Chapter 44: Any Given Round

Friday, October 14, 1983

We were on the road by ten. That was probably earlier than we needed to leave, but there was no point in dawdling.

As before, we took a large, fairly plush rental bus. The sponsorships were holding up well, and parents were happy to chip in given all of the success we were having. For us, it saved some giant lines at the restrooms, let us all relax on the trip much more than we would in a school bus, and was much better suited to snuggling.

Okay, that last one was perhaps not a point in favor with Meg or Steffie, but then perhaps it was, too. They’d certainly not made more than a token effort to separate us in quite a while.

The trip itself was mellow. Most of us were veteran travelers by now, and the kids that weren’t quickly picked up the dos and don’ts from the rest of us. Cammie and Paige teamed up and got us doing singalongs. After that, Sue (surprising most of us) led a round of trivia questions. She’d picked the game up at Gonzaga, where it was a popular pastime. I intentionally missed a few. I had a pretty unfair advantage in terms of how much time I’d had to accumulate random facts.

We stopped for lunch in La Grange and made it to our motel (the same Howard Johnson from previous trips) around two. For all I knew, I might have been at this very motel on this very day long, long ago. If so, this would probably be the trip where Gene climbed between balconies for the heck of it.

Somehow, if it was, I doubted he would do that this time. Gene with Sue was a very different person from Gene without Sue, to say nothing of senior-year Gene after his father’s death. That Gene had challenged authority repeatedly in ways this one didn’t seem inclined to do.

We checked in and changed. I called home to let Mom know we’d arrived and wound up getting Dad instead. He said that Mr. Lancaster had just called and said Mr. McBride’s lawyers had called him last night and made an offer. They were actively negotiating now.

We were back on the bus half an hour from when we arrived. Even with some unfortunate traffic (made far worse by the way Austin’s roads were languishing in the 1980s) we made it to Westwood by three-fifteen.

Check-in was painless, and we grabbed a couple of tables in the cafeteria and settled in to wait. Megan had made up a bunch of little table signs that said ‘Memorial Debate and Drama’ on them. We put those on ‘our’ tables, then settled in to wait. The first round would start at four (which was still plenty early enough).

Not long after I sat down, I saw a familiar face approaching.

“Hey, Dave,” I said, standing and shaking hands.

“Hey, yourself,” Dave Mayrink said, smiling.

Angie shook hands, too. So did Cammie. Jas opted to hug him, too. Between that and some of the Drama girls’ greetings, he wouldn’t have handled things well two years ago. Now, he did. That put him at least a year ahead of his first-life self, maybe more.

After he’d run the gauntlet (which clearly both surprised and pleased him) he said, “So, how’s your year been?”

“Um ... weird?” I said, chuckling.

“It was weird the last time we talked. Weirder?”

“Let me ask about your year first. If I start with mine, we’ll just go down the rabbit hole and never come out.”

He chuckled. “Okay! I’ve been to two tournaments so far — Lamar and College Station. We qualified at Lamar, which I hate to say I expected, but I did. This will be my last in-state tournament this fall. We’re going to Emory, where I think you went last year.”

“Emory was great! You’ll have fun, I’m sure. We qualified at Cy Fair. I still need an Extemp qual.”

“Me, too! Anyway, rabbit hole time.”

“Okay ... well ... the biggest thing was an invitation to a conference in D.C. called ‘Youth are Our Future’. It was ... interesting. Mostly good. I met some pretty cool kids, and plenty that weren’t as cool as they thought they were. I also met President Reagan.”

“You did not!” he said, eyes wide.

“I did. Only for a few minutes, but they were a very cool few minutes.”

“I’d imagine so!”

“Don’t expect him to quote me by name anytime soon. It wasn’t that sort of meeting. Still, it was quite the trip.”

“Sounds like it!”

“Anything else new with you?”

He sighed, smiling. “Carolyn is great! Seriously ... I mean, well ... oh, heck, I don’t know what I mean. We’re talking about going to the same college. I’m really hoping it works. I kinda ... I know what I don’t know, and I’m scared I’m going to blow it, but ... well, better to have loved and lost than never have loved at all.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Angie perk up at the name.

“I’ve got a picture,” he said.

“I’d love to see,” I said.

He pulled out his wallet and produced a picture. He was in a suit — probably the same one he was wearing now — and she was in a nice teal dress. Very pretty, too. She had more than a passing resemblance to Sarah Weiss.

Angie got a look over his shoulder and gave me a tiny shake of her head. Good! That would’ve been a ridiculous coincidence, but then ... Laura. We were going to be on guard for a while.

“She’s very pretty,” I said. “She looks quite a bit like a friend of mine, Sarah Weiss.”

“Her last name is Weiss! I wonder if they’re related?” Dave said.

“That’d be kinda cool,” I said.

“It would be!”

He rambled on for a bit about how great she was. I completely recognized it, both from how I’m sure I sounded sometimes about Jasmine (and had about Candice and Nancy) and from how I knew I’d sounded a long time ago about my ex-wife. Not even ‘before the troubles started’ — she was always special, always someone I could love, just not always someone I could like very much.

We wrapped up as competition time came close, promising to give each other hell if we wound up in a round together, and hoping to do so (though I teased him that Memorial would just take all of the slots in semifinals and that would be that).

Talking to Dave was the highlight of the evening. Neither of our opponents were all that strong, and rounds against a weak opponent often feel flat. They weren’t bad, just comparatively weak. Sometimes rounds against truly bad teams turn into a jumbled mess.

