I couldn’t believe it. All the other kids talked about qualifying for the Junior Olympics like it was the pinnacle of their fencing career. And here I was about to make it to that pinnacle when I’d only been fencing saber for three months. It was crazy. I left the coach’s office and went back to practice in a daze. I couldn’t wait to tell my parents. Work hard, see results had always been their formula, so I was happy to report that they hadn’t wasted their time or money on me.
One month later, my mother was driving me to Cleveland, Ohio, for my first ever Junior Olympics. With Coach Mustilli cheering me on, I had cinched my spot at the last qualifying event in January, finishing in fifth place. Now I was on my way to compete against the best youth fencers in the country at the biggest tournament I had ever been to. I was so excited I could barely contain myself. It felt like just yesterday I was trying to convince Nicole and Ana to try out for the team with me, and now, here I was en route to the biggest national competition for fencers ages twenty and under. Coach Mustilli was going to meet us at the competition because there were at least ten other fencers from my school team who had also qualified.
“I’m nervous, Mommy,” I said somewhere between western Pennsylvania and Ohio.
“I know you are,” she said. “I’m nervous for you. I still can’t believe you’re going to the Olympics already.”
“First of all, Mom, it’s not the Olympics. It’s the Junior Olympics,” I said, laughing. I still had to pinch myself every time I stopped to think about how quickly all of this had gone down. But I didn’t dwell too much on that because I knew I needed to keep up my confidence, think about the future, meaning the competition coming up. Coach Mustilli had warned me that there were going to be the best of the best at this competition and that since I was still so new at the sport I shouldn’t expect to walk away with any medals, but I was feeling pretty confident. At least I was until I walked into the convention center on the first day of competition.
I looked around the room overwhelmed by the sea of white before me. I was used to going to smaller, local competitions and being the only Black fencer in the room, or the only Muslim fencer in the room, but there were thousands of fencers in the convention center that day, almost all of them white, it seemed, dressed in all white. Even the majority of the referees were white. The feeling of otherness settled upon me, and I couldn’t help but wonder if people were staring at me, wondering what I was doing there in their world. “Snap out of it, Ibtihaj,” I said to myself. “Don’t psych yourself out.” I had to remind myself that once my mask was on, I had the opportunity to show everyone how good an athlete I was, and if people were surprised to see someone who looked like me on the strip, let them be surprised and then amazed when they saw that I could hold my own. I just had to stay focused on my goal and ignore any haters—both real and imagined—that I might perceive.
Once I found out who was in my first pool and what strip I’d be fencing on for my first bout, I found a seat and sat down and tried to calm my nerves. I had twin urges to throw up and jet as far from Ohio as my legs would take me. My mom was standing a few yards away with some of the other parents from our school. Coach Mustilli was running all over advising all of his athletes attending this competition.
Because there were so many fencers competing at the Junior Olympics, the tournament was more than four days long. As with every other tournament I’d been to, we started with the pool rounds and then progressed to direct elimination bouts. The first round of competition was to whittle those few hundred plus fencers down to a manageable sixty-four when the elimination bouts began. For my first Junior Olympics, I had a goal for myself to make it into the top sixteen. For my last few tournaments in New Jersey, I’d been finishing in the top sixteen consistently and sometimes I was even finishing in the top ten. I didn’t think my expectations were too high.
But they were.
I didn’t even make it out of the first round of pools. Basically, I was finished with the whole competition before things even really got started. I fenced my first six bouts and lost five, so I didn’t even advance to the direct elimination bouts. It was embarrassing and humiliating. I couldn’t even hold the tears in. They started to fall before I took my mask off. I felt so demoralized. I practically ran to find my mother, who was now, thankfully, sitting away from the other parents. I threw myself into her arms and bawled.
She was talking to me, trying to console me, but I couldn’t hear her over my own inner monologue beating myself up for doing so badly. Finally, I sat there with my face in my palms, covered in tears, replaying each bout and rehashing where I could have done things differently.
“Ibtihaj, you tried your hardest,” my mom kept saying. “There’s no reason to beat yourself up like this.”
“You drove me all the way here…” I cried, unable to finish my sentence. “I have been practicing. A lot.”
My mother pulled my head up and forced me to look at her. “Ibtihaj, you’ve been practicing for only a couple months with saber. Knowing you, if you just keep working at it, you’ll do better next time.”
“There might not even be a next time considering how badly I fenced today,” I said, which brought a fresh batch of tears to my eyes. Was my fencing career over? I wondered.
“Ibtihaj, you don’t have to be a has-been already,” Mom consoled me. “I just think you might need some extra help.”
I wiped my eyes and looked at my mom. “You think I should get a fencing tutor?” I asked.
Mom shrugged. “I don’t know what you would call it. I’m just saying when you need to get better at something, you need to find someone who can help you. Clearly your father and I can’t help you be a better fencer, but we could probably find someone who can help,” she said, always the one to find a solution.
The idea didn’t sound too bad, but I couldn’t even think about my fencing future after my dreadful performance out there. I just wanted to melt into the floor and disappear. I let out a deep sigh.
“Do you want to get back on the road early and call it a day?” Mom asked.
