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Edge of Greatness
For a year and a half, Sada Jacobson has focused every moment of her life on a single, consuming goal. This summer in Athens, it all comes down to a few furious minutes.
July/August 2004
by Carlo Rotella '94PhD
Carlo Rotella '94PhD is the author, most recently, of Cut Time: An Education at the Fights. He teaches at Boston College.
At Nellya Fencers, a fencing club tucked away amid cut-rate pharmacies, auto parts stores, and evangelical churches along strip-malled Forest Parkway in suburban Atlanta, two women and two men prepare for a late-morning saber practice. Sada Jacobson, 21, a Yale junior on leave who is currently ranked first in the world in women’s saber, and her sister, Emily, 18, bound for Columbia in the fall and currently ranked tenth, will both be fencing in Athens in three months as part of the U.S. Olympic team. Matt Zich and Luther Clement, neither on the 2004 Olympic team but both aiming for 2008, have come down from the elite Fencers Club in New York for the week to train with them. Sweating hard in shorts and T-shirts after warm-ups in the humid spring heat, they suit up for fencing: first, the traditional close-fitting white breeches and jacket (under which women wear a plastic chest protector and everyone wears an underarm protector called a plastron), and a glove for the weapon hand; then a gray metallic-mesh jacket called a lame, and a cuff made of the same material that fits over the glove.
The sisters' coach, Arkady Burdan, addressed by all as “Maestro,” is a short, sturdy-looking fellow with close-cropped gray hair, a modest paunch, a serious Russian accent, and a taste for Marlboros. This morning he has already guided the fencers through warm-ups, beginning with stretches, sprints, lunges, push-ups, and sit-ups, then moving on to quick-shuffling weaponless advances and retreats in fencing position—part shadow boxing, part ballroom dance.
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Sada has a left thigh that would not look out of place on the current governor of California. |
Spending significant portions of one’s life exercising vigorously in the en garde position—weapon arm raised and legs flexed, with the leading foot pointing at the opponent and the rear foot pointing off to one side—produces a distinctive bodily asymmetry. The weapon arm is noticeably bigger than the other arm, and the calf of the rear leg, used for pushing off, is much bigger than the other calf. But the most arresting feature is the lead leg’s colossal thigh, hyperdeveloped by years of bearing a fencer’s weight, especially when she lunges. Sada (pronounced “SAY-dah”), a left-hander, has a left thigh that would not look out of place on the current governor of California; Emily, a right-hander, has a right thigh nearly as impressive.
Nellya Fencers occupies a warehouse-like shed that used to house a plumbing business. In the main room, a mostly empty gym with seven 40-foot-by-6-foot rectangular fencing strips painted on the floor, built-in fans rattle away on one wall. Three raised shutter-style doors in the opposite wall open onto a concrete loading dock, admitting bugs and a sluggish breeze. Through the open doors you can see a guy on a riding mower trimming the grass in the cemetery next door. “Why do dead people need every day cut grass?” asks the Maestro, who enjoys playing the emigre perplexed by American life: the excess and waste, the indulgence of children, the insistence on sending athletic prodigies off to college when those prodigies should be training full-time. Sada and Emily, who know this routine, exchange a look.
Having suited up, armed themselves with long, flexible sabers, and donned mesh-fronted masks, the four fencers grab extension cords hanging down from the ceiling and plug themselves in at the small of the back. As in formal competitions, each fencer’s saber is connected to a body cord that runs up the sleeve of the weapon arm and connects to a reel wire worn around the torso under the lame. When touched by an opponent’s blade, the conductive metal in their lames, masks, and cuffs will now send an electronic signal to a monitor that registers a hit with a colored light and a buzzer. The fencers pair off for a round-robin of practice bouts.
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Saber is based on the slashing and thrusting of cavalry troopers in a melee. |
A bout consists of a series of brief engagements called touches, each touch ending when one or both fencers score a hit. In saber, legal hits can be scored anywhere above the waist and with either the tip or the edge of the blade. The other fencing disciplines—foil and epee, in both of which only the tip is used to score—still carry echoes of duels between gentlemen, but saber is based on the slashing and thrusting of cavalry troopers in a melee. It’s faster and dirtier, and strength matters more in saber than in the other disciplines. Opponents often exchange near-simultaneous hits at lightning speed, so a referee must decide who gets the point. (Fifteen points wins the bout.) Determining who has the right-of-way, who initiated the scoring attack, the referee brings sporting order to what the untrained eye sees as a series of brief, incomprehensible spasms of murderous action punctuated by the scoring machine’s lights and buzzer. The Maestro, mounted on a high stool, serves as referee for the practice bouts, barking out ritual commands in Russian-accented French: "Etes vous pretes?.En garde.Allez!"
