Dion Shively Quotes
If you watch a football game or a baseball game, you don't see sportsmanship like this. In fencing you've got to salute your opponent before every match, and you've got to shake hands. These are the rules. 
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In America, when people dueled, they would use pistols. We didn't have fencing schools where gentlemen went to learn the sword. In Europe they had that, and those schools became the basis of the fencing clubs they still have today.
- Dion Shively
We still have a long way to go. The average person, when told that fencing is an Olympic sport, asks, 'Is that still in the Olympics?' It's been in every Olympics there has ever been in the modern age. There's fencing in every summer Olympics and it never gets televised. There's no fencer who is a household name. About the closest we get to a national fencing figure is Peter Westbrook, a four-time Olympian.
- Dion Shively
I named it the Zen Fencing Academy for my hero, a gentleman by the name of Joe Odom, who sadly passed away last year. He was my role model as a fencer and as an instructor. He founded a club in Pittsburgh, Fencers For Fun, as a method of keeping kids off the streets. He always came to (Indiana University of Pennsylvania) to help us out because we didn't have a coach. We always referred to him as the 'Zen master of fencing'. He was that wise old Pat Morita kind of character.
- Dion Shively