Jerry Goldstein Cadillac with Michael D'Asaro on the hood in front of Halberstadt Fencer’s Club, at the original location on Fillmore Street.
Courtesy of Greg LynchFor most athletes, getting a haircut would be a small price to pay for a trip to the Olympics. But very few athletes cared about their hair, and personal freedom, as much as Michael D’Asaro.
At one point in the 1960s, D’Asaro was perhaps the greatest living American fencer, able to defeat international opponents in all three of the sport's major disciplines (sabre, epee, and foil), an unheard-of achievement that is essentially the football equivalent of playing on offense, defense and special teams. In the fencing world, just like in basketball, everybody wanted to “be like Mike.”
When D’Asaro didn’t have a sword in his hand, he was typically holding a joint instead, indulging in everything San Francisco’s hippie revolution had to offer. He grew a mane like a hippie lion, and when the Olympic committee demanded he trim it in order to join the 1968 fencing team, Greg Lynch, director of the new documentary “Stro: The Michael D’Asaro Story” (screening online this week), says that D'Asaro wasn’t willing to conform.
“He said, ‘No, I don’t think so.’ Or he said, ‘Why don’t you go f—k yourself,’” recounts Lynch.
Michael D’Asaro fencing on the beach, and posing for a portrait in Los Angeles in the 1990s.
Courtesy of Greg LynchThe film, screening this week online through the Ojai Film Festival and Mescalito Biopic Fest, features D’Asaro’s former teammates, students and rivals speaking about his monumental influence on the sport, from his professional career to his latter days as a coach.
Before D’Asaro found himself in San Francisco, his biggest influence came from Hungary. Already an exceptional collegiate talent, D’Asaro came into his own after he began training in 1958 with Hungarian maestro Csaba Elthes (“the dean of American sabre fencing”) from whom he learned a smoother, more fluid style that disrupted the typical rhythm of a match. It led him to big wins, including a fourth place finish on Team USA in the 1960 Rome Olympics, plus a gold medal at the national championships in 1962. Although he was still unknown in the U.S., he became a minor celebrity in Europe, where fencing was a popular enough sport that there were TV networks dedicated to it.
“They thought of him as the Jesus of fencing,” says Lynch. “They’d go after him for autographs. I think he had security since he was so popular.”
At that point in his career, D’Asaro had yet to grow out his signature long hair but had already started indulging in substances, most notably during a match in Warsaw. Due to a horrible hangover, he was seeing double, but when his coach told him to aim for the opponent in the middle, he won the match.
In the documentary, Andy Shaw from the Museum of American Fencing expressed the level of his exceptional talent. “Michael can be asleep and drunk, and still beat anyone in the world,” says Shaw.
Classic lunge by Michael D’Asaro on the left. A textbook lunge.
Courtesy of Greg LynchAfter a few years competing on the international circuit and a brief period working in the advertising industry, D’Asaro made his way to San Francisco. He qualified for the 1968 Olympics, but after refusing to cut his hair, he temporarily dropped out of the fencing circuit, opting instead to spend his days listening to concerts at Hippie Hill in Golden Gate Park and working at the corner of Haight Street and Ashbury selling copies of the Berkeley Barb newspaper for a quarter.
When an instructor at the Halberstadt Fencing Club on Fillmore Street learned that D’Asaro lived in San Francisco, he was recruited as a coach. It began a second phase of his career, in which he was one of the most in-demand and unconventional fencing instructors in the world and returned to professional competitions. He became known as "Stro," short for maestro, the traditional term of fencing coach. During his years in San Francisco, he was a cross between a tyrant and spiritual advisor, assigning rigorous training exercises but also handing out bags of mushrooms for students to experiment with outside the gym.
“Michael was a very spiritual guy. As people in the film point out, he was their guru, and he was charting paths to new realms. And the drugs unlocked a lot of things to help him get to those places …” says Lynch. “To make a bad joke, it was a two-edged sword for Michael. It helped him, he enjoyed it, but it was kind of his downfall as well.”
Michael D’Asaro standing in the center in the back at the Halberstadt fencing club. Three-time national foil champion Harriet King is demonstrating the lunge. She won two championships under D’Asaro’s coaching.
Courtesy of Greg LynchAlthough D'Asaro's methods were strange, they worked, with several of his students earning places on the U.S. Olympic Team. After leaving Halberstadt, he went on to teach at San Jose State, where he led the women’s fencing program with the same rigor. He then married one of his students and retreated to a remote home in the woods in Oregon, but his spirit never really left San Francisco, and he had trouble settling into a calmer life, eventually leading to the end of his marriage. He struggled with colon cancer and a brain tumor that affected his coordination to the point where he could barely walk, but he remained teaching until his final days.
In December of 2000, he died of a brain aneurysm, but his legacy has been cemented in the fencing world as one of the greatest to ever hold a sabre.
