Theodore Roosevelt Fencing: Single Stick

President Theodore Roosevelt was a very well rounded martial artist, best known for his boxing and wrestling which he had studied since he was a student at Harvard. However he was also known for the indulging in a type of fencing called "Single Stick" which he practiced with his friend Leonard Wood (Governor General of the Philippines.)  Single stick is a type of western fencing where a cudgel is used instead of a foil, so that the practitioners can hit any target on the body and can do so with full contact impact (as you would expect from boxing) while the weapon remains solid and hefty:

Some contend that Roosevelt & Wood were actually practicing Canne De Combat from France rather than "proper English Single Stick". However, I insist this hardly matters, because if you take Single Stick as practiced in the video above, and make it continuous without stop and go point-counting, you end up with more athletic, flowing and energetic techniques (see also the difference between Karate "point fighting" and Kickboxing), so that no doubt Canne De Combat is simply French Single Stick:

Single Stick was used as training in  the US military during the Spanish American War which Roosevelt fought in as a founder of the "Rough Riders." Single Stick was in the Olympics of 1904, and continued to have competitions held within the UK's military until the 1950's. In other words, for most people who practiced fencing for self-defense or to learn to use a sword for actual combat, fencing was a type of stick fighting all the way through the first part of the 1900's. In traditional ancient Filipino Martial Arts the stick is still used to prepare for sword fighting up to the present day. Before you write off my controversial correlation here, consider that the primary form of sparring for the martial art of Gatka from India is clearly also a type of Single Stick:

But a swordsman is not complete with fencing skills alone. One lucky punch can drop an attacker, but the vast majority of the time it takes many more punches. Likewise a lucky slash or stab from a bladed weapon can end a fight, but from a self-defense perspective it is unwise to expect that it will. The odds that someone can and will get past your sword into close range grappling are good. As Roosevelt got older he became more and more interested in what he called "Jujitsu", the grappling martial art of the Samurai which was developed specifically for grappling encounters while sword fighting. Roosevelt was actually studying Judo, which at that time was much more like what Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu is today:

Thanks primarily to MMA and Filipino Martial Arts (but also thanks to numerous other martial arts) today in the USA this type of training is widely available; you don't have to go to Harvard and then join the military to pick up single stick, boxing, wrestling or jujitsu. The best of the best of these types of martial artists meet regularly at events called "gatherings" (translated from the word "Tipon" in Tagalog.) The most famous gatherings are the "Dog Brothers Gatherings" in California and Europe, but there are local Gatherings such as the Northwest Warrior Tipon-Tipon in the Seattle area and the various "Beat The Crap Out of Cancer" gatherings in Canada (notice the Gatka fighters doing Teddy-style Single Stick at 12 minutes 30 seconds):