Chapter 151: Closing In

Friday, June 22, 1984

Today’s rounds were mostly not all that noteworthy. It’s not that they were bad — none of them were bad. Every team clearly belonged here, just as the teams had at ToC. It’s just that they didn’t really rise to any particular height. This could’ve been prelims at most ToC qualifiers, and certainly could’ve been prelims at ToC.

The oddest part of things was the relative isolation of many of the teams. Sure, we’d been to four ToC qualifiers this year. So had the Lake Braddock guys. But the Hawaii guys? They’d been to one. The Alaska guys we met (just in passing) had been to none.

The exception to all of that was our fifth round, which was likely power-matched. No one said that fifth and sixth were power-matched, but that’s the usual pattern.

Our opponents in our fifth round were Mike Cole and Steve O’Brien from Huron High School in South Dakota. They’d heard of us, while we hadn’t heard of them, but that wasn’t a surprise. They’d only been to one ToC qualifier (not one that we’d been to), and had otherwise stuck to regional tournaments.

About that, Mike said, “Huron is pretty much the definition of ‘nowhere.’ Sioux Falls is the closest ‘big city,’ and it’s two hours away. We went to Fargo, Sioux Falls, and Omaha, and all of those are still tiny compared to where most teams compete. There are a bunch of good teams in the area — or we think so, anyway — but even flying out isn’t easy.”

They’d been to Georgia’s summer program and liked it, and it’d obviously served them well. I’d easily put this round in our top five of the year. Cammie and I threw everything we could at their eyewitness testimony case. It sounded quite a bit like ours, but certainly not in any nefarious way — they’d just covered all of their bases, just like we had. We knew it, we knew what to run against it, and they absorbed every attack and kept going.

This one was going to be a narrow decision either way, I was pretty sure. We had some arguments a judge could decide on, but so did they.

I wasn’t looking forward to seeing them in elimination rounds — but they certainly deserved to be there.

By contrast, our sixth round — against a team from New Mexico — was relatively easy, supporting the idea that it was a high-low match round. They were good, but we were definitely better.

Cammie and I were both confident that we’d done well, and that was enough.

With the relaxed timings of Nationals, the four rounds had only kept us going until nine at night, and that was with generous lunch and dinner breaks. The timing allowed more time for people to talk, but they really weren’t mingling as much as I might’ve wanted.

Not that we were, really, either. When we tried, few people really wanted to talk, so we mostly hung out in our little Memorial bloc or with our frenemies.

I called Dad and Mom at the Hilton between fifth and sixth rounds. They’d arrived safely but decided not to come over until tomorrow. They’d probably watch one of our earlier elimination rounds — presuming we broke — and then wait for a later round to watch another one.

Camille and Francis were here, too. So were the Seilers, the Kotharis, the Zimmermans, and Jess’s mother. I again felt bad for Cammie, but she’d undoubtedly have many of the other parents watching, at least.

We all hung out for a bit at the dorms, but went to bed early. We wouldn’t find out if we’d broken until tomorrow morning, but pretty much everyone felt like they had.

That might be universal, though. No one got to Nationals who wasn’t a ‘winner,’ after all.

Jas and I just snuggled up and went to sleep, as before. If we were going to do any fooling around, it wouldn’t be tonight.

Saturday, June 23, 1984

Our first round of the day was a piece of weird timing. Every event at Nationals had roughly one hundred entries, whether teams or individuals. Breaking to octofinals meant that sixty-four of one hundred entries would compete in any event with rounds of eight (everything but LD and CX Debate), but octofinals would only mean that sixteen out of one hundred LDers and CX teams would break.

The disparity was pretty stark.

Instead, CX and LD broke to ‘double octofinals’ (an awkward name, to be sure!) which gave 32 entries a shot. It was still much lower than the other events, but we’d have had to either break to ‘triple octos’ or limit the other events to breaking to quarterfinals to ‘fix’ things.

Thus, the only postings at ten were CX and LD. We were still in, and so was Jaya. So were most of the teams we knew, including Natalie and Brenda, Laura and Moira, Shaun and Mike, and Mike and Steve. Admittedly, of those, we only really knew Natalie and Brenda — and even that was a bit tenuous — but, still, we knew they were all tough opponents and that we’d face them soon enough.

Not in our first round, though. Our first round was against Kaufman and Martin from Bronx Sci. We’d last seen them in the first elimination round at ToC. I doubted they’d be happy to see us, and I wasn’t happy to see them, either.

