Hall of Fame
The year was 1972, the place was St. Louis, Mo., and the tournament was something called The Gateway Foil Classic. If ever two kids showed up with credentials straight out of Horatio Alger by way of Central Casting, it was Mike Faulkner, a 1984 Hall of Fame inductee, and Marc Volpe, whom we honor today. This was a tournament filled with college teams from the heartland of Middle
America and outstanding fencers whose college careers were behind them and who now competed for some of the most outstanding fencing clubs in the country.
So here came the two kids from Rutgers… well, not exactly, Rutgers. “I don’t understand,” a rival puzzled. “I mean either you are Rutgers or you aren’t Rutgers. I always thought it was in New Brunswick. What is this Newark? I mean nobody is from Newark if they are, they sure as hell don’t fence.”
“It’s a long story,” Marc Volpe told him. “I mean you have to be from there to understand it.” And then he and Faulkner went out and put the kind of steel to the rest of the field, which would have done Old Doug Fairbanks proud. By tournament’s end, everybody knew who Rutgers-Newark was. What it was, was the team that won the Gateway Classic.
From 1970-73, Marc Volpe, who had won the Newark City League foil title at Vailsburg High before he came to Rutgers-Newark, won 130 individual matches and lost just 30. He helped lead his team to the 1971 North Atlantic Championships and later won both the Long Island Foil Championships and the New Jersey Foil Open.
A former Newark City Police department detective who attended
Seton Hall Law School for a year, Volpe lives in Belleville and is employed by New Jersey Bell Telephone as a corporate account executive.
