Westchester's county attorney reflects on his Olympics experience in Munich in 1972

John Nonna has been practicing law and serving his community since the 1970s. But inside this public servant beats the heart of a world-class athlete.

Nonna, 76, and currently the Westchester County attorney, can still proudly put on his blazer from the opening ceremonies at the 1972 Munich Olympics, where he competed on the U.S. fencing team for the first time in individual and foil events.

"It’s quite a stressful event because you have to compete but there’s so much noise around you," Nonna said. "You’re in an Olympic village with athletes from all over the world in every single sport, and then you walk into that stadium in the opening ceremonies and there’s an absolutely huge crowd of people. I was awestruck by this. And if it’s your first Olympics like it was for me, and you don’t have a lot of experience in world-level tournaments, it’s quite an experience."

The Paris Olympics began Wednesday with opening ceremonies happening on Friday.

How John Nonna got into fencing

Nonna got his first exposure to the world of sports in his hometown of the Bronx. He attended Regis High School, a Jesuit high school in Manhattan, where he started out playing basketball. Going on to study law at Princeton University, he discovered he had a talent for fencing.

"I knew I wasn’t going to make the basketball team at Princeton, so I went to a demonstration on fencing. I was enthralled by it," Nonna said.

He said most fencers start the sport around the age of 7 to 10 years old, but starting the sport as an 18-year-old freshman in college didn't stop him from quickly rising up the fencing ranks. Nonna picked foil over the other two weapons, epée and sabre, but continued to train with the other two disciplines.

"I liked foil because the target is just the torso so it’s a little more challenging. In epée, you can hit anywhere on the body. In sabre, it’s slashing. You can slash anywhere from the waist up, including the head," Nonna said. "So foil is a little more challenging. It was really the weapon to practice dueling to deliver fatal blows more than anything."

While juggling his budding law career, Nonna continued competing after college until he shocked the local league, and himself, with a major win at the New York Athletic Club, where he beat the world champion foil fencer in the quarterfinals of the international Martini Rossi tournament in 1970.

"I said, 'You know, maybe I should stick with this sport for a while,'" Nonna said.

Commitment to fencing leads to Olympics opportunity

He continued to train five nights a week in 1971 at the New York Athletic Club, while studying law and serving on active duty as a naval reserve at the Brooklyn Naval Station and competed in tournaments on the weekends.

"It was an intense time commitment, but the Navy let me train," Nonna said. "Since I was stationed in Brooklyn, I was able to stay at the club and they let me take some time off to go to tournaments in Europe. That was really important to get the exposure to the international fencing community."

Nonna eventually made the 1972 U.S. Olympic foil team after becoming a finalist in the national championships for both foil and epée. Before he knew it, he was headed to compete in Munich, Germany, in late August.

"You get all psyched up about it," Nonna said. "The adrenaline flows and you go day to day building up to the competition."

Nonna and the U.S. fencing team didn't win any medals at the 1972 Olympics, which Nonna attributes to his lack of experience. However, he had the best record of the foil team in the team event, despite losing to Russia, which allowed him to continue to qualify for future Olympic events.

Being present for the tragedy and history of Munich Games

In the last few days of the 1972 Olympics, tragedy struck when 11 members of the Israeli Olympic team and one German police officer were taken hostage at the Munich Olympic Village and killed by eight members of the Palestinian terrorist group Black September.

"The fencing events were all over, so it was quite shocking when we read in the paper the next day what had happened," Nonna said. "We could see where they were staying across from where we were staying, in the different buildings in the Olympic Village. We couldn’t see what happened, but I knew the Israeli fencing coach (Andre Spitzer) was one of the people killed. We all knew him from the U.S. team because everyone knows each other in the fencing community so that was quite a shock that people you knew were killed by terrorists."

Nonna said the last few days of the Olympics, typically festive and celebratory, "felt more like a memorial service for these athletes" and put into question the effect on future games and whether the Olympics could ever continue after such a tragic event.

Continuing to compete

Back on U.S. soil after the experience of a lifetime, Nonna continued to train in hopes of his next Olympic Games while simultaneously starting a family and continuing his law career. However, because of a few bumps in the road on his athletic career, he didn't realize the 1972 Olympic games would be his last.

"I really enjoyed my fencing career, although I could not delve into it as much as I could have because I was trying to become a lawyer at the same time," Nonna said.