Both of us were well aware that there was a thin line between being realists and letting our ego run away from us. This wasn’t a tournament that would help with that. Most likely the ToC qualifiers on our slate would do that. With four qualifiers, only two which counted against the in-state limit, we’d have plenty of top competition to hone our skills before we got up to State.

Privately, we had a goal to meet ToC’s qualifying requirements even though we didn’t need to. If we couldn’t qualify again, that said something about us, and it wasn’t something good.

Extemp, meanwhile, was fine in the usual way. I had no idea how well my competition had done, but I felt like my rounds were as good as they’d ever been. Amit (and Ted) had been, and always would be, far better than I was, but I was certainly good enough to get to State.

The tournament pretty much ran on time, and we were back at our motel and in bed by eleven. However boring we might be in terms of our work ethic, we were hardly boring elsewhere, and I had a feeling we might stay up late tomorrow. The motel was well suited to it, and it’d been a while since we’d had the opportunity.

Of course, that was predicated on there being something to celebrate, which was why we had the early night tonight.

We did have a bit to celebrate, anyway. Meg had gotten word that Memorial had beaten Westchester 42-14 in what was described as a ‘snoozer.’

I gave Jas a kiss goodnight, plus a big hug for Angie, Cammie, and Paige. At least, that was the plan. It turned out Paige wanted a kiss, too (if a more chaste one than the one Jas got), and then Cammie startled me by also wanting a kiss.

Jaya gave me a wink during that, but nothing more. I don’t think anyone saw, or at least anyone who didn’t know. Based on my understanding of girls, though, I wouldn’t have been in the least surprised if every girl knew, even the new kids.

Saturday, October 15, 1983

Another day, another tournament. Our first round of the day was bland, but our second round was not bland.

My assumption was that they’d paired us high-high, which would be common enough, and made sense given that our opponents were Blaine Davidson and Carlo Gutierrez from Grapevine, who we’d last seen in semifinals at Northwestern.

Notwithstanding that either they or we would have a loss after this round, we greeted them warmly, and they greeted us back just as warmly. Just like us, they were qualified for State and viewed this tournament as mostly a chance to get out of town along with a way to keep sharp.

Both of us toned it down considerably from semifinals. Our judge here was a local businessman (yes, we asked) judging the fourth round he’d ever judged. Our judges at Northwestern were veterans with over one hundred rounds each. If we did here what we’d done there, we’d both leave our poor judge in the dust, which is generally considered to be a bad idea.

We both slowed down, took time to be more rhetorical, and emphasized everything just a bit more. It was fun to have a round like that and know the other team would follow. Just like a round against a really bad team, a round where one team is paring things down and the other is going full-speed is a mess, and you have no idea which the judge will pick. Would it be the one whose arguments were understandable, or would they pick the one that was fast, and possibly incomprehensible, on the theory that all of that sound and fury must have signified something?

Neither of us wanted that gamble. Besides that, we actually pretty much liked Blaine and Carlo, and neither team wanted to win a junk round in that fashion. There were solid odds we’d see them again.

They’d brought in burgers for lunch. Not a bad choice, as long as no one dumped ketchup in a bad place. As paranoid as we all were about our nice clothes, I’d seen people have to compete with a big ketchup splotch prominent on their white shirt or light-colored dress. Sucked to be them, I’m sure.

Around one, the postings went up and Cammie and Paige hopped into action.

The breaks were a bit more interesting than usual. Cammie and I broke in CX, as did Angie and Gene and Natasha and Penny. The interesting part was that neither Anne and Megan nor Sue and Amit broke. We can’t all break at every tournament, but it felt strange.

Extemp was more familiar ground. Amit (of course), Cammie, me, Angie, Gene, and Natasha all broke. Meanwhile, in LD, Jaya, Janice, and Eric advanced.

In Drama, we had all of the duo teams left, along with Jas, Sheila, Paige, Angie, and Sierra in Dramatic and Lexi, Sara, Paige, Jas, Marsha, and Gordon in Humorous.

I had to remind myself that this was just Memorial’s third tournament of the year. Those who hadn’t qualified had two more chances this year, plus several next year, to qualify. We were doing great for this point in the season, especially with the significant restrictions we were under compared to last year.

My quarterfinals Extemp round was interesting. And, by ‘interesting,’ I mean ‘potentially embarrassing.’

One of the topic choices I drew was one that I imagine someone wrote a while back and hadn’t weeded: ‘President Reagan has seemed to indicate that the Republican Party needs to welcome people it hasn’t done well at welcoming. Is this realistic, and what are his chances of success?’

Nothing about me, directly, nor even my quote, but the subtext was clear, and I would certainly have a unique take on it. The problem was, it was very likely too unique.

I went with ‘What steps should the United States take in response to the downing of KAL-007?’ My response was largely that we were doing the right things: a coordinated pressure campaign to get the Soviets to admit fault and change their behavior.

I couldn’t say it in the round, but my feeling was that, in a strange way, KAL-007 might have saved the world. It was hardly public knowledge now, and wouldn’t be for more than a decade, but only a few weeks after the KAL-007 incident, the world possibly came very close to global thermonuclear war when a Soviet early warning system malfunctioned and indicated a US missile attack on mainland Russia. A Soviet officer (whose name I couldn’t remember) decided the warning was a mistake and waited. Had he followed policy and reported it, the Soviet Union might well have launched a ‘counterstrike.’