In which we explain the particular nature of last weekend's tournament

My favorite Columbia moment from the past:

“We’re missing only one ballot, and then we can pair the first break round!”

“Where’s that ballot? Who’s the judge? Let’s call him.”

Mutter mutter mutter mutter call call call.

“Uh-oh.”

“What?”

“The judge is gone.”

“What do you mean, gone? Get him. Where is he?”

“He went home to China.”

One of the most interesting facts about debate tournaments is that each one has a particular character that endures from year to year, despite any attempts to change it. College tournaments obviously have a conveyor belt of tournament directors, and other venues lose their coaches or whatnot, events are added and subtracted or changed from JV to Novice or Varsity to Academy, we incorporate a new activities like PF—nothing matters. A tournament is what it is, and it always is. Everything in life should be so reliable.

The particular character of the Gem is, first, there is no such thing as a room. On the back end, getting rooms confirmed is a nightmare of humongous proportions. We were still working on it the day of the tournament. Somehow the tabroom software was sentient enough to realize that we were doing the tournament we were doing, and went off the tracks with, you guessed it, room assignments when we paired round one (requiring a desperate call to CP who patiently explained that I was an idiot for not being able to read his mind and helped us out, but the problem is, in the Traveling Tab Room only O’C is capable of reading CP’s mind—he is a whiz at figuring out what CP was intending, making him the Scalia of CP originalism—which is scary both to CP and O’C to a mutual—defined as the same—degree).* On top of that, the Room Police at one of the venues decided that the 10 o’clock reservation ended at about 9 o’clock, causing a mass exodus into the cold to other venues spread across the campus.

Secondly, the weather is always just bad enough to kill you, but not bad enough to cancel the tournament. Nevertheless, the number of students not wearing coats is a constant. Come to think of it, the number of students not wearing coats at the January tournaments was identical for Columbia, Lexington and the Sunvite.

Third, while we post all the information on tabroom and send oodles and oodles of updates, most people attending the tournament prefer to get their information from the person I now know as Some Columbia Kid. Some Columbia Kid, who has no official standing in the tournament and is assigned no particular job, has been at every Gem I’ve attended since working in tab, and I’m not quite sure if it is the same person every year or simply an identity taken on by different persons over the passage of time (I suspect it’s the former), but Some Columbia Kid is always telling people the wrong times for the rounds, the wrong places for the ballots, and the wrong rooms to go to debate. Some Columbia Kid might possibly be Mr. Met’s job during the off-season. Sounds plausible. In any case. if I ever actually run into Some Columbia Kid, I’m going to have to kill him. (And it is true that no other college tournament has anything like him. He, or she, is entirely a local phenomenon.)

Fourth, something seriously nutty always happens in the tabbing. During the break rounds, apparently Some Columbia Kid misentered not one but three ballots, giving a win to the wrong student. We had to recall pairings for the following round, but the disaster was actually minimal, and we were quickly able to assign judges to the correct pairing without a major overhaul. But when we did, the kid who hadn’t advanced remained on the pairing. We couldn’t get rid of him. We gave him a loss, we dropped him, we forfeited him, we threatened his life with a railway share, but all to no avail. Eventually I think I gave him a panel in a subsequent round and had them drop him (on a 2-1; no need to be overzealous), but he was the Rasputin of debaters and that’s a fact. Fortunately he had left the campus and didn’t see his name on every schematic after he’d been eliminated. For that matter, even after we got rid of him he left behind an empty room on the pairings. Rasputin indeed! Similarly, the lovely and talented Ben K, who was only scheduled to judge on Sunday, was assigned to every round on Saturday. We removed him, blocked him, deactivated him and put him into the Witness Protection Program, and still he came up every time. For all I know, he also came up in Duo, Dec, Congress and the UDL tournament down in the Village. When he finally showed up as he was supposed to on Sunday, we all carefully approached him and touched him gently on the elbow, just to make sure he was real.

As I say, every tournament has its character. This is the Gem, every time, year after year. It’s an exhausting tournament, to put it mildly. But the kids running it did an excellent job, the fields were very strong, the tab room just kept chugging along (and we now have all the dirt on Aracelis, which we’ll husband until the time is right), and a splendid time was had by all.

And so to the MHL.


*If there was ever a sentence that is the quintessential example of my writing style, this is it. Two em-dash digressions in a parenthetical digression, plus a sarcastic dig about CP's use of MJP, another dig about the lack of intuitiveness of the software, a random mention of O’C who wasn’t even there, and an allusion to my favorite Supe. Sometimes I wonder why I bother using periods at all.