What it takes to be a knight at Medieval Times - a restaurant that features a jousting tournament
Medieval Times is a family dinner attraction inspired by an 11th-century feast and tournament. Customers are served a four-course meal and treated to sword fights and jousting tournaments. Depending on your seating, you cheer for one of six knights, many of whom have been training for a year. Here's what it takes to become one. The following is a transcript of the video.
Ivan Guevara: My name is Ivan Guevara. I am a knight here at Medieval Times. I've been doing this for approximately six years now. When I started here I started just as a squire. It was a part-time job and I saw how everything that the knights did and riding horses and fighting and it felt very emotional to me, like it was very captivating how all the guys would just go at each other and fight and made it so realistic and I just wanted to do that myself and I started training to do so. Six months to a year of training so we can learn the choreography and the horseback riding. It's a very physical job. Sometimes we can land wrong, get a sprained ankle or something but that's why we train. We practice every day on the regular to make sure that we eliminate hurting each other or eliminate like an accident with a horse. More than physicality, believe it or not, it's a lot of discipline. Discipline, discipline, discipline, because you want to do something, you want to make sure that you're capable of doing it every day. Like, constantly just be in there, put them in the ward no matter what happens in your outside life. If you wanted to come in here with an attitude of I'm gonna get this done. I'm gonna go through with it and I'm gonna enjoy every minute of it. You can work yourself into having a good physical body but if you don't have the discipline to do so, then it's going to be really tough to become part of what we do here. It takes a lot of discipline. I really enjoy when little kids come and then they come after to another show and they say, "Do you remember me?" I've had little girls literally just hug me and start crying because they were so happy that like … nothing beats that.