Last weekend, Ben and I went to Tucson for a fencing meet. Every year there are four (three in Olympic years) national competitions, called North America Cups (or NACs for short), for adult “elite” fencers. (There are additional ones for junior elites, for veteran elites, and for less highly rated fencers. But there are only four for which Ben and I qualify.)
So we took off for the Tucson NAC on Thursday and I fenced on Friday. I didn’t fence particularly poorly, but I also didn’t win particularly much. I made the 75% cut out of the pools, but only just, and then lost my first direct elimination (DE) bout by one touch, despite being ahead for almost the entire bout. Blah.
On Sunday, however, Ben fenced. And he fenced excellently. He went 5-1 in his pool, including pulling off a nice 5-3 win in his very first bout — against Brendan Baby, who is a strong fencer and was the top seed of the pool. Entering the DE table, he was seeded 29th (of 176) and kept up his tricky timing and fast attacks. He won his next two bouts to make the round of 32. (That means there are 32 fencers left in the DE table; the rest have been knocked out.) In the round of 32, the NACs use a format called “repechage,” which essentially means double-elimination. Fencers compete until they’ve lost two bouts or they’ve made the final 8. Ben’s first bout in the 32 was a loss against Ben Ungar, who ended up 3rd. So Ben was knocked “into repechage.” He then fenced to a strong finish against Adam Maczik, and then knocked Cody Mattern out of the tournament 15-11. Cody, by the way, was ranked 4th in the country (now 5th). Adam and Cody both fence at Northwest Fencing Center in Oregon, and Ben eliminated them both in similar style, attacking into their prep and forcing them to make mistake after mistake. Northwest rallied a cheering squad for the Cody bout, but they were largely kept silent as Ben made Cody look silly, hitting him when he paused time and again. After this delicious victory, Ben had to adjust to a completely different style in his next opponent, Adam Watson, who is shorter but attacks long. He didn’t win that bout, though, and was eliminated from repechage in the round of 16. His final placement was 15th, which is his best result at a NAC ever. Yay Ben!
The next day we attempted to fly home. I say “attempted” because it was an awful ordeal. We were flying out of Phoenix and unbeknownst to us, there was a Nascar race there that weekend. That meant that all of US Airways’ flights were oversold. We ran into several broken ticketing machines, incompetency, a surge in people trying to get through security, and what looked like security-personnel-training-day at the airport. They gave away our seats because it took us almost an hour to get through to the gate. So we then flew standby on two more oversold flights (and needless to say didn’t get on them), and had to spend an additional night in Arizona, finally getting home at 3:00 PM the next day. I used to like US Airways enough, but they’ve been getting worse and worse. I now heartily un-endorse them and their now parent company, America West.
