QUEENS, N.Y. James doesn't fit fencer's traditional profile

Fencing lifted Kamara James from the inner city to Princeton to the Olympics.
POLITIA, Greece (AP) -- The hatred seeped out of Kamara James, exploding in fits of anger and curses aimed at herself and at the people who dominated her life. She raged against her dangerous neighborhood, against her missing father.
Then she picked up her sword and made things better. It lifted her from the inner city to a scholarship at Princeton, and now has taken her all the way to the Athens Olympics.
James is the only U.S. woman competing in the fencing discipline of epee in Athens. But the 19-year-old does not neatly fit the traditional profile of a fencer.
A native of Jamaica, she grew up in a tough neighborhood in the New York borough of Queens. One night, she came home to find two bodies on her doorstep. But in an area where guns were the norm, she waved a sword.
Before she began fencing, James was an angry loner.
She met her father once, when she was 9. Her mother, who now works as a ticket agent for American Airlines, remarried when she was 7. But her stepfather died of cancer five years later.
"I never had money, I really never had a father," she said. "I came into fencing, this world of affluence, of white middle-class Americans. I had never been to a restaurant before."
Turnaround
James, who moved to the United States with her mother and two siblings when she was 10, started turning her life around when she was introduced to the Peter Westbrook Foundation by her fifth-grade teacher.
Westbrook, a six-time Olympian and the last American to win an Olympic fencing medal, started his foundation in 1991 to bring fencing to underprivileged kids in New York. Four of the fencers on the current U.S. Olympic team were inner-city children who came through the Westbrook foundation.
It was a culture shock for James and her neighbors, who were not used to seeing someone coming home with fencing equipment -- or in a fancy car.
"Peter would send me home in a cab five days a week. I'd show up in a Lincoln Town Car," she said.
At first, James lashed out in anger when she failed to win. Gradually, she learned how to channel her intensity into fencing. And she started to win -- including a bronze medal at last year's junior world championships in Italy.
"I just hated to lose. I had no positive examples growing up. I was angry at people, I was angry at myself," she said. "Fencing is such an emotional and a mental sport that it gets your anger out."
U.S. team captain Jeff Bukantz said James, who picked up fencing footwork quickly because of her previous exposure to tap, ballet and modern dance, used the anger to her advantage.
"She has a temper, which is good. If you channel it in the right direction, you can psyche yourself up," he said. "Kamara is very talented and she's inherently aggressive."
Qualified for Olympics
Though James did not compete at this year's U.S. championships, she qualified for the Olympics because of her No. 50 world ranking. She has been able to take the year off from Princeton, where she is a sophomore majoring in religion, thanks to a $50,000 grant from Morgan Stanley.
No U.S. fencer has won a gold medal at the Olympics since 1904, and James is unlikely is break that streak. But she could have an even bigger impact as a role model.
"The fact that she's been able to come this far is a testament that sport gives chances to kids in inner cities -- and to her own individual effort, to face her circumstances and come from where she has," said Jim Scherr, chief executive of the U.S. Olympic Committee.
James already is thinking beyond the Athens Games. She hopes to get a business degree and develop a foundation in her native Jamaica that will use fencing to help youngsters.
"There's no pressure at the Olympics. There's no way I can go wrong now," she said. "I'm doing things that I thought people did on TV, that you didn't do in real life."