Dueling in the desert

Wednesday, March 5, 2003 | 9:48 a.m.

Mel North and his cousin Pat swaggered like swashbucklers when they first dueled each other with rusty fishing poles in the back yard of North's family home on the west side of Chicago in 1935.

"We felt we were pretty good," North said, "as long as we didn't lose an eye."

When he started taking fencing lessons three years later, at the age of 13, all North lost was the rough demeanor of a street hooligan. The manners, organization and direction he learned served him well when he soon left home for good.

"I started being a nice kid, because everyone else (in fencing) was nice and polite," said the father of two and grandfather of three. "And I never doubted that I'd be a fencing master."

Fifty years ago, North landed in Los Angeles, turned UCLA into a Western powerhouse after starting that program and tutored Basil Rathbone, Danny Kaye and Alan Alda, fetching $500 an hour to teach those stars how to parry and riposte for the big screen.

North, who has a 29-page resume, moved to Las Vegas in 1990.

Imagine Kian Ameli's luck when his parents sought fencing lessons for him four years ago and North's was the lone name they found in the yellow pages.

"We were amazed that there actually was a place to fence," said Kian, who is rated among the top five boys under-12 fencers in the country by the United States Fencing Association.

At that time, North's studio, Salle de Nord, was at Desert Inn and Pecos. A year ago, he moved it to the Las Vegas Sportspark in Summerlin, a 10-minute drive from the Ameli home. North's wife, Gloria, a former prima ballerina, gives ballet lessons in the studio.

North's six dozen students are equally split between adults and children.

He instructs one student to use his opponent's greed against him. He tells another to advance, lead fist with the thumb up, as if he were snatching a $1,000 bill from someone. He logged every fault and skill of every opponent in a little black book, a habit he advises his students to copy.

He has produced eight certified masters.

"I always liked pirates and I wanted to know how to play with a sword. It is fun and relaxed, and maestro is really nice," said Kian Ameli. "It's physical chess, like maestro says, and I want to fence people around the world."

Sean Ameli, Kian's father, is a renowned cardiologist who was the fourth and final member of his family to take lessons from North.

Kian started it, little sister Nik-Nik followed and then their mother, Cynthia, was afflicted with fencing fever. Within two months, Cynthia yearned to compete on a national level. Nik-Nik is among the country's five best under-10 girls, and Cynthia is top five in the state with the saber.

Sean, 42, is most adept with the foil.

"To have someone with his experience ... when you hear what he's done, he's the cream of the crop," Ameli said. "To have someone like that at your disposal is unbelievable."

North, 78, is just as grateful to have found Ameli.

Soon after meeting the Amelis, North had a heart attack. Two months into rehab, he still felt awful. Cynthia convinced North to go to Sean for a second opinion, and Ameli prescribed a non-invasive artery-strengthening treatment. North improved rapidly.

"He saved my life," North said of Sean Ameli.

It has been a rich one.

When he was 13, North only dropped into the nearby Jewish People's Institute on Chicago's west side to swim when he heard a clink clink upstairs. He saw the fencers wearing the sharp white outfits and was hooked for life.

The instructor, a Marine Corps major, scoffed at the pint-sized kid who wanted to try the foil. Come en garde, said Mjr. Stevens. North complied. Then he charged and retreated like a musketeer.

The major asked North where he previously fenced. North laughed about his back yard bouts with Pat. By then, he was out of the fractured environment, which he declined to elaborate about, of his family's home. "So I made my own environment," he said.

Until he sensed he had overstayed his welcome, North lived with an aunt or friends. For a regular meal and spending cash, he washed dishes in restaurants and sometimes slept on those kitchen floors.

He boxed in illegal underground clubs -- called "Smokers' Clubs" because of the many spectators who smoked big, stinky, black cigars -- when he attended Marshall High School. His opponents were 19, 20 and 25.

Sandy Saddler, whose 103 knockouts are a featherweight record, attended regularly. So did neighbor Barney Ross, a world champion in three weight classes who was never knocked out in 81 pro bouts.

Ross helped North forge an unofficial career record of 26-0. "If they hit you, they'll hurt you," said Ross, who instructed North to jab and dance, jab and dance.

