Join Saber Tour’s Arthur Gautier in an exclusive interview with William Henley, a fighter ranked Saber Tour #45, founder of the Saber Talk blog and assisting in UK Outreach for the Saber Tour.

William, welcome to your own place, Saber Talk! Really happy to be on the other side of the table for this interview. First of all, let’s start at the beginning, how did you first get involved with LED Saber as a sport?

Hello Arthur, thank you so much for agreeing to write for the blog once more and take over my usual spot as interviewer for this one!

I’m always a little annoyed at myself when this question comes up, because while I distinctly remember initially exploring the options as far as lightsaber sport went in the UK in early 2024 or late 2023, discovering Ludosport in the Midlands and a few others such as Silver Sabres, I can’t for the life of me remember why I was looking for them in the first place.

I suppose the most plausible option, and the one I highly suspect to be the true course of events, is that, being incredibly obsessed with Lord of the Rings at that time, I was looking for sword-fighting opportunities to try out the style of the characters I loved.

Of course, I looked into Fencing, but I didn’t like the focus on thrusting, as I didn’t have the same visual language as the fights we see in films and media. I also explored local HEMA clubs, but it turned out that, being 13 at the time, I was too young for such things.

So at that point I turned to lightsabers, and discovered First Strike was my local club, and then spoke nicely to my dad who agreed to take me, and also to train with me.

You are particularly involved in the LED Saber environment: fighter, referee, Saber Talk writer, helping to develop the sport in the UK. How do you feel about all that and what gave you this envy?

A very good question! Initially when I joined the world of LED Saber through First Strike (as detailed above) I was mostly there to train within the syllabus they had and progress as far as I reasonably could. At this time there were others in the club who were participating in what was called the Kobaru Kai, or tournament fighters, who would come out and compete in your events.

My father was then encouraged by Kenny (our Instructor) to join this group and compete at the UK Open 2024, so I went along as a spectator, and I must confess, the energy of the Saber Tour event took me captive immediately and I haven’t broken free since!

I took up refereeing because I felt that if I was going to commit to covering the sport as a Journalist through my blog, I should also consider officiating it, to deepen my understanding of the other side of the arena and how the sport functions behind the scenes.

You have been around competitions for some time now, first as a spectator, and then as a fighter and referee. How do you feel about the competition in general? Do you have any pre-competition routine or habits?

Competition is the best part of our sport for me, nothing beats the thrill of gearing up for a match, hearing the calls of referees and assessing your rankings before and after.

The Tour especially is an incredible example of sport at its best, a friendly yet competitive environment where players from limitless clubs and countries can express their skill and climb the rankings all while making friends and seeing new places.

On the matter of pre-competition routine, I don’t think I have anything major if I’m honest. I do tend to look up videos of my opponents going into the Pool Stage if they exist, and if there is none to be found, I’ll analyse their ranking position and recent results.

This not only helps me estimate the level of my opponent, but through looking back at match results I can see which styles they struggle with combating the most and adjust my own techniques accordingly to give me the best chances. (At the end of the day I’m a huge data nerd, so I’ll always try and make good use of that I suppose.)

You are currently training at Vanguard Saber Academy, a quite recent club (though coming from First Strike Combat). How is the club and how are the trainings there? Also, you are training and fighting alongside and against your father. How do you feel about that? Does it make any difference?

Oh definitely, it makes a huge difference I think, mostly because obviously being together so much of the time, we can fit in a huge amount of sparring hours, which lets us test different ideas and strategies and develop further than we would if we didn’t have that readily available access to combat.

Regarding training at Vanguard, it was a bit of a shift from First Strike, but largely for the better I feel, the environment is wonderful and immensely supportive, and our ruleset (which I must confess sprung from ideas of mine alongside those of Rob’s) contains the same arming of strikes and use of Masks as the Tour, though the mechanics of scoring are rather different.

I’m also very priveleged to be in charge of web design for Vanguard, and soon I shall be taking over charge of our youtube channel, so it’s been amazing to help the club develop in that regard!

I also feel I have a lot more autonomy over my style at Vanguard, and through training with Marco Cuomo from Eclipse over Zoom since SaberFest last year, I feel I have improved immensely and hope to continue to do so.

Do you have any inspiration from fighters around you, whether it is for their style, their mindset, etc. ? 

In my early days of practicing the Saber Tour system of combat, I was hugely inspired by the guys from Silver Sabres Combat Academy, who I saw make the knockouts at the UK Open 2024. Having fought Ben Lavers in tournament since then, his speed in parrying still stands out to me as incredible, and something I’ve worked on incorporating into my own style over time.

This leads me on to my other major influence: Amaury Mouhtajjib. Amaury is such an incredibly talented fighter both in terms of not only his technique but also in his sheer physical abilities, he is able to accelerate into motions so rapidly he’s almost impossible to counter, truly something I want to include in my own way of fighting!

