USC Fencing Club - Early History

Early History

The beginnings of the USC Fencing Team date back before its creation in 1926 to the initiation of Rufus B. von KleinSmid as the fifth President of the University of Southern California in 1921. Von KleinSmid was, among his many talents, a skilled fencer and an enthusiastic promoter of the sport. He received instruction on a regular basis at the Los Angeles Athletic Club (L.A.A.C.), an institution which is still in existence in its original location downtown. The fencing instructor at the Athletic Club was a Belgian fencing master by the name of Henry J. Uyttenhove. Shortly after von KleinSmid took office, fencing was first offered as a "Sophomore Sport," essentially a recreational sport separate from the varsity athletics of the university. None other than Henry Uyttenhove became the first fencing instructor at USC.

In 1926, a few years into the fencing program, the team grew out of its sophomore sports standing as "the department was reorganized by Coach Uyttenhove, and with the material at hand he put out an honest to goodness fencing team." After only being in existence for one year, the USC Fencing Team placed second in the Pacific Coast Intercollegiate matches of the American Fencers League of America (the precursor to the USFA), held in San Francisco.

With a flood of interest in fencing by the students of USC, women's fencing was first offered as an intramural sport in 1927 under the tutelage of Uyttenhove, and already in 1928, several of the women were placing in the finals of the Pacific Coast Championship Tournament.

The USC Fencing Team would go on to become a powerhouse in Pacific Coast Intercollegiate tournaments, winning countless titles in several weapons as Uyttenhove continued to instruct his students. For example, by 1940, after fifteen years of fencing at USC, the fencing team had collected 14 Pacific Coast Intercollegiate titles.

When USC President Rufus B. von KleinSmid began training with Uyttenhove at the Los Angeles Athletic Club, he was not the only VIP to learn from the maestro. In 1920, an actor by the name of Douglas Fairbanks was engaged to star in a Hollywood motion picture, "The Mark of Zorro". Fairbanks employed Henry Uyttenhove to instruct him on the fencing arts and to train him for his movies, and soon he began taking lessons at the Athletic Club. There, he met von KleinSmid and the two became very good friends. They were often seen dueling each other and it is fair to say these earliest connections between USC and Hollywood were made on a fencing strip.

Douglas Fairbanks would go on to become the first president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. According to the Academy, "The College Affaire Committee was one of the first committees established by the Academy. It met for the first time just 13 days after the Academy's organization banquet in 1927 and that meeting's purpose was to confer with USC President Rufus von KleinSmid about the possibility of introducing appropriate motion picture courses into the university curriculum. The result of that and future meetings, as well as the friendship that existed between von KleinSmid and the Academy's first president, Douglas Fairbanks, was "Introduction to Photoplay." First offered in the spring of 1929, this lecture series course featured speakers that included Fairbanks, directors D.W. Griffith and Ernst Lubitsch, MGM Production Chief Irving Thalberg and Producer William deMille." Out of the friendship between the two swordsmen, the world-renowned USC School of Cinema-Television was born in 1929.