'I will be just as good or better than these fencers'
KYLE — You might know him from around town — the friendly Centerfield Bar & Grill and Railhouse bouncer who stands a staggering 6 feet 8 inches tall. He also plans to be an Olympian.
For Allan Brown, being so fresh to the fencing game isn’t intimidating. In fact, it’s the opposite — it fuels his passion. Brown officially picked up the fencing blade less than a year ago, but already has goals to make it to the 2024 Olympics in Paris.
“[Fencing] is something extremely new that I've never done,” Brown said. “When I was in college, I was always curious about it. I just never paid attention to it too much because I was so focused on playing football and baseball. I was just dead set on that and I never really took the time to be, like, ‘You know what, let me see what this is about.’ And I didn’t want to talk about that [to] my teammates because they would’ve been like, ‘What are you talking about fencing for? We got a game to play.’”
Brown’s interest in fencing piqued when he was living in New York back in 2016. There, his friend Tico Flores, who taught fencing classes, convinced Brown that he would be great at the sport — “You would dominate the fencing world,” he told him.
Photo by Brittany Anderson
Brown, left, scores a point while practicing with fencing master Gary van der Wege, right. While van der Wege does not coach Brown, he has been a good source of tips, tricks and advice for him.[/caption]
It would still be a few years before he would heed Flores' advice and start training and competing as a fencer. A native Texan, Brown moved to Kyle in 2020 during the pandemic. However, he also holds dual Panamanian citizenship, having been raised as a child in Panama, which would later end up working in his favor as a fencer.
An ambidextrous epee fencer, Brown trains weekly with his Buda-based coach Derek White. He also practices at Texas Fencing Academy in north Austin, where academy owner Ray Parker helped Brown learn the rules of fencing and get him his equipment. Along with practicing at home, he practices once a week in the evenings at a local church in Kyle where fencing master Gary van der Wege teaches youth classes and often gives Brown fencing advice.
All of the hours poured into the sport are for Brown to accomplish one big goal: he’s currently aiming to make it onto the Panama Olympic fencing team. In order to qualify for an Olympic team, fencers must accumulate a certain amount of points. Competing in tournaments helps bring in points and Brown recently had the chance to compete in Panama in late March. There, he said the competition was “pretty fierce.”
“I'm not gonna say it wasn't the warmest welcome [but] I noticed that the Panama team and guys that are on the Olympic team all practice together. They do everything together, they train together, they’re pretty much a family,” Brown said. “And then to have me, this Panamanian that's an outsider come in and be like, ‘Yeah, I'm trying to be on the team.’ They're like, ‘Who are you? We’ve never heard anything about you.’ It was a little tough, but at the end everyone kind of opened their arms to me and was more welcoming. A couple of guys apologized for it.”
There were around 30 fencers at the competition, with Brown being the only Panamanian-American in attendance. He still managed to make it into the top eight, or the “Elite Eight” as they call them.
“The tournament itself was pretty tough. It was really tough competition,” Brown said. “I've noticed that Panamanians do talk a lot of trash. But in the end, it really didn't faze me because, you know, I was out there winning. I lost my first bout and then after that I won seven in a row … It got me a good amount of points.”
Brown said that there were at least two fencers there who had already competed in the Olympics, but knowing this didn’t throw him off.
“I already knew [when] I was coming in that I had to show up. I knew I had to bring it,” he said. “I didn't come, I'm guessing 3,000 miles, just to get last place. I could have done that here.”
“I've learned that fencing is like human chess. Your move could be somebody else's point. So you have to be very precise and choose when you decide to stick your blade out wisely,” he later added. “It's a lot of thinking. People are like, ‘Oh, you’re just standing still for a while.’ I'm like, no, you're really trying to find your opponent's weakness. Their go-to moves. What they're trying to do to bait you. What ‘kink’ they have so you can try to get points. It's not just about being the tallest or the biggest, or having the longest reach, because I've lost to guys that are shorter. They’re just very precise with their blades.”
The trip to Panama also brought him something more than Olympic points: the ability to go back to his roots. Brown left the country when he was 11 or 12 in the midst of Miguel Noriega’s reign and deployment of U.S. troops to the Panama Canal where his father had been working.
“At first I had butterflies and jitters because I haven't been back in Panama in 30 years,” Brown said. “It was good to be back, but it was just so different. It was totally different. It wasn't like what it was when I was a kid. But I mean, the people were so friendly and it's such a beautiful place … It was kind of like a breath of fresh air and a monkey off my back because my family had been telling me to come down, and I was just so busy and I never had the chance or opportunity to make it down there. I had to sit down for a second and tell myself, you know, ‘I'm so sorry that it took me 30 years to come back to a place that I grew up in.’”
Like his experience in Panama, Brown’s fencing journey as a whole has been a humbling one.
“I started off at the bottom of the barrel,” Brown said. “I guess that's what also pushed me to become one of the best fencers because when I went to nationals, I was ranked dead last coming into competition. I guess it triggered something. I was like, ‘You know what, I'm never going to be dead last again in any competition’ … And it made me so mad because I've never been last in anything athletically. It literally triggered something for me to work hard and to really sit down, watch my opponents and really understand the game. I ended up doing really well in nationals after that and I told myself, ‘No more. I will be just as good or better than these fencers.’”
Over the next several months, there are upcoming competitions in countries like Colombia, Peru and Italy that could help him score points, which he said he needs to try and attend.
“At this point I’ll be competing against fencers that are current or former Olympians,” he said. “I just need to be in the mix.”
Although, such a journey is not a cheap one. While Brown has also traveled to competitions in and out of state, it's all been a stark reminder that this intense — and expensive — road to the Olympics would not be possible without the power of the community.
“I pretty much finance all this by myself but I've also had a couple people — well not even a couple people, just literally the Kyle community, that has found out from word of mouth that I'm fencing and I live in the Kyle area and trying to make the Olympics [team] and they want to donate or sponsor,” Brown said. “It’s been unreal … I'm still kind of in disbelief that people have wanted to contribute somehow … This entire community of people that I see, that I work with, has been extremely supportive of this journey that I'm taking.”