Regarding your own style: a minion mask, a red saber, and a very agile fighting style. Why all that? Can you tell us a bit more about these choices and what it reveals about you?

Well the reasoning behind the Mask may be a little less… innovative, shall we say, than you may be expecting. Initially at First Strike, my nickname was Minion (because I looked very similar to a more senior student training at the time, and tended to mimic his style) and when we transitioned to Vanguard the name stuck.

As for putting the Minion on the Mask specifically, I was really inspired by Adeline Colcanap’s Kung Fu Panda mask when I saw it first at the UK Open 2024, and how off-putting it was to go up against, even from a spectator perspective, so when I decided that I didn’t want the White Hand of Isengard as my “brand” so to speak, it seemed a natural replacement as it both fit my name at the club and also was highly recognisable on the arena.

As far as the red saber goes, my style has always leant, I think, towards a more aggressive tendency so with Red being associated with Sith in the Star Wars lore it seemed a natural fit.

Finally, regarding my style, I think it’s developed naturally over time, as being a smaller fighter a lot of what I do (especially against tall fighters like my instructors Robert Isaacs and Ryan Butcher) focuses on closing distance quickly when I find an ingress and landing flurries of blows to secure the advantage, as well as the fact that I find evading blows to be one of the most effective forms of defence!

Where do you see LED Saber going over the next five years, especially with its growing international reach?

Well, I do have a slight concern for the future of the Saber Tour rankings in the immediate future, with clubs such as JKAMX, Imperial Sith Academy Hellas and Kyber Kai joining the Tour, as initially there may not be a lot of cross competition which could lead to isolated groups of fighters climbing high up the rankings without ever being tested against the European circuit.

But that’s a bridge to cross when we get there, over the next five years I really hope to see the Saber Tour grow further across Europe and beyond. Even more so, I want to develop a form of cross-ranking between all LED Saber schools and organisations, so that we can establish the world leaders, hopefully with a hybrid ruleset that lets all schools compete on even footing!

You will be competing in the French Open, in only a few weeks. How do you feel about it? What do you expect from the event? And also, do you have any personal objective for this competition?

Indeed I will! I’ll be interested to see how the environment differs from our home tournament, the UK Open, as obviously Gymnase Japy is a much larger venue than Jackson’s Lane and of course is open to the public.

I’d also love to talk to other fighters and club leaders about their approach to the sport, what rules they fight under at training outside the Tour, what they want to try and develop in the future and if there’s anything I can do to help them achieve those aims. However, I must confess that I’m always nervous to start a conversation but I would love to meet new folks, so I invite anyone who wishes to talk with me to come over and have a chat :D! 

As far as objectives for the competition go, there are two main things:

1. And I don’t want to raise my hopes too high here, but I’ll confess I have my eyes set on making the elimination stages!
2. I would love a rematch against Fabrice Pedrot, as there was only a single point between us in London, so I’d love to have a match with him once more to see if I can even the score.

And of course, we have the presentation of the Saber Talk awards, which I’m very excited for, as I can’t wait to hand out the trophies.

If you could step into the arena for a full three-round match under official Saber Tour rules against any opponent — historical or fictional — who would you choose to duel, and why?

Ooooh that’s a tough question!

Hmm, I’m not too sure, but I think that, and this may be a boring answer, I would love to have a match against David Miller from Sellsword Arts, as he is an incredible swordsman with a huge amount of knowledge and I’d love to see what he’d make of our rules.

To go down a more fantastical lane, the other opponent I’ve always wanted to try my hand against is Sir Lancelot, widely regarded as the greatest swordsman of the Knights of the Round Table, I feel he’d be an incredibly hard opponent to defeat.

Finally, let’s have a word on your blog, Saber Talk. What brought you there? And would you expect it to develop as the sport evolves?

Having discovered the Tour, I of course went on the web to see what I could find out about it, and saw the website, and the youtube. This was before any of the streams were recorded and before yourself and Adrien had begun to commentate the videos of the Finals and Open de France, so the media coverage was very minimal, so I founded Saber Talk to try and fill the gap in coverage and bring the sport to the wider public.

As well as promoting the sport, Saber Talk (more importantly) gives me an opportunity to learn about how other LED Saber players conduct their training and how they view the sport, which broadens my connection to the Tour’s European stronghold.

Of course, the more I learnt about the circuit, the deeper I was sucked into its orbit and now, for me, it is the definitive LED Saber experience and I’m more than willing to commit to seeing it grow and evolve, improving not only the number of fighters and availability of tournaments in my home country of the UK through onboarding and outreach, but also committing to other initiatives, such as potentially English-language commentary in the future, and improved methods of judging the fights.