The Los Angeles chapter of the Lightspeed Saber League practices Wednesday nights at Mike’s Bikes in Mid-city. Everyone’s welcome at this fencing-meets-’Star Wars’ sport that’s played all over the country. Their sabers glow in the dark just like in the movies and sometimes they make sounds too.
Team captain Tony Zaldua Jr. helps train the squad. He describes the sport and introduces a few team members in this sound portrait.
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ZALUDA: My name is Tony Zaldua, Jr. and I am the captain of the Lightspeed Saber Los Angeles base, known as the crate base. Lightspeed saber fighting is a little different than your typical sword fighting style. It’s more like fencing. To be a strong competitor, you have to be fast, you have to have a great defense. So you have to fake a lot, meaning you strike one way and then you change the direction to get another target. The best fighters fake the best.
Our team crew members, they come from various backgrounds. The style of Rafael Estrada, they call him Rafi. He fights like Yoda. Every time I fight him, he’s bouncing around, moving around, jumping around. William Alonzo. He’s an attacker. He’ll come at you like a charging bull and he’ll tap his blade on the ground to intimidate you and try to throw you off. He’s offense like probably 99% of the time.
ALONZO: My name is William Alonzo, and I’ve been with Lightspeed since like 2016. I used to scream a lot while I attacked.
ZALDUA: Kang Snow is the, he’s the CEO, he’s the founder. He’s a supreme leader in ‘Star Wars’ terms.
SNOW: My name is Kang Snow. George Lucas came up with a really cool new iconic name, the lightsaber, and he also did what he thought made sense, which was if it’s really an energy weapon and it comes out of a beam of a crystal, then you can’t have quillens. Quillens are the apparatus around the hilt that protects your hands. When Obi Wan Kenobi says it’s an elegant weapon, I think that’s what he meant. It has no extraneous parts on it. And that’s elegance.