Chapter 3: Partners?

Monday, July 12, 1982

For this middle week, they assigned us CX partners, as they’d promised — or threatened. After meeting my partner, it was likely more the latter.

Marcus, the graduate assistant, was reading off the names. Obviously the first name he read was in alphabetical order and the second was ... not. That meant you had to pay attention to everything. Cammie had gone first, and been paired with a girl named Carla Foster, who I’d barely met. Cammie didn’t look thrilled.

A few names later, I heard “Christopher Hamilton - Steve Marshall.” I looked around and spotted him. One of the more ... reserved ... ones, I thought. White shirt, blue pants, and he looked like he might be wishing for a tie. He glanced at me and I didn’t think he looked pleased, though — to be fair — I might just be reading something into his look that wasn’t there.

Once Marcus had finished, we all rearranged. Christopher stuck out his hand. “Christopher Hamilton. Lexington High, Massachusetts.”

“Steve Marshall, Houston Memorial.”

He offered his hand. I reached out, shaking. His grip tightened. I guessed he was trying to make a point, though I wasn’t sure what. I matched him, rather obviously surprising him.

He dropped the handshake before it got even more awkward. Then he shrugged a bit. “I don’t know why they do this, but ... just tone it down, okay? That whole gold shirt thing might play where you’re from, but it’s not going to work here.”

I shrugged right back. “You might be surprised, but ... I’ll see what I can do.”

“Look, we’re a really strong program and I know what I’m doing. We’ve sent people to Nationals most years and a lot of them do pretty well. I mean to go next year.”

“All the best to you. Maybe we’ll meet there,” I said, smiling.

“Yeah. Maybe. So, what sort of case have you been working on?”

I shrugged again. “We looked a bit at Saudi Arabia. It’s looking to play fairly well. There are some interesting ideas with some of the South American countries.”

He frowned. “That’s a pretty narrow interpretation, don’t you think?”

“I don’t know how the topic’s going to play out, but most of the ‘global realpolitik’ negatives focus on loss of credibility if we freeze everyone out. You dodge most of those, and — until we see where the chips fall on killer evidence — Chomsky aside, there’s better evidence on the credibility card than there is claiming it’s no big deal.”

He frowned a little deeper. “Still, I think that’d get hammered as sidestepping the topic.”

“So, last year you rewrote minimum education standards for every subject federally?”

He hesitated. “Okay, fine, point taken. Of course we didn’t. That’d get you clobbered on federalism, states’ rights, all that stuff. Fine. I still think we’re better off cutting down everywhere, but I can see the value in looking at countries or regions. The problem is, the topic is to ‘significantly’ reduce arms sales. Last year we didn’t have that.”

“So, what’s ‘significant?’ We did some work on that. It’s easy to find legal opinions that ‘significantly’ means less than ‘substantially,’ which is still allowed to be well under fifty percent. Some cites simply define it as synonymous with ‘measurably.’ On that basis, cutting sales nearly anywhere by an amount worthy of news coverage would count, and you know as well as I do that the news makes a big deal anytime we sell even a single-digit number of fighters or bombers to a third-world country.”

“Fine. Again. Point taken. We’ll dig into it. You going to be ready for practice rounds Wednesday?”

“Hell if I know.” He frowned at that. “I should be ready now, but until we get out there, how do I know if I’ll run out what I think are some great quotes and the other guy will have the perfect source impeachment or counter or can make an out-of-context shift to something crazy and get us in a nuclear exchange with Russia?”

He shook his head. “Yeah, but they’re equally uncertain.”

“Gotta play the hand you have. But the worst rounds are usually the jumbled messes where no one really knows what they should focus on.”

“We’ll see. How about ... meet tomorrow at 1pm and we’ll go over each other’s evidence collection? We should be able to count on handing cards to each other, but it’s...”

“ ... different without practice. Yeah. I know. Tomorrow at 1pm works for me.”

“Anyone else from your school here?”

I nodded. “My Debate partner, Cammie Clarke. My sister’s over in the Drama program.”

He rolled his eyes. “Drama. Don’t even get me started. Those people ... I have sympathy, I really do.”

