Harnessing Anger: The Inner Discipline of Athletic Excellence

Pete Westbrook's story takes him from urban poverty and a broken family to the highest reaches of sports excellence as 13-time U.S. National sabre champion, 6-time Olympian, and a man who reclaimed the aristocratic art of fencing as a sport available to one and all. As Westbrook tells it, he was able to make this journey because he was blessed with riches: a caring mother, a tough coach, and a martial art requiring skills that could be applied off the mat as well as on. Although traditionally fencing has been the domain of white European aristocrats, a number of history's great fencers have been black, like Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, who became one of Napoleon's generals (and was the father of Alexandre Dumas, author of The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo). Pete Westbrook has given the history of fencing an American twist. After taking up the sport at the urging of his mother when he was fourteen years old, he learned its psychological discipline and flexible strategy, two keys to fencing that brought him not only national and world championships, but spiritual peace and self-knowledge as well.

Publishers Weekly

Born in 1952 to an African American father and Japanese mother, Westbrook has had plenty to be angry about, starting with his earliest years in the housing project where he saw his father physically abuse his mother. Westbrook's mother finally kicked her husband out of her house and, for the most part, out of Westbrook's life, when he was four. She eventually moved Westbrook and his sister out of the projects, and sent her son to a "predominantly white, all-boys Catholic school" with "a great athletic program" that included fencing. Westbrook says his mother knew that fencing and kendo (samurai-style fencing) attracted people who "tended to be educated, disciplined, and refined. And those were the kind of people she wanted me to know." Westbrook excelled at fencing in high school, and was offered a full scholarship to NYU, where he discovered group therapy, which was like "a second college degree." In 1974, he won his first of 12 national sabre-fencing championships. Written in a simple, honest and direct voice, this is an inspiring memoir about being poor and biracial; learning confidence and self-control; understanding the cultural differences within our country; and mastering the psychology and politics of competition and winning. Westbrook is living proof of the tremendous difference that harnessing anger through the discipline of sport can make. Photos not seen by PW. (May)