More than one strip of bacon!

The Breakfast of Champions. That's what JW calls it. And I guess that's what it is. The final day of TOC is kicked off with an expensive gala where everyone sits down and eats for an hour, and then the festivities begin and there's various talks and whatnot, and finally awards, and then it's off to more rounds or home, depending on how one has spent the previous couple of days.

Maybe I’m just getting sour sourer in my old age, but I felt, as I explained when I started the TOC series, that the sentiments of the breakfast were out of whack with the reality of the place. Everyone celebrated the values of debate, but TOC is really not about those values. I think I’ve talked enough about how I feel about that. Not that the speakers weren’t genuine in their sentiments; in fact, the keynote speaker, a former debater, was one of the best I’ve ever heard. But one didn’t arrive at this particular TOC in LD and not know that the bad feeling surrounding it was deep and scarring. Dave Huston admirably tried to address this as preface to announcing the LD awards, but there wasn’t much that could be done in that venue. For a lot of us, it was the elephant in the room. It still is. Not that it was TOC’s fault, beyond the problem of the closed committee, which was merely a footnote to the issue. The fault lies not in our tournament but within ourselves.

The dais at the breakfast comprises the cream of the TOC crop. You can mix in a lot of the cream of the NFL crop in there too while you’re at it, because there’s a bunch of overlap. Like I said, Big Debate. But they’re all very nice people, I would imagine. I don’t know many of them all that well. I certainly don’t believe that they’re some sort of evil-doers presiding over an evil event. There’s nothing wrong with a debate competition for competition’s sake; that’s not what I’ve been contending. I’ve maintained that it’s gone off or going off the tracks because it’s been injected with too many metaphorical steroids. But, again, I’ve said all that. Enough is enough.

(Maybe I was just in a crappy mood that weekend. I had a terrible cold, my Aged P had been driving me crazy, and my cat died in the middle of it. Let's see how much you love TOC under the weight of all that. Then again, I'm not saying anything all that revolutionary here. TOC is too concerned about the competition. Big revelation.)

I spent most of the breakfast sort of taking in the sights. As our keynote speaker explained at one point, in debate nobody cares how you dress, they only care how you argue, but jeesh—could name deleted send that poor, battered t-shirt to the laundry just this once? I mean, when I start noticing that people are poorly dressed, you know we’re in trouble. As with any event like this, I spent my share of time texting snide comments. I should point out that over the weekend there were all sorts of people to be noted in the coming and going column, who were apparently working the gig in aid of a new job: lots of changes next year, some moving around of the schedule, that sort of thing. I never did see Bietz, but I’ll bet he was there somewhere, unless maybe there was a new Apple product being released that weekend that he had to buy two of in every color. I did manage to break bread with CP at one point over the weekend; when I had the Big Ho, I think he ordered the Cheap Ho, if I remember correctly. (The name of the restaurant is Tolley-Ho. I’m not totally making this stuff up.)

After the breakfast we tabbed the late elim PF rounds sitting in a corner of the mezzanine, where people came by to chat or to see if I was really as evil as I had been portrayed in the press or to tell us that if a certain judge were put into a given round it would be the end of life on the planet as we know it. Meanwhile I tracked the Panivore on her triumphant march to Quarters, the best the Sailors have ever done on my watch. O’C took a great picture of us at my demand, which is almost as shocking as my complaining about the couture, but it was a moment to memorialize. I wasn’t all that negative about the weekend not to celebrate her great success. In a tournament that is all about the competition, to actually succeed at the competition is pretty remarkable.

We’ll talk more about the whole shebang on the next TFVT. I would guess that some demurrals to my positions will be offered. But other than that, I think I’m done with the subject. You probably are too.

Time to move on.