Lookin’ Sharp 2023

This weekend JW Pugnetti and I travelled up to Columbus for Royal Art's Fencing Club's event: Looking Sharpe 2023. During last year's event, the rules on what you could have as your off hand weapon in the dagger tournament were much looser. One guy showed up with a mop, another with a Viking shield, yet another with just a second rapier; but this year I wanted to fight with something truly unique: a Battle Spatula!

Imagine the bastard child of a small sword and a spatula. That’s what this was!

Last year I commissioned The Drunken Smithy to make the bastard child of a spatula and a side sword as a gift to Pete May for letting us run Funfecht at his house. I asked to borrow it for this tournament to test its efficacy in battle. You'll all be pleased to know it functions especially well as a parrying weapon. Moves like "Flip the pancake" and "Smash the patty" are great for locking out your opponent's weapon and delivering a "tasty" thrust. What it wasn't very effective for unfortunately was cutting or thrusting like a dagger. Because of the stiffness, I wasn't allowed to thrust people with it and because of the thinness I wasn't allowed to cut with it either unless I wanted a yellow card. Granted, I am in no way complaining about this ruling from the event organizers. For the safety of the other fighters I applaud their caution; however fighting with this self imposed limit did make it a little difficult to advance through elims, but it was totally worth it to hear what was by far the best quote of the event

"Yellow's initial thrust was parried by the spatula ..."

Here I am getting knocked out of elims. Apparently fighting against a dagger when you have a spatula isn’t a strategically adventageous move. Who could have known?

This was a close fight, but a good one!

This is where my favorite quote of the day came from: “"Yellow's initial thrust was parried by the spatula ..." Noice!

Will has beaten me a few times across a couple of different weapons. This wasn’t an exception.

Brian Stone is the owner of Two Ravens Fencing Club up in Cleveland. After he narrowly beat me in Rapier/Dagger at “As You Wish” and watched my earlier fights, he realized my most effective strategy with rapier is to look for an opening and thrust as quickly as possible. What he realized was that without my ability to follow up with a thrust from my dagger I was pretty screwed. So he picked up a buckler and fought with his rapier in his left hand and basically shut down my entire strategy! Featured above is me getting my ass handed to me in the most one sided fight of the day. This … ladies and gentlemen, is what the confluence of extreme speed, extreme skill, and a knowledge of your opponent’s options looks like! Happy as always to fall on his blade!

I also fought in the messer tournament! This was my first time trying out messer in a tournament setting which was pretty fun! It was also my first time trying out RAFA's messer ruleset and I ... am not a fan. I get that they're trying to make messer fight differently than saber by making hand shots not count towards your score to incentivize people to go for deeper targets, but making them suddenly count during sudden death in my opinion is contradictory to the core goal of the ruleset. It incentivizes two different strategies: one for the fight itself (which is to attempt to control your opponent's blade and deliver a mortal blow) and another for sudden death. To me, it's like saying "We want you to not just focus on hand shots. We know that technically your hands are far more exposed with messer than saber but ignore that and run in for a thrust/cut to the head/chest ... unless it's taking too long then sure... go ahead and hand snipe. But be quick about it, we've got an event to run!"

I will say that the irony is not lost on me that I'm claiming that the messer tournament rules are an example of sub-optimal constraints being imposed for the sake of having fun and eliciting a certain fighting style when I intentionally fought in a rapier plus tournament where I could have chosen from a host of better side arms and instead chose a spatula. It's important for clubs to have the freedom to try out new rulesets and experiment with new ideas in order to grow HEMA. I just don't think every idea is good and this ruleset could use some polishing. Still fun though!

Big shout out to Frank Zamary for hosting us and Royal Arts for hosting yet another banger of an event!