputation.
Visit the official Duellist Fencing Equipment UK website
Fencing article from the Sports Illustrated Magazine, 10/1990 issue.
Heavy metal’s man of steel: rocker Bruce Dickinson is one fine foilsman. (Iron Maiden lead singer is seventh-rated fencer in Great Britain)
Sports Illustrated; 10/1/1990; Mason, Jack
Offstage and out of his spandex knickers, Bruce Dickinson doesn’t play the shrill and pampered prima donna. In fact, there isn’t much about the Air Raid Siren, as the leather-lunged lead singer of the British heavy-metal group Iron Maiden is nicknamed, that fits the image of a rock ‘n’ roll animal.
Dickinson, 32, has a degree in history from the University of London. He’s a published novelist, albeit of a rather bawdy tale, The Adventures of Lord Iffy Boatrace, which a few members of Parliament would like to see banned. He’s working on a rock opera about Italian violinist and composer Niccolo Paganini. He had been going with the same woman for several years, before marrying her in May. He doesn’t use drugs, and he’s sharply critical of metalists who do. “There are a lot of bands using self-abuse as a marketing gimmick,” he says. “Metal music has been ambushed by a fashionable West Coast wasted look — you know, the red bandanna and the heroin needle sticking out of your arm. I think that’s disgusting.”
But the thing about Dickinson that least conforms to the M.O. of the metal magnate is his passion for, of all sports, fencing. Dirt-biking, bungee-jumping — those seem like they might be a rocker’s preferred recreation. But fencing? Incongruous as it may seem, the man who wrote and recorded Bring Your Daughter to the Slaughter for the Nightmare on Elm Street 5 sound track was also the seventh-best foil fencer in Great Britain during the 1988-89 fencing season.
That ranking placed Dickinson just below the top tier of British fencing, a remarkable achievement inasmuch as he didn’t really begin concentrating on the sport until he was 25, after having taken it up when he was a teenager. What’s more, because Dickinson is often in a recording studio or out on year-long concert tours, usually far from a reputable salle d’armes, he can’t spend nearly as much time training as do those in fencing’s upper echelon. But what makes Dickinson’s climb through the ranks still more impressive is that he accomplished it after he switched his fencing hand from his right to his left in 1986.
“I find that fencing and training give me more stamina and help me deal with the craziness of being on the road so much,” he says.
Dickinson discovered the sport’s rigors at the Oundle School, a boarding school in Northhamptonshire. Though a solitary sort as a kid growing up in Sheffield, he played some cricket and enjoyed go-kart racing. At Oundle he was becoming interested in the three R’s — rowing, rugby and running — when, fittingly, a metalwork teacher gave him his first fencing lesson. “I’m a ham,” Dickinson says. “I was immediately attracted to fencing because it seemed like a romantic, melodramatic form of combat.” At 15 he won the school fencing championship and became team captain. At 17, however, he was expelled from school for what he describes as “nonsporting reasons.”
A training stint with the British equivalent of the army reserve convinced Dickinson that school wasn’t so bad after all. In 1977, he enrolled at the University of London’s Queen Mary College and fenced on occasion, although singing and studying took priority. After earning a degree, he sang with a band called Samson until Iron Maiden invited him to join up in 1981.
Dickinson’s robust tenor and animated stage presence added a theatrical dimension to Maiden’s crunch-and-squeal guitar sound. His first album with the band, The Number of the Beast, went to the top of the British charts and helped Maiden break into the U.S. market. But success in the music business, especially the metallic end, which gets minimal air play, is spelled T-O-U-R. To promote an album, Iron Maiden typically spends a year or more on the road, with concerts on more than half the days. Ultimately, it was the toll of touring that persuaded Dickinson to pick up his weapon again.
“Life on the road can get a little one-dimensional,” he says. “I wanted to get back into fencing to do something outside rock ‘n’ roll. I didn’t want to reach 40 and have to say all I’d done was look out the window of a tour bus and get drunk.”
He trained sporadically and competed in regional tournaments in Britain for several years before making a serious commitment to the sport. Through the summer of 1985, Dickinson studied five days a week under British Olympic foil coach Ziemak Wojciechowski. But Dickinson’s hard work wasn’t doing his fencing much good.
He might have remained an earnest but middling fencer had he not stumbled on the fact that he was using the wrong hand. “My father found out he was lefthanded while shooting in the army,” says Dickinson, who also figured out through firearms that he wasn’t entirely righthanded. One day on the road, the boys in the band were fooling around with a target pistol and someone pointed out to Dickinson that he was sighting with his left eye. He read up on eye-hand coordination and left-right brain functions and decided to convert himself into a southpaw foilsman.
He worked on the switch while dividing his time between training sessions on the isle of Jersey and recording sessions in Amsterdam. “Basically, I had to learn how to fence all over again,” says Dickinson. “It was strange at first. Everything was so much more natural, I thought I was doing something wrong. My coordination and timing had also improved considerably, though I still had problems with my legs, which had been conditioned to righthanded fencing.”
By the summer of 1986 Dickinson was about as good lefthanded as he had ever been righthanded, making it to the round of 16 in tournaments in Holland and Britain. When the band toured the U.S. later that year, he called on his network of contacts in the fencing community to find out where he could pick up a match or a lesson. Sometimes he finished fencing only hours before showtime. One tournament at the University of Southern California concluded 50 minutes before the band was scheduled to perform in Long Beach.
Many of the acquaintances Dickinson has made through fencing have only a vague knowledge of his other life. Nathaniel Cohen, a 26-year-old Yale graduate ranked 16th in foil in the U.S., remembers meeting Dickinson and fencing with him at the New York Fencers Club a few years ago. Cohen’s impression was of “a nice, unassuming English guy with long hair. The only thing that tipped me off was this group of 14-year-old girls hanging around.”
In 1987, after recording another album in West Germany, he stayed on and worked out at the Olympic training center in Bonn for six months. His ranking jumped accordingly; by the end of the 1987-88 season he was 18th in Britain.
After yet another world tour, Dickinson returned to England and immersed himself in competition for seven months. By the end of the ‘88-89 season he was ranked seventh. His team, Hemel Hempstead, finished first in the national team championships. But last season, ‘89-90, though the team came in fourth, Dickinson, who had had little time to train or to compete, saw his ranking slip back to 35th.
“Bruce has an explosive offense and is very clever on defense,” says George Kolombatovich, the coach at Columbia University, a perennial NCAA fencing power. “But that trickiness can also be his greatest weakness.”
“Well, yeah, sometimes I get a little too creative,” Dickinson says. “You don’t get points for style.”
Eric Rosenberg, formerly ranked sixth in the U.S., and vice-president of the New York Fencers Club, agrees that Dickinson’s fencing has room for improvement. “His preparation could be better,” he says, referring not to Dickinson’s combat readiness but to the suppleness and fluidity with which a good fencer initiates his attack. Dickinson, however, recently had the opportunity of fencing Rosenberg and beat him in two of three bouts. “Bruce’s preparation is definitely coming along,” Rosenberg conceded after his defeat.
Dickinson’s best years may still be ahead of him. While age may be slowing his reflexes, some fencers peak in their mid- to late 30’s. In a game in which mental toughness and tactical savvy are as critical as quickness, experience can still triumph over raw athleticism.
So despite having many other irons in the fire — a fencing-equipment import business; a solo album, Tattooed Millionaire, as well as a brand-new one from Iron Maiden, No Prayer for the Dying, in release; and a baby due in several weeks — the nimble-footed Air Raid Siren hopes to hit a few more high notes behind both the blade and the microphone.
COPYRIGHT 1990 Time, Inc.
FENCING PICTURES
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