Jake, Part 3, conclusion

I know you. What you want to hear are the tales of the raw underbelly of the Jake adventure. The gossip. The clashes of titans behind the scenes. Blood on the saddle. Raw emotions tossed into the fire and burned to a crisp (does that make any sense at all?). You want to know where the bodies were buried, and who buried them.

Who am I to disappoint a waiting public?

At any tournament there are moments of magic that one simply will never forget. Running a tournament frazzles the best of us. You spend weeks stressing out over everything that can go wrong, and if you’re any good you’ve covered the major potential disasters, but then something tiny yet unexpected sneaks up on you and you grab the nearest novice and rip off the poor child’s head just to get your frustrations out. But Jake was, I’m sorry to say, mostly devoid of such moments.

Nevertheless, the person I can only refer to as Woman in Prison was there, and she managed to wreak her usual havoc. It’s amazing how one judge can screw up a tournament. Say something untoward to the students, then disappear into the cloud for half an hour, then show up the minute your ballot has been pushed and demand that the idiot tab staff get their act together immediately or you’ll…you’ll…plotz! We first thought, after our original encounter, that WIP was some sort of parent, which at least provided the excuse of benighted ignorance, but I gather she’s a coach. May the Lord have mercy on her team’s heathen souls.

Then there was the balanced diet moment. I missed the precipitating event personally, but I gather someone commented that the Jake parents, in their masterful care and feeding of five or six hundred kids, coaches and assorted lunatic judges over the long weekend, were relying a little heavily on the starches in their main courses. Heaven forfend, there was pasta amidst the Tastes of the Mediterranean! As the VCA knows well, I am the first to point out that Tastes of the Antarctic or the Veldt or the Hindu Kush or whatever is, well, pretentious, but O’C is a man who eats pretentious for breakfast Tastes of America (AKA bagels) and then posts photos of it on WTF, so a lot of good that does me. But needless to say, given the hard work of his parents seeing to hospitality and given what a great job they did, when faced with criticism O’C was less than abiding. Simply put, we had to chain him to a desk in tab and hose him down for half an hour, no easy feat in a building with only marginal running water.

On the plus side, the second award ceremony, which O’C promised would be brief, lasted less than an hour. This is brief, indeed, in O’C-ian terms. We could save, oh, fifteen or twenty minutes easily just eliminating the introductions. That is, someone has to introduce the captain of the team who introduces the president of the team who introduces the assistant coach’s mother-in-law and fourth cousin twice removed and then there’s a drum roll and O’C, who’s been standing over to the side wishing he had worn his Liberace costume, is finally announced and he bursts onto the stage and thanks the captain of the team and the president of the team and the assistant coach’s mother-in-law and fourth cousin twice removed and Liberace, and you start to long for the CatNats thankathon, if you know what I mean. And, of course, the trophies are, as they say on the Riviera, de trop. When the eleventh place speaker award requires a forklift, you know you’ve gone a little overboard.

On Sunday, after the final round, we began the Round Robin. In the morning O’C and I laid it out, and aside from forgetting one or two things, like the fact that judges couldn’t judge their own kids, we got it sorted out pretty well. We only did two rounds that day, on the assumption that most people were pretty tuckered out, and headed down to O’C’s favorite restaurant where we were greeted by his grandfather—yep, my reaction was the same as yours—and then dug into some incredibly good Japanese food. It’s amazing how much raw fish the average adolescent can put away. They bring out these sushi boats the size of, well, a Jake trophy, and eleven seconds later the ship is totally abandoned. Our original plan of Brazilian food was lost in our restaurant being closed Sunday night, but it was probably for the best. That many adolescents tucking into beans the way they were tucking into sushi could not have a positive outcome.

I did judge a round on Monday, in which I learned that morality is not related to what one ought to do—who knew?—and I sort of overheard the final round but didn’t pay much attention because it would have required much more attention than I was able to drum up at that point in the proceedings. It seemed fast but, at least, clearly presented. As for the content, it seemed to have everything but the kitchen sink. I gather you can watch it’s fraternal twin brother from the main tournament on WTF. So, make your own judgment.

Anyhow, that was that. Henceforth and forthwith, what we have is a firmly established Big Jake on the $ircuit, for better or worse. The New York City Invitational, once a jewel in the forensic crown, is a jewel again. This will be a hot ticket for a long time coming. In this business programs come and go, and tournaments come and go, and usually once they’re gone, they don’t come back. Big Bronx is back. O’C made it happen. I applaud him (and, having said something nice about him, can now go back to torturing him for the next year or so).