With Tej Hazarika
To Peter Westbrook, "harnessing anger" means controlling one's fury and channeling it in a positive direction. Westbrook's success in what he once called "that strange white sport" is really just one expression of the self-discipline that has led him to beat the odds, again and again.
Peter Westbrook is listed in The Guinness Book of Records as the all-time winningest American record holder in U.S. National Sabre championships. In 1995, at the age of 43, although the average retirement age for world class tournament fencers is 34, Westbrook won two gold medals for the U.S. at the 1995 Pan American Games. In 1996, he was one of only three American sabrists chosen to compete for the gold in the Summer Olympics in Atlanta, his sixth Olympic Games, an incredible twenty-year Olympic career.
In Harnessing Anger, Westbrook tells how he came to be the first African American to win a national gold title in sabre fencing. The son of an African-American father and a Japanese mother, Peter was raised by his mother alone in poverty in a Newark ghetto. Becoming a fencer at an early age gave him the confidence and the discipline to use an ancient martial art to his advantage both in swordplay and when facing the vicissitudes of daily life in the inner city.
The autobiography of this 6-time Olympian, 13-time U.S. National champion and the only book on his amazing life, Harnessing Anger tells us how Westbrook has overcome strong adversaries on and off the fencing mat.
Collected in
Black History; Black LiberationShe taught us that we should never give up in our endeavors. She would literally tell us not to cry, to work hard, to be ethical, and to fight to achieve our goals. And if we should survive the fight, she said, we should get up and fight some more.
Remembering Peter Westbrook (April 16, 1952 – November 29, 2024)
REMEMBERING PETER WESTBROOK
(April 16, 1952 – November 29, 2024)
Pete Westbrook was that rarest of human beings, someone whose struggles in early life led him to show great compassion towards the struggles of others and who, as he aged, turned the possibilities in tens of thousands of other people’s lives, especially young people of color, into his main preoccupation.
The title of his book, Harnessing Anger, says it all. To paraphrase: We’re not perfect, we’re human, and we may have enormous reservoirs of anger in us. So harnessing anger can be the great weapon that we turn into a force for good.
Pete himself could be a two-edged sword: quick to respond, alert, always in the moment, ready to pounce or pull back, gentle and hard. And his art, in life as in fencing, was to redirect the different emotions he was capable of into positive action.
I’ve never met anyone quite like him. Six-time Olympian, the first African American and Asian American to win an Olympic medal in fencing. And in the decades since, someone who led a movement that turned what had been a white bastion into a Black and Brown one too, much as Arthur Ashe once turned tennis from an elite white sport into a Black and Brown one practiced on public courts in cities across America.
In 1991 Pete founded the Peter Westbrook Foundation, which trains hundreds of young fencers every year in New York City. Most recently, Lauren Scruggs, who works with PWF, was on the gold medal-winning American team, and took the silver in the individual foil competition, the first Black American woman to win an individual Olympic medal in fencing.
We lost a true humanitarian, a consummate sportsman and a towering figure in fencing when Peter Westbrook died last week.
—Dan Simon
One of the greatest American fencers of recent years, Peter Westbrook was a 6-time Olympian and Bronze Medalist at the 1984 Olympic Games, as well as a 6-time Pan-American Games Team Member, Gold medalist in 1983 and 1995, and a 13-time United States Champion. Currently, he is President of the Peter Westbrook Foundation and a member of the board of directors of the U.S. Olympic Committee. Westbrook has been featured countless times in print and electronic media, including appearances on The Today Show, CNN, TBS, and BET, and in the New York Times, People, the Village Voice, the New York Daily News, the Newark Star Ledger, and the Philadelphia Inquirer, among others.