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blog — December 03

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