Mom and Dad had come to watch that round. We warned them that Bronx Sci in general, and these guys in particular, were known for speed and that it might be a messy and hard to follow round, but that (of course) didn’t deter them from watching (nor should it have). We also warned them that Kaufman and Martin were known for getting loud and strident later in the round.

Jas, Angie, and Paige were watching us, too. Carole and Jess opted to go watch Jaya instead, which seemed fair enough. Neither of them was rooming with Cammie and me next year, after all.

The round itself was pretty much ‘fine,’ in the way the ToC round had been fine. Even knowing that we knew their game, they used the same tactics that they’d used before (quiet and mumbly at the beginning, loud and strident late in the round) and spoke way too fast. It was probably the only tool in their toolbox. Even their opening affirmative speech presented their case too quickly — and too unclearly — for my tastes.

Being fair to them, they were solid debaters. They’d belonged in elimination rounds at ToC and they belonged at Nationals. In my opinion, at least, they didn’t belong in semis or finals. Quarters would’ve been a stretch. They just weren’t as good as a number of other teams here except at going fast, and ‘going fast’ isn’t by itself a winning strategy (or shouldn’t be).

Sure, if we lost, I’d feel stupid and rudely arrogant, but that’s how it goes sometimes.

After the round, the parents clumped around their kids, pretty much, though people shuffled between groups regularly.

Mom said, “That’s what you do? I’d imagined something a bit more ... eloquent!”

I chuckled. “You should watch one of Jaya’s rounds. Lincoln-Douglas is much more often about eloquence. We try, but you have to match quantity with quantity.”

Dad said, “Well, Lincoln — and Douglas — were known for their oratory!”

Dad had always been, and would always be, a big Lincoln fan. He’d grown up in Illinois, and more than once had referred to the schools teaching ‘The Gospel of Saint Lincoln’ as he grew up.

Mom said, “I had trouble understanding some of it. I mean, when they spoke. They went really fast. You and Cammie were clearer, even going fast. Or maybe I just know your voices better.”

Cammie shook her head. “That took hours of talking with marbles in our mouths. That was one of our Northwestern drills. Going fast and staying clear is a skill. They’re clear enough that we can follow, and the judge hopefully can, but then we’re all very practiced at following people who blast through evidence while mumbling. Besides, like Steve said, we’d seen them before and we knew what they were up to.”

Mom shook her head. “Well, I thought you were better!”

Angie said, “They were. Take it from me. I can’t talk as fast as any of them — we didn’t do those drills in Drama! — but I can follow, and Steve and Cammie countered them across the board. That one should be a no-brainer.”

“Don’t jinx us!” Cammie said, chuckling.

“If that jinxed you, the fix was in,” Jas said as she joined us. “I can’t reliably follow things at that speed and I still know that much!”

“You should perhaps go watch Jaya at some point, assuming she’s still in,” I said. “It’s a very different sort of debate, and she’s amazing. Lots of natural talent, combined with endless practice. You should also watch Amit in Extemp. There’s a reason he was the runner-up last year.”

“They’re both terrific orators,” Angie said, nodding. “You’ll enjoy it. I’d bet both of them will stay in until tomorrow, but watch Jaya first. Amit losing at any point before finals would be a huge upset.”

“We might do that!” Dad said.

Paige, who’d just came over, said, “Hopefully, none of us will be joining you! We all want to be busy, too!”

“And we want to see Angie first, of course, too,” Mom said.

“Naturally!” Angie said. “I am the best!”

“Modest, too,” Paige said, giggling.

“Shy and demure,” Jas said, smirking a bit.

“And you, of course. And Paige, too!” Dad said, with Mom nodding right along.

“I’m the second-best,” Paige said, grinning.

“The best in my book,” Angie said, giving Paige a kiss.

As we were waiting for octofinals breaks (which would affect everyone, not just CX and LD), Penelope and David arrived. They’d driven over today and would stay tonight. I was glad to see them here, and it clearly made Cammie quite happy.

Paige and Cammie didn’t try to report the breaks when they were posted, because we could all just read our own events and then report back.

The news was unexpected, if perhaps not truly surprising: all of us were still in. I hadn’t expected otherwise, truly, based on our results at ToC. We were all easily in the top tier of our events, and the bar wasn’t even that high for anyone outside one-on-one debating.

Jaya was going up against someone from Bronx Sci this time, while we had a team from Palo Alto, California. They were one of only a few CX teams still going that I knew nearly nothing about. All of the ones I did recognize were still going, which meant things were going to get challenging, soon.

Our opponents turned out to be really good — which was hardly a surprise, since we were down to sixteen. Theoretically, these were the best sixteen teams in the nation, though I’m sure some teams who’d made it to octos at ToC but not here would dispute that.