One duo goes at it in front of the Maestro while the other practices sans referee on a neighboring strip; then they switch partners and start over. Both Sada and Emily have to adjust to Matt’s long reach when they oppose him. Luther is not as tall as Matt, but he’s quicker and trickier. Sada likes to train against men, who use their greater strength and speed to push her up and down the strip, which, she says, makes her work harder. She and Emily hold their own against the New Yorkers, the Maestro occasionally switching from referee to coach to offer advice or praise. When Emily, attacking fiercely, scores a series of points against Matt to draw even in one of their practice bouts, the Maestro calls out to him, “We have fencers here. No girls, no boys. Fencers.”
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Watching the sisters fence is like listening to blood relatives sing harmony. |
Sada and Emily take their turns against each other, too. Watching the sisters fence is like listening to blood relatives sing harmony. A quality of intimacy, of knowing the other all the way to the bone, supercharges the exceptionally close interplay of two characters, two styles, two bodies in motion. Sada is taller than Emily, and she has shed more of the rounded softness of post-adolescence, but otherwise when they face off on the strip in matching gear they make a near-mirror image: Sada in a left-handed stance, Emily in a right-handed stance. Both of their lames have “Jacobson USA” printed in block letters across the back. Their very different styles are almost perfectly complementary. Emily presses long, fluid attacks that show off the elegant lines of her fencing and her surpassing quickness. Sada stymies Emily’s advances with crisp defensive moves, disturbing her timing and creating opportunities to score with parry-ripostes.
At first they seem to be playing out an over-familiar formula, running through rote sequences of attack and counterattack, but they become more inspired as they proceed. The engagements extend and grow more heated, the two sabers forming a live-wire tangle of clanking, hissing metal as the sisters contest each touch with increasing improvisational fervor. When they land hits at the same time, they both turn to the Maestro with a wordless shout, each positive that the point should be hers. The Maestro encourages such demonstrations by his pupils—he calls it “giving voice” to show that you feel you won the point—but when serving as referee he seems to shrink a little before their competitive fury, putting aside his normally peremptory manner to explain in detail the logic by which he awards the point to one sister or the other. When he renders judgment, one sister nods, satisfied; the other stares at him for a long baleful moment before returning to the en garde position. When he calls out “Simultane!", which means that neither receives the point, both sisters stare him down, temporarily united against this irksome man who keeps interfering with their private duel.
Their private duel may well continue in the Olympics—perhaps even in the gold-medal bout, although the Maestro superstitiously refuses to even discuss the possibility. Sada, at the top of her game these days after having taken a year and half away from Yale to devote herself entirely to training, prevailed in their practice bouts on this day. But Emily is one of the strongest female saberists in the world, a formidable opponent, despite having been distracted from training of late by her senior year of high school. The balance of power between the sisters swings back and forth; one will dominate their practice bouts for a few weeks, then the other will take over. They have met four times in official competitions so far this year, and each has won twice.
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How often do you hear someone say, “Maestro, what do you want from Subway?” |
After practice, and having eaten a carry-in lunch with her training partners and coach (how often do you hear someone say, “Maestro, what do you want from Subway?”), Sada sits on a folding chair on the loading dock and talks shop. “Ideally,” she says, “you should have a sense of what you’re going to do in every touch. If I did a fast attack last time, then this time I might take a step back, let my opponent fall short. Then the next time, something different.” A certain warlike joy lights up her face as she says, “Every once in a while you’ll really get someone, you’ll have them in the palm of your hand, and they don’t know what to do. The smarter fencer should win.” This is her mantra. The smarter fencer should beat the technically superior fencer and the better athlete, the merely diligent and the fortuitously gifted.
Her mentors agree. The Maestro, asked to explain what makes Sada so good, says, “Hard work and very good think. She have good memory, too—remember opponent from years ago. Like chess player. She prepare special tricks, play around opponent’s action. She play game.” Henry Harutunian, Yale’s beloved Armenian-born fencing master, says, “She has exceptional athletic ability, but also so strong in the mind.” Harutunian, who coached Sada when she won the NCAA title in women’s saber in 2001 and 2002, sees her virtues as in part inherited from her father, David Jacobson ’74, who fenced for him at Yale in the early 1970s. “She never want give up,” he says. “I can see same thing I remember her father have, but daughter have more drive, more killing instinct.”
