A Dedicated Fencing Master Goes Back to His Future
By Leonard Shapiro
There are scholar-athletes, and then there is Middleburg’s Turner Smith, who takes the term to a stratospheric level.
A retired environmental attorney with a distinguished Curriculum Vitae, Smith now devotes much of his time to Virginia land conservation through The Land Trust of Virginia. Smith, the athlete, also has a remarkable resume. Five years ago, at age 70 and almost 50 years after he competed as a varsity fencer at Princeton, Smith decided he wanted to take up the demanding sport once again.
“It’s tremendous exercise,” Smith said. “It’s three-dimensional chess at light speed. As you get older, you want to keep the blood flowing to the brain. You still have muscle memory, and you can pick it up, althoughI found much of my muscle memory was wrong because the sport has changed so much.”
Smith grew up in Arlington County before his family moved to a farm in Haymarket. He played football and ran track at Episcopal High School and when he enrolled at Princeton, he thought he’d mainly be focusing on his studies until his freshman roommate convinced him to join him on the fencing team.
“There was no way I could play other major sports there because the athletes were so good,” Smith said. “But almost everyone on the fencing team had not fenced before. We all started on an equal playing field, and by sophomore year, I was fencing on the varsity.”
The sport consists of three disciplines—foil, epee and saber. Foil, the lightest weapon, is the descendent of the practice weapon, with a torso target area. Epee, the heaviest of the three weapons, is the traditional dueling sword, with a whole body target. The war-like saber replicates the cavalry sword, the target being the whole body from the waist up – the exposed part when on horseback.
Smith fenced foil until his senior year, when he switched to epee to help his team. The change also allowed a talented sophomore named Bill Hicks to get more experience that year. Hicks went on to win the NCAA foil title as a senior.
Princeton also had a Hall of Fame coach, Stan Sieja, a World War II aviator who came to the school in 1946 and directed the fencing program for 36 years. He was manager of the U.S. team at the 1952 Helsinki Olympics and led Princeton to the 1964 NCAA Championship and three Intercollegiate Fencing Association titles, with a number of Ivy League championships and countless All-Americans.
A couple of years ago, Smith was at the Middleburg Tennis Club and struck up a casual conversation with another member, Richard Pantel. When Smith mentioned he’d been a fencer at Princeton, Pantel parried that he’d once captained the Princeton team, coached by Sieja, that won the Ivy fencing title in 1979, and was himself a finalist in the NCAAs.
“Amazing,” Smith said. “A Princeton fencer, the same coach, and he lives in Round Hill, 10 minutes from me.”
After graduating in 1962, Smith became a commissioned Army officer and the leader of his infantry battalion’s tactical nuclear weapons platoon. Following his military service, he graduated from Harvard Law School in 1968 and joined a Richmond law firm. There were no fencing clubs in that area, and he put the sport totally behind him.
Over time, he opened his firm’s first foreign office in Belgium, practiced in Richmond, Brussels and Washington, and, for three years, headed his firm’s legal team
representing a senior Croatian political leader from central Bosnia in a war crimes trial in The Hague.
His return to fencing five years ago first began at a Harper’s Ferry club, and he fences three times a week at clubs in Manassas, Front Royal and Fairfax. When he first showed up in Harper’s Ferry wearing his old Princeton paraphernalia, there were snickers all around because all his equipment was illegal under current rules. He now practices with fencers of all ages, including teenagers.
“When I first started again, I began to realize how important good balance was,” Smith said. “The first few times I was on my keister, a lot. One time I was flat on my back down on the floor and saw the kid I was fencing staring down at me saying ‘Are you all right sir?’ I’m sure he was petrified that he’d killed me.”
But Smith got up and now more than holds his own. He’s competed in two national over-70 championships and, though he occasionally comes home with welts and bruises, he’s in fabulous shape, back close to his Princeton playing weight. He’s also started playing tennis again, with lots of cardio and stretching, as well.
“People are always saying to me ‘why are you fencing again at your age’?’” Smith said. “Look, you only go around once, so what the hell. My attitude is ‘why not?’”