Peter Westbrook
Peter Westbrook was born on this date in 1952. He is a Black Japanese Sabre Fencer, teacher, and administrator.
Westbrook grew up in the Hayes Homes housing project in Newark, New Jersey. His father was Black, and his mother was Japanese. His mother, Mariko, was the daughter of a Japanese bureaucrat and had defied her father by marrying a Black GI, leaving her country forever. As a child, his father beat his mother often until one day, his father left.
Westbrook’s mother always wanted a good life for her son; around fourteen, she had structured his break out to a better life. She told him stories about her ancestry, and some laced this heritage with modern enticement. "My mother could trace her lineage back through many samurai. "This was a source of great honor, great pride,” Westbrook said. She also offered him five dollars for each fencing lesson her son would take.
Westbrook took his first lesson at Essex Catholic High School from a fencer named Samuel D'Ambola. Westbrook also boxed in the Police Athletic League and the streets. But fencing’s intellectual encounter was attractive, and Westbrook mastered the art of strategizing several moves ahead of his opponents. Meanwhile, his mother worked as a domestic at the local Catholic grammar school so that he could study at Essex and keep fencing. He became one of the best high school fencers in New Jersey, and New York University offered him a full athletic scholarship.
Westbrook was 22 when he first appeared at the Olympic Games in Montreal in 1976 as the team's youngest fencer. He also won gold medals at the Pan American Games in 1983 and 1995, silver medals in 1979 and 1987, and a bronze medal in 1975. A Six-Time Member of the U.S. Olympic Team, Westbrook was the 1984 Olympic Games Bronze Medalist in Men's Sabre and a 13-time U.S. National Men's Sabre Champion.
In 1991, he created the Peter Westbrook Foundation. Westbrook was inducted into the New York University Athletics Hall of Fame in 1985, the USFA Hall of Fame in 1996, the Sports Hall of Fame of New Jersey in 2002, and the International Sports Hall of Fame in 2021. Peter Westbrook died from liver cancer at a hospital in Manhattan, New York, on November 29, 2024, at the age of 72.