Sada was already Arkady Burdan’s pupil when she came to Yale, and Harutunian tried to gloss rather than revise the Maestro’s teachings. “Burdan have his style,” says Harutunian, “and I try never to change that style, not to disturb that foundation. I try to give my opinion, my feeling—more lighter, more elegancy, more neatness between rhythm and fencing.” But Harutunian recognizes that Sada’s main strength does not lie in polished fencing. “Sada winning because of her temper, her power,” he says. “Her sister more natural fencer.” He looks forward to having Sada back at Yale after the Olympics for one or two more years of college fencing. She could potentially win two more NCAA titles for Yale, but the talent pool grows deeper and the competition stiffer every year. Emily, in particular, fencing for Columbia and training regularly at the Fencers Club, will be tough to beat.
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Like boxing, saber was long deemed especially unladylike. |
Had they been born a few years earlier, the Jacobson sisters would not have had the opportunity to duke it out for national and world titles in saber; they would have had to content themselves with competing for the unofficial household championship. Only in the last five years has women’s saber been completely incorporated into the circuit of World Cup competitions in fencing, and the 2004 Olympics will be the first to include it in medal competition. Like the marathon, boxing, and the military combat arms, saber was long deemed especially unladylike—perhaps because men were not ready to see women excel in the rough stuff. Sada and Emily have come along at just the right historical moment in which to exercise their talent for cut-and-thrust. Sada says, “Women’s saber has been around just long enough now that we’re starting to see some complexity. It’s getting more interesting.” And she will probably be around to help it grow more interesting. “In fencing, you peak in your late twenties, so I still have a lot of time.” She’s in the right place, too. An influx of master coaches from Eastern Europe since the end of the Cold War has turned the United States into a fencing power, finally ready to compete with the European countries that traditionally dominate the sport. “We’ve never had such a strong U.S. fencing team, especially in saber,” Sada says. “I wouldn’t be surprised to see anybody on that team take a medal. That didn’t use to be the case.”
Sada’s parents did not raise her to be a fencer, and her father believes that if she had not taken up the saber she would have found something else: martial arts, perhaps, or chess, or some other individual competition requiring copious preparation, concentration, will, and a mind capable of scheming against an opponent while anticipating the opponent’s scheme, then reacting against the opponent’s reaction.
David Jacobson says, “This is a young person who, from the time she was very small, could focus on a task at hand with great intensity. Even when she was two or three years old, doing a puzzle. And she has a drive to excel in all aspects of her life, a powerful desire to be the best in whatever she does.” These traits, and an understanding of the importance of hard work, seem to be inborn, impossible for Sada or her family to explain. Before she fenced, she swam competitively, but swimming did not fully scratch the itch for mastery. “She is extremely quick and strong, but she probably never would have been a great swimmer,” says her father. “There’s only so far technique and desire can take you in swimming. Being a natural athlete built for swimming counts for so much.” As a fencer, though, Sada’s particular gifts, combined with excellent coaching (which matters more in fencing than in perhaps any other individual sport), have taken her all the way to the top. “Among her level of fencers, she’s probably a B athlete,” says her father, “but she made herself into an A-plus technician, and she has A-plus intellectual skills.”
It’s a good thing Sada found fencing—or, more accurately, fencing found her. It began with a visit from Coach Harutunian to the Jacobson household during the Atlanta Olympics of 1996. The two men dug David’s old fencing gear out of the closet where it had been stored, untouched, for many years. “We were just goofing around in the driveway for old times' sake,” says David. “That was the first time my daughters”—Sada, Emily, and their younger sister, Jackie—“ever saw me fence.” Harutunian recalls, “Their eyes were so big, so amazed. They looked at their father completely different.” Afterward, he gave Sada a couple of pointers in basic footwork, but it seemed to go no further at the time.
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The Maestro teaches his charges to crush their opponents’ spirit. |
The experience inspired David to get back into fencing, though, and a couple of years later Arkady Burdan, one of the foremost saber coaches in the world, arrived in Atlanta. David began taking lessons with the Maestro, and his daughters followed him to the club. “There was no plan,” says David. “The girls gravitated to the club one by one because they were curious. Arkady Burdan is so dynamic, he got them going. They had success early—remember, there weren’t that many women in saber at that point, and they moved up fast—and it snowballed from there.” Sada remembers that on one of her first visits to the club, “my mom and my little sister got me all dressed up, and then I almost died in warm-up, it seemed so hard. Plus, a guy in the club got hit in a sensitive area, and he was screaming on the ground.” The point of this story does not seem to be that the rigor and the frisson of danger gave her pause; rather, she seems to be explaining what made her say to herself Now this is what I want to do.
She fences regularly with her father these days, just for fun. He describes the experience as “humbling.” David, like Sada a lefty, competes in the over-50 division, and he describes himself as “pretty good, even very good, and I’m certainly bigger than her,” but he must fight desperately to keep from being embarrassed by her. “I’m not talking about trying to win; I’m talking about scoring enough points to make it look semi-respectable. When she takes a parry, it’s like hitting a brick wall. When she comes at you, it’s like a freight train. She’s a very intimidating opponent, and very frustrating, too, because it seems like she knows what I’m going to do before I do it.” The Maestro teaches his charges to crush their opponents' spirit, to demoralize them by defeating their technique and their plans so utterly in the first few touches that the conclusion of the bout seems foregone. Sada can’t unlearn this lesson just because she happens to be fencing against her father.