I zipped my lip, for now, and just smiled. Letting him know I was one of ‘those people’ would probably not work to my advantage. I already wasn’t thrilled, and he didn’t seem thrilled either.

“See you then. Well, and before.”

“Yeah. See you.”

I didn’t get a good chance to sync up with Cammie until dinner. Well, or Angie, but I never saw Angie during the days. Cammie and I at least got to talk some, sometimes.

“So, how’s your new partner?” I asked Cammie.

“Ugh! She’s just ... um ... well ... robotic? I guess that’s a good description. She’s convinced she’s really good and I just don’t see it. She’s one of those who keeps her eyes down, doesn’t have much in the way of presentation skills, and talks really fast.”

“Sounds like a real catch,” Angie said, giggling. “Do any better, big bro?”

“I ... don’t think so? We started off with him trying to crush my hand. That didn’t work...”

Both girls giggled at that, nodding.

“ ... so he instead insisted I wear boring clothes and pretty much tried to push me to follow his lead. After all, his school usually sends someone to Nationals and he’s trying to get there next year.”

Cammie giggled a little. “You didn’t tell him, did you?”

“Nah. It’s not my accomplishment. Besides, that can wait until Friday, when we’re done with each other.”

Angie grinned. “Sneaky and underhanded. I approve, big bro.”

“It is your accomplishment, though,” Cammie said. “I mean, obviously it’s Lizzie and Janet and Amit and Callie’s achievement, but we’re a team, and we all make each other better. They’d be the first to say they wouldn’t be who they were if they didn’t have the rest of us. I wouldn’t be half the debater I am if not for all of you, especially you two.”

“And I wouldn’t, either,” I said, knowing better than any of them just how true that really was.

“It’ll be funny if we debate each other,” Cammie said, grinning. “I won’t hold back!”

“Wouldn’t expect you to. Why start now?”

She grinned. “Got that right!” She turned to Angie. “What’s new in Drama-land?”

Angie sighed her best dramatic sigh. “We’re putting on ‘Oklahoma!’. In two weeks, with existing minimalist sets and ill-fitting costumes and all that. I am thinking train wreck with some chance of serious physical injury in the dance numbers. Okay, not really, but ... this is going to be crazy.”

“You signed up for it,” Cammie said, grinning.

“I know! But I knew I was crazy. I just didn’t know they were crazy, too!”

We all had a good laugh at that.

Tuesday, July 13, 1982

I caught up to Christopher at the end of lunch. I’d seriously considered my pink shirt, but decided not to antagonize him that much. Yet. Instead, I’d gone with a pale blue. That got a disdainful look, but no comments.

“I brought my evidence file,” he said. Unnecessarily, of course, since I’d have had to be blind to miss the sample case he had strapped to a luggage carrier.

“I brought mine, too,” I said, showing off a similar setup.

“So, let’s go see what we’ve got.”

We headed off to the library and grabbed a table as far away from anyone else as we could manage. Technically, we should’ve used a study room or the like, but, in practice, the library was nearly dead in the summer and we could get away with quiet conversation.

We dug into each other’s files. I think we were both equally surprised that mine was considerably larger and higher quality. I’d expected him to have gotten further with research. Those UH runs had paid off.

“Hey, this is pretty good. I can see it’s a bit tilted to the Middle East, but you’ve got pretty broad coverage.”

I shrugged. “We hit the libraries as much as we could before heading here.”

He looked surprised, but didn’t say anything. “These typed cards are sharp. Where’d you get a typist?”

“I’m a pretty damn good typist. Probably the best on the team, though we’ve got ... maybe six of us ... that can hold their own.”

“Huh. Well, cool.”

“So ... what’re we running?” I really didn’t care, and I felt like it’d go better if I let him run things a bit.

“I ... okay, so, the evidence is better for your regional case, but this is the time to see what’ll fly, so, I’d really like to run across-the-board, if you can go with that.”

“No problem. You know what you’ve got better than I do, so...”

“ ... so you’d make a better first affirmative, yeah, right. And I’d rather go second negative, too, if that’s okay.”