A left-handed boxer, North owed some of his sweet science success to the balance he had perfected -- left foot back -- from fencing.

He made $5 a fight, giving Pat and another cousin, who served as his managers, $2 each. A burly foe once gave North a pre-fight hug. North winced at the guy's flammable breath; then saw the bottle of whiskey his opponent clutched in his other glove.

North popped him a few times, then -- "like a cartoon," North said -- the guy dropped to both knees, raised each mitt to a temple, winked at North with his left eye and then splattered to the ground.

"This was Chicago, man," said North, also a three-time state platform diving champ at Marshall.

North barely filled out to 5 feet, 5 inches and 140 pounds, but he served in the Merchant Marines during World War II. He will not speak about the horrors he witnessed during a bloody tour of the Northern Mariana Islands, which include Saipan and Tinian.

He left Chicago for Los Angeles in 1953 and quickly established himself as a fencing master.

Under North's guidance, Carl Borak, who went on to produce films, won national titles as an under-16, under-19 and under-20 fencer in all three disciplines, a feat that hasn't been duplicated.

North directed UCLA to an epic 174-bout winning streak. Michael Dmytryk, the son of once-blacklisted film director Ed Dmytryk, was an artist with the saber. Umberto Carnera, son of heavyweight boxing champion Primo Carnera, was an epee ace.

Bernice Filerman, fabulous with the foil, was one of four 14-year-old girls under North's direction who made a U.S. women's national team in the early 1960s. Filerman also excelled at biology, earning a Ph.D. and teaching the subject at UCLA.

Sean Ameli took one of her classes 20 years ago.

Ameli recently made that stunning connection as he scanned the many photographs that adorn the walls of North's studio. Ameli squeezes three or four lessons a week into his hectic schedule.

"This is pure joy," Ameli said. "It's addictive. What's fun about it is that it's a physically agile, aerobic exercise. It's not mundane. You have to keep thinking on your toes. I don't know if I'll ever get to the point where it's that physical chess thing."

"You're getting there," North told Ameli.

North consulted for a variety of movies, and he's in an opening scene of the made-for-TV "Mark of Zorro." A plume of smoke marks his spot in a saloon scene -- that's when he smoked a pipe. He steamed off the set of one movie when its star made a pass at him.

He coached U.S. teams at a junior tournament in Rotterdam in 1965 and at the world championships in Cuba in '69, a rare trip granted by the U.S. State Department. He has been instrumental in improving the Japanese and South Korean national teams.

Well-known in Russia, he once gave a speech in Moscow when someone, through a translator, asked if he could spot greatness in a newcomer to the sport.

"I see a blue aura, like a flash," North said. "It's not in everyone, it's not all the time and it's not immediate."

After the translation, his audience gasped in awe.

UCLA officials have notified North of his near-future nomination into that school's Hall of Fame. He was inducted into the Southern California Jewish Hall of Fame on Jan. 18, which led to two revelations.

For more than two years, North charged, he had endured regular doses of racial epithets via a message board on the web site of the Nevada division of the USFA.

"Amateurs," he said of his small faction of hate-filled, if not jealous, enemies.

After he was inducted into the Jewish Hall, evidence of that message board was destroyed, probably by its creator. North recently leaned forward in his office chair and plucked a gold necklace, with a cross at the end, from under his sweat shirt.

"Know what? I'm Catholic, too," whispered North, who spent as much time in Catholic Youth Organizations in his youth as he did in the JPI. "I believe in miracles."

North never forgot his father's saying, that religion is like a mountain stream, meandering down in different paths and velocities, all winding up in the same pool. He understands the paradox of his beliefs, but adamantly believes what he wants to believe.

Fear isn't a factor for someone who fended for himself at such a young age by boxing in illegal clubs, hurling himself off 10-meter platforms, sleeping on the kitchen floors of restaurants and defending his country in the Marianas.

The fencer dueled life, and won.

"It is the most marvelous sport in the world, or I wouldn't have stayed in it all my life," North said. "If I die tomorrow, I have no regrets."

archive