U.S. OLYMPIC FESTIVAL LOS ANGELES 1991 : NOTEBOOK

Peter Westbrook has rattled a few sabers in his day. The four-time fencing Olympian won a bronze medal in the 1984 Los Angeles Games, five gold medals in six Olympic Festivals, eight Pan American Games medals and a record 12 national championships.

Westbrook, 39, hopes to make it five Olympic appearances, but that is it.

“There’s other things in life besides fencing,” he said during the Festival, where he is hoping to add another gold medal to his collection this weekend. “I’m engaged now (to Susan Miles). I want to buy a house. I want to have children. I want to do the things other normal people do.”

Westbrook, the son of a black father and a Japanese-American mother, has started the Peter Westbrook Foundation for disadvantaged children in New York.

Westbrook and Olympic fencer Mike Lofton hold clinics for 40 youngsters, ranging from 7 to 12, Saturday mornings at the New York Fencers Club in Manhattan.

“Forty little brown faces showed up the first day, no one else believed it,” Westbrook said. “(Fencing) is an elite European white sport, not an inner-city thing.”

Westbrook, who grew up in Newark, N.J., hopes to introduce fencing to minorities. He and tennis player Arthur Ashe are going to give clinics in their specialties.