Later in the afternoon, having digested her sub and warmed up again, Sada has a one-on-one lesson with the Maestro. They fence “dry,” without electricity or the gear it requires. Both wear shorts, T-shirt, mask, and glove. The Maestro, who will be taking all the hits, also wears a black padded sleeve on his weapon arm, the right, and a sleeveless heavy leather jerkin of the kind worn by villainous henchmen in sword-fight movies. He carries his blade low, tapping a couple of beats on the floor as he advances, then bringing it up as he presses home the attack. The Maestro affects the persona of a lout who rushes in ceaselessly for the kill, only to be sharply rebuffed each time by Sada, who parries and counters, smacking him on the padded arm, the jerkin, the mask. When she lands a hit, he holds his pose so that she can repeat it, to ingrain more deeply the feel of a successful move. The lesson takes on a satisfying rhythm: the Maestro’s weapon tap-taps on the floor, then he takes a running step or two and tries to overpower her, she stands her ground and stops his blade, then comes a zing and a smack as she lands the counter, then the same zing-and-smack again, and again. Sometimes the Maestro calls out a particular sequence of moves in code, just like boxing trainers do when they put on the practice mitts for their fighter to bang on, and she briskly obliges.
More fencers have been arriving for afternoon practice. They mill around in the carpeted anteroom that adjoins the gym. A boy of 11 or 12 sticks his head through the doorway into the gym to ask a question of the Maestro, who shouts, “Never more in time lesson you talk to me after today! Okay?!” The boy recedes swiftly from view, his head bitten off. If you’re going to have people call you “Maestro,” you have to act like one.
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“Is everything psychology. If somebody stubborn, stupid, you take advantage.” |
The interruption gives the Maestro a chance to stop the action and underscore the crux of today’s lesson. He and Sada remove their masks. The Maestro says, “When first time you beat opponent in preparation, he remember you beat him because he slow. So next time he fast, so now maybe you can trap.” Sada nods, but then asks, “How do I know he’s gonna go for the mask?” If the opponent does not attack the mask, Sada cannot spring the particular trap they’re working on. “You make him,” answers the Maestro. “You give no choice. Psychology! He try here”—he gestures at her ribs—“but you no let him. Then he try here”—the arm—“but you no let him.” He imitates the opponent’s frustration. “So, the mask,” he says with a shrug, dismissing this imaginary stooge whose own aggression and competitiveness have been turned into agents of his undoing. “Is everything psychology. If somebody stubborn, stupid, you take advantage.”
You take advantage. This is what Sada does best. She makes her opponents fail, then she makes them pay.
Sada and the Maestro put on their masks and fence for a few more minutes, then the masks come off again, they shake hands, and she thanks him for the lesson. They will fly to France in a few days for a World Cup event, in July they will go to Rome to train with the Italians, then in August they move on to Athens for the Olympics. As Sada stows her equipment in an oversized sports bag, novice fencers come into the gym—boys and girls, white and black, dabblers and aspiring Olympians, all sorts. One or more of the girls may face Sada one day in an NCAA competition, a World Cup event, the Olympics. The Maestro warms them up, his voice trailing out of the gym to Sada as she puts her bag into the trunk of her car. “Run to line and back! Poosh-ops!.Stand up! Now, en garde! We begin!”
Sada gets into her car and heads for home, ready to call it a day. Between a training session and a lesson with the Maestro every day of the week but Sunday, five additional sessions per week with a strength and conditioning trainer, and the extra rest required by all this strenuous activity (“I need nine hours of sleep a day now; at Yale I was lucky to get six”), fencing has pushed everything else in her life out of the way for the past year and half. Back at Yale, her contemporaries in the Class of 2004 are intent on senior essays, graduation, life after college. Sada is thinking about the competition: “There’s my sister, of course, and then there’s a Russian, maybe three from France, one from China, an Italian, a couple of Germans, a couple of others to watch out for.” All of the top-flight saberists have met repeatedly in World Cup competitions. “I know their styles, what to expect. We know each other’s technique. So here’s where strategy really starts to matter.” That means she needs to plan for each opponent, reviewing tendencies and weaknesses, crafting new tricks to go with tactics that have worked in the past. A saber bout can reach 15 points in a hurry, years of preparation compressed into a few minutes of bewilderingly ferocious action. Sada, as ferocious as they come, aims to be the one doing the bewildering.  |
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