When Steaphen Fick was 9 years old, his mother gave him a
plastic sword with a plastic jewel on its handle.
When Steaphen Fick was 9 years old, his mother gave him a plastic sword with a plastic jewel on its handle. He loved it. With it, he was a knight, a musketeer. To his mother’s dismay, he graduated to curtain rods and broom handles, many of which he broke.
He grew up. Swords disappeared from his life until 1988, when he got out of the Army. He bought his first sword, which he still has, at the San Luis Obispo Renaissance Faire. In 1989, he assayed his first fight in armor and “got the snot beat out of me.” He was hooked. Over the next 20 years, he fought more than 3,000 fights in armor, and more unarmored with rapier and other lightweight weapons.
In 2000, he opened his school, DEMAS: Davenriche European Martial Artes School. He chose the acronym because it sounded similar to Dumas, author of the Three Musketeers. When our daughter Anne first started taking broadsword lessons, the class was held in Sir Steaphen’s back yard in South San Jose. (We called Steaphen “Sir” for the same reason that a karate instructor is called Sensei: respect. We respect him because he beat a mort of people at various tournaments.)
When the rains began, class moved into the garage. The garage, though dry, had rafters which would, unfortunately and unexpectedly, arrest a downward plummeting cut such as a fendente or squalembrato. “Hand of God!” the combatants would exclaim, and fight on.
From the garage, the kids’ class moved to a student’s back yard in San Martin, thence to a pavilion belonging to the grandparents of another student, in the hills east of Gilroy, thence to the Strand Theater in downtown Gilroy. More recently, classes moved to a new Salle, a 2,600-square-foot facility in Santa Clara, which includes a workout room and a library of works in English, German, Italian, and Japanese. Sir Steaphen also teaches a class in rapier, a la Three Musketeers, in Morgan Hill.
Modern day fencing resembles the sword techniques resurrected by DEMAS in the same way surgery resembles butchery, or chess resembles war. Fencing is about scoring points. Sword fighting is about hitting without getting hit.
Class begins with stretching and strengthening exercises. The students practice their standard parries, cuts, and thrusts. Sometimes they practice grapples, or how to take a fall featly. The adults use wooden wasters or metal swords; kids use bamboo shenais, especially modified with the addition of pommels and quillions.
The activity that lights up their eyes is free-play, when two students don fencing masks and gloves and face off, trying to apply all they’ve learned to score hits off each other. Back and forth and around they weave, exchanging flurries of blows, until eventually, at Sir Steaphen’s command, they disengage, pull off their masks, and shake hands: sweaty, red-faced, breathless, grinning.
Techniques were painstakingly translated from manuals first written in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, including the Flos Duellatorum, written in 1409 by Fiore Del Libre, then literally hammered out by and on the bodies of Sir Steaphen’s students at DEMAS.
Sir Steaphen’s most recent endeavor is a book, published this year and carried at BookSmart and Barnes and Noble, and on Amazon: “The Beginner’s Guide to the Long Sword.” He wrote the book in six months in 2004 while working at a computer company. Then he sat on the book for four years, paralyzed at the thought of sending it to a publisher. In the meantime, he learned so much more about guards and movement that he completely rewrote those sections. Finally he sent the book out to publishers, and his third submission, to Black Belt Books, hit paydirt.
The Guide is written in three parts. In part one, the reader may lounge about in his pajamas and read the theory. In part two, he must pick up a long object, find a partner and go out to the driveway to practice the rudiments. And part three suggests strongly that the student find a group with which to continue his study.
Steaphen will be signing books at Gilroy Barnes and Noble on Sunday, July 19. For details, contact Sir Steaphen at
da********@********ay.com, or www.knight2day.com. Tell him the
mother of Pigtails of Doom sent you.