Part of me wanted to say yes. I wanted to put as much distance as possible between me and this soul-crushing experience. I didn’t want to talk to my teammates and have to tell them that I’d done so poorly that I didn’t even make it out of the first pool. But I also didn’t want to leave right away. I’d never been to a Junior Olympics, and I wanted to see the best of the best go at each other. I wanted to see what the best junior fencers looked like on the strip. I also didn’t want my mom to think she’d wasted her time bringing me all the way out here.
“Let’s stay a little while longer,” I said softly, while wiping my nose on a tissue. “Is that okay?”
“It’s fine,” my mother answered, and we both settled into our seats and tried to find a bout to focus our attention on. I was scanning the floor when a flash of color caught my eye. I don’t know why I hadn’t seen them before, but on the far end of the convention center there was a group of African-American kids in matching uniforms. I followed their line of black-and-yellow sweatshirts to find that they were cheering on a Black fencer I hadn’t noticed before. They were screaming and yelling with such passion, I knew they had to be a team of some sort. Usually the only sounds you heard at fencing tournaments were the primal grunts and yells from the fencers themselves on the strip. Fencing fans tend to be a subdued crowd, but this group of fans was anything but subdued. There were only a handful of them, but they had enough energy to fill the entire hall.
I nudged my mother. “Look over there at all those Black people. Who do you think they are?”
My mom turned her head to look. “I don’t know, but it’s nice to see them here. I was starting to think we were the only ones here.”
“Well, we are in Ohio,” I reminded her.
“Yeah, but this is a national competition. There should be some diversity up in here.”
I shrugged my shoulders. My mom was right, but I didn’t want to have a conversation
about diversity in fencing at that moment. I just wanted to watch the competition.
CHAPTER 6
I just never give up. I fight to the end.
—SERENA WILLIAMS
We heard about this place in New York City specifically for Black fencers. Since I’d started fencing, other parents had casually mentioned it to my mom when she was in the stands at my competitions, thinking she might be interested in checking it out since we were Black. After my disappointing performance at the Junior Olympics, my mother decided it was the perfect time to try to find some more information about this club people kept talking about. We both thought this might be the place where I could get some extra help and training.
With only a little bit of digging, my mother discovered the name of the organization was the Peter Westbrook Foundation. Through sheer coincidence, around the same time Mom was doing her research on the club, a documentary film about Peter Westbrook himself was premiering in New York City. My mother took that as a good sign and decided to take Faizah and me into the city to go see the film.
Peter Westbrook’s story was a fencing fairy tale that unfolded right in our backyard of Newark, New Jersey. The child of a Japanese mother and an African-American father, Peter and his younger sister were raised by his mother alone in a housing project in Newark during the 1950s and ’60s. As a child of mixed race heritage and during a time when race relations were tense due to the burgeoning civil rights movement, Peter struggled with his racial identity, and his mother worried that without a father figure in his life, he would turn to the streets for answers. In Japan, his mother’s paternal heritage included a long line of men of the sword—samurai—and these men held an honorable role in society. Peter’s mother wanted the same for her son and thought fencing could provide a similar sense of honor and pride. More importantly, she felt it would provide an outlet for his energy and a safe space from the Newark streets. Once Peter’s mom found out there was a fencing team at his high school, she begged her son to try out for the team. As a high school freshman, Peter had already discovered the importance of the street hustle, so legend has it that he struck a deal with his mother. He agreed to try fencing if his mother paid him five dollars. His mother agreed, so Peter went to the team practice after school. Secretly Peter enjoyed the sport, but he didn’t tell his mom that. Instead he told her he wasn’t yet convinced. She offered him another five dollars if he went back, and he built a small bankroll until he couldn’t deny he had found a true passion. As a saber fencer, Peter excelled on his high school’s fencing team and was recruited with a fencing scholarship to attend New York University, one of the best collegiate fencing schools in the country.
Peter’s stardom only continued to soar from there. In his first year in college, he won the NCAA title for a saber fencer. By the time he was a college senior, he had become the national champion, an honor he would repeat twelve more times over the course of his career. In 1976, he attended his first Olympics. By his retirement from competitive fencing, he had been to five Olympic competitions, winning a bronze individual medal in 1984. During his last Olympics, in 1992, he was selected to carry the torch for Team USA. It wasn’t just his success as a fencer that made Peter Westbrook so remarkable, though; it was also the fact that he came from such humble beginnings and still managed to dominate a sport that had previously been reserved for the white and wealthy. He battled opponents on the strip and was forced to fight racism and classism in order to claim his spot among the annals of fencing greats, which he did on his own terms. Peter claimed the title of being the first ever African-American to win a national gold medal in saber fencing.
Once he retired from competition, Peter Westbrook didn’t hang up his saber. Knowing how fencing had saved him from a life of dead ends, he decided he wanted to help other young kids without a lot of advantages. At the urging of a friend, Peter created the Peter Westbrook Foundation in 1991 in midtown Manhattan. The idea was to use fencing to not only teach a remarkable full-body sport, but also to teach life skills to underserved children from the New York City area. What started as a small program for fewer than a dozen kids ballooned into a powerhouse operation serving more than 250 kids from the community, plus an elite athletic program created to train young athletes with potential to fence on the national and international circuit. Pretty soon, the Peter Westbrook Foundation had developed an international reputation as the place where good fencers of color go to become great.