He remained tied to the U.S. National team throughout the 1970s and even qualified for two Pan American games in 1975 and 1979. Nonna was forced to give up his spot at the 1975 Pan Am Games in Mexico City after the judge he clerked for denied him a month off to compete. However, he was given a second chance in 1979 and won a silver and bronze medal in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

Nonna, along with 471 other athletes, made the U.S. Olympic team again for the 1980 games in Moscow. But after Russia invaded Afghanistan in 1979, his dream of competing in another Olympic games were dashed.

"The Carter administration decided they were going to try to punish Russia by not letting the U.S. Olympic team go to the Moscow Olympics, so we didn’t get to go, but Congress awarded us all the Congressional Medal of Achievement," Nonna said. "I might have won a medal in 1980 if we had gone, because I was much more experienced then, but this medal is something no other Olympian has unless you were on the 1980 team."

A framed and signed picture of Nonna, former president Jimmy Carter and former first lady Rosalynn Carter hangs in Nonna's current office at the Westchester County Office Building in White Plains. There, Nonna is seen wearing what would have been the U.S. team's Opening Ceremony outfit designed by Levi Strauss.

"That was my last chance at competing, really, because I was getting involved with my legal career and that was true for a lot of athletes who probably had a chance to do really well, but they were deprived of that chance," Nonna said. "But there were mixed feelings about the event. You weren’t going to decline the opportunity to meet the president and shake the president’s hand but a lot of us athletes did not think it was good foreign policy to boycott an Olympic games. There should not be politics in the Olympics so it shouldn’t have been used as a foreign policy method to deal with the invasion of Afghanistan."

In lieu of competing in Russia, Nonna said the U.S. Olympic committee permitted each team to choose another event to go to in place of the scheduled games. The U.S. Fencing team chose to go to China for two weeks to compete with the Chinese national team.

"We went to Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou and Nanking. It didn’t make up for missing the Olympics, but it was an interesting kind of reward for making the Olympic team," Nonna said. "We were there for Thanksgiving, and we were staying in a hotel in Shanghai. The chef actually made us a Thanksgiving turkey dinner and they were really proud. It was a very good dinner, so it was a nice way to meet people, which was part of what I liked about fencing."

After his retirement in 1980, Nonna was captain of a U.S. fencing team and took them to various international events, including the 1982 world championship in Rome, but did not compete. He was also a referee for fencing events at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles.

After the Olympic dream

Today, Nonna is focused on his life of public service. He continued to practice law after his retirement and became involved in local politics.

"I wanted to give back. Being a lawyer and charging clients wasn’t enough," Nonna said. "I went to a Jesuit high school where they tried to impart on you that you had to do good works for others. You had to be involved in the community, so that’s what got me involved in public service."

Nonna became the acting village justice for Pleasantville in the 1990s and was on the board of trustees for the village until 1995, when he became the mayor. He served as mayor until 2003 then was elected to the Westchester County Board of Legislators in 2007, where he served for four years.

In 2017, while Nonna was working at a big Manhattan law firm, his colleague George Latimer called him after getting elected as County Executive and asked him to become the Westchester County attorney.

"I had known him for about 15 years. He called me and he said, 'Would you consider leaving private practice and come to work as the county attorney?' I said of course, I’m ready to do it. I’m ready to do full time public service.," Nonna said. "I enjoy it very much. There’s so much we do with good legislation, defending the county, making sure the county exercises its rights under contract, so there’s a lot of important work done here."

While he doesn't keep in touch with the fencing world anymore, Nonna still has a deep love for his sport. At 78, he still works out six or seven days a week and has participated in 10k and 5k runs in his free time.

As the 2024 Olympics begin in Paris, he said he will be tuned into fencing, track and field and soccer events.

"We’ve done a lot better and actually won medals in fencing since roughly 2000 onward," Nonna said. "When I fenced in 1972, the last medal we won in fencing was in 1960 and the last one before that was probably 1932 or 1936. Maybe 2000 was the first Olympics with this, but the first medals we won were women’s sabre and women’s epée. So, the women kind of led the way for the U.S. to win medals in fencing in the Olympics."

This article originally appeared on Rockland/Westchester Journal News: Westchester's county attorney reflects on his Olympics experience in Munich in 1972