In case that’s confusing, first affirmative is the one speaker position that just presents a prepared speech. That’s not all you do, of course — you cross-examine, are cross-examined, and also present a rebuttal speech on the fly. But, on affirmative, the second affirmative usually has the harder job, though a lousy first affirmative will sink the round before it even gets started.

“No problem for me. Cammie and I trade off sometimes, just so we don’t get in a rut.”

“I don’t think I know anyone that does that.”

“Several of our teams do. Keeps things fresher.”

“I guess. Sometimes it’s better to specialize, though.”

I shrugged. “Maybe so. Okay, so, what am I reading?”

He handed me a photocopy of the case he was proposing. “Run through your cards and see what you can punch up, I guess? We’re doing rounds the rest of the week, pretty much, right?”

“Yeah. I hope the feedback isn’t too brutal.”

He frowned a little. “Shouldn’t be. You seem sharp enough, and I’ll be fine.”

“So ... let me see what I can do with this. Do you want a read-through before the first round?”

“Nah. We’ll fix things after that.”

“Works for me.”

A copy of Christopher’s affirmative in hand, I spent the rest of the afternoon making notes, then rewriting and tightening it up.

It needed quite a bit of ‘tightening up,’ which didn’t surprise me. He’d concentrated on content, not presentation. Over the course of a few hours I got it into a structure I could read at speed while still emoting, making eye contact, things like that. I had Christopher pegged as someone who didn’t care so much about things like that. I might be wrong, but that was my guess.

This would’ve gone much, much faster with a computer. As poor as word processors were in 1982 — and, by even late 1980s standards, they were quite poor indeed — it still beat hand-writing long documents or using a typewriter. Unless Angie and I changed something, though, we were still years away. Would we? I had no idea. If I did, I was feeling more and more it would be as a mentor or an investor, not as a programmer. I had some solid ideas there — just, not for right now.

Wednesday, July 14, 1982

After the usual morning assembly, they sent us off to meet with our partners and get ready. Practice rounds would start at 1pm. The schedule was posted. We were going up against two guys I didn’t know first, then my maybe-friend Wesley second. The only thing I could remember about his partner Jeff was that he was from Georgia and soft-spoken.

“So, show me what you’ve got,” Christopher said.

I ran through the case, timing it. I got through it with about five seconds to spare. That’s fine, in my experience — in competition the adrenaline will likely shave ten or fifteen more seconds off.

“A lot of editing,” he said, frowning just a bit. “But ... it does read better. I didn’t hear the third Chomsky quote, though.”

“We don’t need it there. It’s better kept for rebuttals. I needed the time.”

“You could read faster. You need to practice with marbles in your mouth.”

I chuckled. “Been there, done that. I can go faster, but ... well, you’ve heard the same lectures I have. In some elimination rounds that’ll get you a bit, but you won’t get to them in many tournaments, because you’ll lose the judges.”

“Never had a problem with that,” he shrugged. “Maybe our judges are better.”

“No idea. Most of the tournaments I went to were local high schools, so ... parents, businesspeople, things like that.”

“That might sway it, yeah. Anyway, it’ll work. I don’t even know which round we’ll be affirmative in.”

“Yeah. They’re keeping us in suspense.”

“Want to run through the evidence again?”

“Can’t hurt.”

We broke for lunch around 11am. I caught Angie on the way in.

“Have you seen Cammie?”

“Nope. Guessing you haven’t?”

“Not since she went off with ... um ... Carla.”

“We can just hang here. You have to be somewhere at 1pm, right?”

“If I’m not there fifteen minutes early I think my partner will have a stroke.”

She chuckled. “Still, we’re fine.”

“How’s your show going?”

“Brutal. Absolutely brutal. Right now, I think we’d be literally talking about breaking a leg or two. Or three. Or more.”

“Ouch!”

We chatted about her show and my partner for almost half an hour until Cammie appeared, rolling her evidence case, looking grumpy.

I got up and gave her a hug. So did Angie.

“What’s wrong?” Angie said.

“That bi ... um ... I... everything I do is wrong, according to Carla. Accent, pacing, word choice, whatever. Handwriting! Organization! It never ended. I’m even wrong about things she doesn’t know I’m wrong about.”