When the film was over, I had tears in my eyes. Our stories were similar. We were both born in Newark. We were both rarities in fencing—Peter for his race and me because I wore hijab. Peter had reached a level of success I could only dream about at the time, but I still felt an instant kinship with this bald-headed, brown-skinned, petite, wiry fencing elder. There was a reception after the film, and we had a chance to meet Peter and some of his coaches. I was so nervous I didn’t know what to say when it was our turn to shake his hand. Luckily my mother didn’t have the same problem. She knew exactly what to say. She told Peter that I was a saber fencer, that I attended Columbia High School, and I was looking for a way to improve my game. My mom may have been unsure of the differences between saber and épée, but she knew how to help her children get ahead. And sure enough, Peter told my mom to bring me to the foundation on any Saturday morning, and they’d be happy to see what I could do.
Mom and I took the train into New York City’s Penn Station on an unseasonably cool day in May. It was toward the end of my junior year of high school. We then walked down to 28th Street and Seventh Avenue. The Peter Westbrook Foundation was housed on the second floor of a nondescript building not too far from the Fashion Institute of Technology. The foundation shared the space with the New York Fencers Club where elite athletes from around the city also practice. We took the elevator up and entered into a huge space dominated by hues of blue. Bright blue walls and pillars extended down the floor. The smell of sweat and metal hit us as soon as we entered. The sound of fencing blades clashing and loud chatter filled the room. Mom and I paused in amazement as we entered the space. This was the largest fencing club I’d ever been in, and almost everyone there was some shade of brown. And there were a lot of people. Dozens of little brown kids were getting fencing lessons from coaches who were also brown. There were some white, Latino, and Asian kids on the floor as well, but the overwhelming majority of students seemed to be African American. My mother and I stood there for a moment taking it all in. We turned to each other at the same time and grinned.
“Can you believe this?” I whispered to my mom.
Seeing all of those Black people in the room was such a contrast to what we were used to seeing in the world of fencing. I felt like a five-year-old at Disneyland. Everything around me seemed like a dream. Fencers that looked like me. Coaches that looked like me. I could feel the tension in my shoulders release as an immediate sense of belonging settled over me. To walk into a room full of fencers and not feel like the odd one out, to not feel eyes surveying my body, pausing at my hijab, wondering if my race or religion would prove an impediment to my success on the strip, felt like freedom.
“I know,” my mom whispered back. “This is going to be great, Ibtihaj,” she said squeezing my arm. “I can just feel it.”
I recognized some of the Olympic fencers I’d seen in documentaries and videos we’d watched during practice. And they were standing only ten feet away from me. Coming from Columbia High School where we were always state champions, suddenly I felt a cold dose of reality hit me. These were the real champions.
“You must be Ms. Ibtihaj Muhammad,” a man said as he walked over to us from the center of the floor. “Welcome to the Peter Westbrook Foundation. My name is Jerry.”
My mother stepped forward to make the introductions.
“Hello, Jerry, I’m Ibtihaj’s mother. We’re here to get Ibtihaj some extra training, and we’ve heard great things about your program here.”
“Thank you,” Jerry said. “And we’ve heard some go
od things about you, Ms. Muhammad,” he said, looking at me. “Your coach, Frank Mustilli, goes way back with Peter, and he said we should check you out. So, come on in, Ibtihaj,” he said. “Mom, you can have a seat,” he added, gesturing toward a row of folding chairs near the door, but within perfect view of all the action.
“Thank you,” I said as I followed him across the floor. I wondered what Coach Mustilli had said about me.
Jerry instructed me to get changed, pointing out the girls’ locker rooms, and then told me to meet him back outside. I went into the locker room and came back out in my full fencing kit, holding my mask in one hand, my saber in the other. My parents had bought me my own fencing equipment after my first year on the team. When I switched weapons, they also had to buy me a saber lamé—the special Kevlar jacket all saber fencers are required to wear—which ran another $150. A near seven-hundred-dollar investment wasn’t a small sacrifice in our home, so I wore it with pride, like armor. In my uniform, I was transformed into a warrior, and I was intent on showing everyone at the Peter Westbrook Foundation what I could do.
“Come on over here,” Jerry said, beckoning me over to an empty strip. After a quick warm-up, another girl who appeared to be my age and height trotted over. “This is Angela,” Jerry said. “We’re going to have you fence with her and see how you do.”
“Okay,” I said, excited to see another Black female fencing saber. I was trying to size Angela up, wondering how good she was but also wondering if we would become friends. But first we had to fence, and only one of us could win—and that was going to be me.
Angela and I assumed our positions on opposite sides of the strip. Knees bent. Sabers up. When Jerry yelled, “Fence!” I didn’t wait for a second. I exploded out of the box toward Angela. I moved so fast she didn’t have time to react. I scored a point, finishing quickly, underneath her right arm.
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