The First Lexington Lake Regatta, 1973 (part one of two)

One thing that always impressed me about Los Gatos residents was their great interest in sports.  I suppose my lifelong dis-interest in sports might be a result of hearing groans when we picked teams as kids.  When the teams were picked and I was last guy waiting, who wasn’t picked, the team that was stuck with me, the short runt, would all groan and turn away; I was their rotten luck.  Admit it guys, that’s what you did when you were in elementary school. 

Anyway, even when my cousin was going to school here in Los Gatos, everyone seemed very involved with different sports activities.  In Almaden, we rode bikes to get from one place to another.  In Los Gatos, bicycling was a sport; even for adults, not just a means of transportation.  I never saw an adult farmer ride a bike.  People in LG would run around the roads just to stay in good shape; that was incomprehensible to me.  If you were the least bit out of shape, get your ass outside and do some farm work, there was always something to get done and never enough time to do it.  People would get strung up for wasting that much energy on non-productive running.  There was a big difference between Los Gatos and Almaden regarding sports, and, I ‘spose, a few other things as well. 

In September of 1966, I was registering at San Jose State for my first semester of college.  This was when the Viet Nam war was really starting to build up.  It was important for all of us male students to get our student deferment for the Selective Service, the military draft board, if we didn’t want to get sent to the meat grinder, as some called it back then.  We needed fifteen and a half units or we wouldn’t get the deferment.  In these pre-computer days, registering at San Jose State (SJS) meant you had a hellish couple of days running from the registration tables in one department headquarters to another, all the way across campus, to hand register for classes.  It was always a frantic process.  Especially when you were doing it for the first time. 

I had diligently got all the fifteen units I wanted for my academic classes but I had left the physical education class, the half unit, until last as I had no interest in sports.  Well, dumb me, by the time I went to the big gym where all the sports registration took place, there were no classes left except a few sorry ones.  Eventually, I squeaked into a co-ed “introduction to fencing” class.  It was so humiliating, a femmy woman’s introduction to dance class; that’s how I saw it.  But, I got the half credit.  I could put up with it for a semester. 

To my surprise, and everyone else’s, I was really good at fencing, right from the start.  I had the speed, the accuracy and the “wind,” the endurance to throw my 160 pound body around for a half hour  at a time and stay on my feet.  And, it wasn’t a team sport, no one to moan, I was my own team.  In fact, I had a very big advantage, I discovered; I’m left-handed.  More than 90% of the other fencers were right handers and when we lefties stepped onto the mat, our masked opponents, tall or short, would always say exactly the same thing, “Oh, shit!”

I would be fencing still today were it not for some very screwed up knees.  And though people think the “sword” is the really important thing in fencing, without legs, you are not a fencer, just dead weight and an easy target.  Foot work and mobility are the first things you learn in fencing, not blade work.

I met all sorts of fencers in Los Gatos, old and new.  Here again, unlike Almaden, this ​town was not just a center for artists but for a lot of different specialty sports.  Where I grew up, ​everyone played and listened to baseball, that was about it.  The first specialty sport, besides fencing, I was introduced to was rowing, they called it “crew” on those super long, super skinny boats that carry one, two or a half-dozen rowers pulling on just one oar (obviously not including the single seaters).   Jim Farwell, the owner of Mountain Charley’s, was very, very big on rowing.  He coached the women’s crew team at the University of Santa Clara.   Jim may have been real big on the mechanics of the human body but that’s about as far as his mechanical abilities went.  When it came to mechanical stuff, Farwell would rely on me or one of his more mechanically inclined friends to deal with things.  I spent a good deal of time up at the boat house on top of the Lexington dam, fixing this, tweaking that.  He’d often take me down to the university and show me how they trained there on special, sometimes computerized equipment.  And too, he’d hook me up with the fencing coaches there.  It was all quite interesting but it was time I should have been working, probably.  Unlike Farwell, I wasn’t a rich guy. 

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