When John Sheehy '07 fenced his last bout for Brown, there was no grand finale. When he ended his fourth and final season as a Bears epeeist with an 11th-place finish in the C pool at the Intercollegiate Fencing Association Championships, there was no celebration befitting the end of a career.
But to Sheehy, fencing goes beyond tournament results. When Sheehy was 13, he injured his neck while diving off a dock. Due to a spinal cord injury at the C4 level, Sheehy now walks with a limp and has limited control of his left hand.
Despite the odds, Sheehy joined the Brown fencing team as a walk-on during his freshman year. He has fenced for the team ever since and became an integral member of the team along the way.
After finishing the IFA Championships last month, Sheehy's fencing career has come to a close. There was no brass band to accompany his exit, but the lack of fanfare did not matter to Sheehy.
"Fencing isn't really a sport where there's an opportunity for that to be recognized," he said. "You fence your last bout, and it just happens to be the last one you fence because you're not qualifying to the next level. So, you're done, you're looking around and your team's kind of scattered around, and you think, okay, that's cool."
Despite spending the last four years fencing at Brown, Sheehy's first love growing up was another sport.
From a young age, Sheehy played in the top ranks of junior hockey in Massachusetts. As a goalie, he played Triple A hockey with several players who were drafted into the NHL. Sheehy said he was he was too young to have his hockey future projected with any certainty, but needless to say, he showed lots of promise in the rink. A week before he got hurt, he played in a Triple A tournament with his team and recorded five shutouts in six games.
Then, in late August of 1998, while visiting western Massachusetts, he suffered a devastating injury. After getting injured, he spent eight weeks in a hospital in Atlanta. The doctors gave him a wide range of possible scenarios, but he believed at first that he would fully recover.
"I was a kid," Sheehy said. "I was ignorant, and I was stupid. I thought that I would be back playing hockey within a month. As that month hit, I thought, okay, it would be three months. Then, by that time, I thought, maybe I have missed too much to get back into the competitive level. I was already so far into it that it wasn't a huge blow or anything."
While working out on a daily basis, Sheehy said he saw people fencing and was intrigued.
"I was in high school. I don't remember exactly where I saw it," he said. "I saw it the year before I came to college, the fall of my senior year in high school."
He decided it was a perfect match because it didn't require him to use his injured left hand, and shortly after seeing other people fence, he decided to start fencing himself. When Sheehy began fencing at Brown, his presence on the team made an immediate impact.
"His strong character shows (through) his persistence and his consistency in practice everyday," said Head Coach Atilio Tass. "And later on, once he had learned the sport, he ... competed against people who had no other physical difficulties and was even able to beat a great number of them over the years. His entire career was extremely successful."
Sheehy is proud of how the team changed and grew over his four-year tenure. This change was exemplified by the team's improved recruiting along with its step up to Ivy League competition for the first time last year.
"I'm looking forward to what the team is going to be doing," Sheehy said. "(Our progress) is very encouraging. The people that are younger than me are going to be taking it to this whole new place. I didn't teach them to fence or anything, but I was there as a part of it to show what Brown fencing is."
Sheehy said he feels that during his four years he experienced a true turning point in Brown fencing.
"When people look back and think about (when) the team picked up and started to become one of the best teams in the country, even though we're not there yet, they'll look back at this as the time where it started to change," he added. "It's been cool to be there for that."
Sheehy said he is completely satisfied with how his life has turned out, but he admitted that sometimes he does wonder what might have happened if he hadn't gotten hurt.
"Oh, yeah, all the time, but it's the kind of thing that you've got to avoid," he said. "What can you do? The big thing that I always think when I get into that trap is, what if I played hockey? What if I was playing goalie for BC right now? What if I had offers from pro teams? And then I think, well, that could have happened if I had hit at a one-degree different angle on the bottom of the lake. The best way to counteract that is to think that if I had been a degree in the other direction I could be dead. Sure, lots of stuff could have happened, but just as much bad stuff could have happened. You work with what you get. It's a silly thing to think about what could have happened."
Sheehy's athletic prowess has clearly extended to a new realm and a new level. So much so that perhaps a brass band should strike up a tune.
