Fencing, at first glance, is a simple sport. It’s you against one opponent. The first one to score five touches wins.
Even the best fencers around find themselves down 0-4 sometimes. Finding your way back from that is what proves their mettle.
Doc Rolando has faced 0-4 many times – and not only while he’s fencing. Doc has run the Masters Fencing Academy since 2008, and he attributes his success, both in fencing and in life, to simply having the bigger heart. It’s a lesson in persistence, in never giving up, no matter what’s in front of you.
The Masters program is renowned in the area’s fencing universe as the go-to place that will take your skills to the next level. Even if you just want to try it out without joining your school’s team – or if you’re an adult who’s always wanted to try it but never had the opportunity, it’s the place to see what fencing is all about.
“We’ve had kids come in and you could just tell by the way the walk in, we’d say ‘boy, this kid’s going to take some work.’ Then we work with him for a bit and all of a sudden something clicks and they rise to the occasion and they become this Uber fencer and actually a pretty good athlete - but don't ask them to throw a football don't ask them to dribble a basketball, that's not happening - but fencing enabled them to just rediscover themselves and realize that they don't have to be super athletic in order to be super successful. You can see it in their poise, the way they carry themselves.”
It's the commitment to his students and changing their lives in multiple ways that pushes Doc forward. It’s what helped get him through the toughest opponent he’s ever faced: prostate cancer.
“I noticed I was just feeling ‘off’ and sluggish back around October of 2022. Then I got a shocking diagnosis that it was prostate cancer,” he says. If you know Doc, who’s as high-energy and as physically fit as anyone you’ll ever meet, this could’ve upended his entire world.
But it didn’t.
Cancer was like any opponent. It was a competition. He was going to face it head on, take whatever it was going to give him, and fight back. This diagnosis wasn’t going to change his resolve, nor his commitment to his program.
“Most of the kids didn’t even know about it. My coaches did. They figured I’d take time away to fight this. But I wouldn’t. I was going to keep going as long as I could go. And I never missed time. It kept me going. You never take that for granted. When some of the kids would find out later what I was dealing with and still giving them lessons, they told me that they were ticked off that I’d ‘destroyed them’ while bouting during our lessons, but after they found out about it, it gave them the drive to rise up and compete even harder when they had their own bouts later.”
45 days of radiation treatments are hard to endure. It saps absolutely everything from you. After walking twenty feet to his kitchen he said felt like he’d run a marathon. Yet he never stopped coaching, never stopped training with his students. Since he’d been in such good shape, he joked with his coaches that now he knew how an average human feels. Yet he went through it all undaunted, determined to live through it the same way he’d done everything, by persevering. He’d put his faith in God’s hands, that there was a reason to fight through this and lead by example.
Not everyone would go through the treatments he did without anesthesia, but that’s just Doc. He just didn’t want to lose any more time to this than was necessary. He wanted to be back out there, teaching late into the night without having to “come out of it.”
“As a fencer, I have blades coming at me all the time. You get numb to it,” Doc points out. “The doctor would say ‘are you sure…?’ Yep, I’m sure. Although there was one procedure that I went through I would’ve been willing to give up state secrets if they’d asked.”
But the important thing that Doc wants people to know – you can get through it. Fencing gives him his motivation to persevere, but everyone has their thing that will keep them going. It’s the positive mindset he subscribes to that he uses when he speaks with others about getting from diagnosis to living the rest of your life.
After going through all of this, he’s very open to talk with others who find themselves in similar situations. “I have conversations all the time with men in their 50s and 60s that are struggling with how to treat it, who to go to, and all that stuff. I might know them as a friend of a friend of a friend who’d said ‘Oh, I know this guy who's going through it and maybe you should talk to him,’ and all of a sudden I get a call and we get to know each other and you know it puts their mind at ease when I get off the phone. I guide them through what I went through and how it’s beatable, especially if you have the right mindset.”
That right mindset has led him through prostate cancer treatments, reasonably no worse for wear. He’s fine now, for the most part, but as he says, you’re always hyper aware of what your body is going through and what could be next. It’s not a tooth that’s pulled and the issue goes away while you’re being treated. That’s why positive perseverance is key. Keep fighting that opponent, no matter what the score is. 0-4 is just an opportunity to show what a bigger heart is capable of overcoming.
Masters Fencing Academy holds its training sessions at Our Lady of Consolation Church, 1799 Hamburg Turnpike in Wayne. For information about the program, go to mastersfencing.com. If you’d like to talk to Doc about surviving prostate cancer, he can be reached at arolando@optonline.net. If anyone can help you through that, it’s Doc.
All I thought was ... "If cancer is a fencer I'm kicking its butt."
I'll talk with anyone going through something like this. If it helps just one person, the question of "why did this happen to me?" has been answered.