Dance With The Girl You Brung
One of the things I have noticed about getting older is that you start to understand more about the universal truth of some cliches. You'll hear phrases all your life and never give them a second thought, but at some point something happens and you'll realize, "Oh. I get it now."
I have just such a reaction whenever I hear a variation on the "Dance with the girl you brought" cliche. You might also hear it phrased as, "Stick with what works", or "Stay the course", but the ultimate meaning is usually the same: Don't mess with success. Wait. That's a cliche, too. But you know what they all mean, and likely have some of your own life experiences that have helped you see the wisdom involved.
This is a story about college debate. A lot of my audience has extensive experience with that activity, but for those of you who don't, I need to give you some general sense of what college debate is (or at least, was) like when I was in the activity. It's not about standing in front of a crowd and making sweeping hand gestures while offering grand rhetorical statements of truth and supposition. Nor is it about "having arguments", in the tit-for-tat way that most people might imagine.
Rather, college debate is/was about a very specific topic, say, whether or not the Supreme Court has given too much authority with certain decisions. A given debate round consists of two two-person teams debating against each other in front of one or more judges, who decide the outcome of the debate. More than anything, debate is about two things: specific rules of engagement, and time.
Debate has a highly structured set of rules. Arguments are made and responded to in very specific ways. It not only matters what you say or how you say it, it can matter when you say it and why. And these rules are not intuitive; you can't just walk in off the street and have a debate in this fashion. It takes years of training, typically, for one to grasp the various rules and strategies involved. Put simply, a college debate would be largely unrecognizable to a lay person as a "debate"; it would look nothing at all like Presidential debates, for example.
That's assuming, of course, that a lay person could understand a single word spoken in the debate. That's where that second factor-time-comes into play. You see, each participant in the debate must advance their arguments and strategy in a limited amount of time, usually 10 minutes or 5 minutes per speech, depending on which part of the debate they take place in. One of the rules of debate is that you must respond to things your opponent says in their speech, and if you don't, the un-responded-to argument is considered to be a true statement.
Well, take that logic to it's ultimate conclusion, and you can see what happens. If I can make 10 arguments in my speech, and you only answer 8 of them, then 2 of my arguments will be considered as conceded and therefore "true". If those arguments are good enough in and of themselves to defeat your overall position on whether, say, the Supreme Court has too much power, then I will win the debate.
See where this is going? The time limits on speeches and the rules of engagement heavily encourage fast talking. Let me emphasize: Fast. You would barely be able to understand a word of it. Trust me. You'd think college debaters were stark raving mad if you saw one of these debates. There were true stories of debaters doing demonstration debates in front of their administrations, who were so horrified by what they saw that they immediately pulled the plug on the funding. Of course, fast talking (speed, we used to call it) is an acquired skill, both to say and to hear it. Since the judges were often former debaters, this speed permeated most every debate. These were not exercises in rhetorical grandness, although the great ones had that ability and knew how to use it when the time was right.
There is a third, and very important factor in college debate: research. These were not off-the-cuff, "here's my example" mental and verbal exercises at warp speed. A typical debate would involve making a claim, and then supporting that claim with researched evidence. For example, one year my partner (Jim of Hyperbole) and I were running a case on an advertising good/bad topic that said that tobacco advertising was bad, because it led to a lot of people smoking that wouldn't otherwise. And we read excerpts from many books and articles and such that supported our various claims. While debates were could just as easily be decided by shrewd analysis, tactical victory or technical error, "evidence", as we called the excerpts was the meat and potatoes of most of the debates. If the other team had better evidence than you did, you needed to be good, fast and persuasive to have a chance to win. It also didn't hurt if the judge(s) liked you.
Gosh, I know that's a lot of background, but debate's a hard thing to explain to people who didn't live through it, and it's the only way this story is going to make any sense at all.
So, then. Dancing with the girl you brung. Here's the story...
It was my fourth (of five) years as a college debater. Jim and I were a strong team, one of the top 8 or so teams in the country. After a strong regular season, we felt that we had a legitimate chance to win the 1991 National Tournament, in Bellingham, WA. Other teams were better than we were that year, but we were certainly in the mix. We had been highly successful with a very good case on the Bowers v. Hardwick sodomy decision, which essentially turned out to be true, given last year's overturn. And, we had an aerial surveillance case that pretty much kicked ass, too, that the Supreme Court had OK'd certain types of aerial surveillance, and how that opened the door to all kinds of nasty things from a rights perspective.
You only run your cases when you are affirmative, roughly half the time. I bet we didn't lose 5 affirmative debates all year, out of well over 70. At no point in the year did we ever encounter any arguments against these cases that we couldn't beat, largely because the cases were true. The losses were, from our point of view, either a result of bad judging decisions (Hello, Dick Lesicko!) or correctable errors on our part.
So, what do we do? We tried to get slick, we busted a little chuckle and we said, "Sure, we could beat everybody with these cases that are tried and true and established and that other people fear, for which we have reviewed all possible literature and find no viable counter-argument to exist. Or, we could show how brilliant we are by trying to put together some wacky new case."
Dumb decision, right? It gets dumber. A LOT dumber. First, we don't even research the case ourselves. We go to our friend Greg, who debates in a different kind of format, and we take his case, designed for a very different topic. It's about whaling, says that whaling is bad for a variety of reasons. The catch is, the Supreme Court handed down a ruling that allowed certain kinds of whaling. Therefore, it's topical for us. Brilliant! Nobody's even come close to running a whaling case on our circuit. How mighty we will feel when we see the stunned looks of horror on our opponents faces!
But there were problems. First, as any second-year high school debater will tell you, it's a bad idea to run cases that you personally didn't research. Not that there was a problem with Greg's evidence, necessarily, but you just always want to know the ins and outs of your case. Second, Greg's coach, a certified weasel who didn't like Greg, went straight to our arch-rival (and the eventual National Champion) Kansas State, and told them what was up. So they had the goods on our "secret" case before they ever arrived in Bellingham. Third, some of the evidence was a little on the old side, by a few months. But who cared, right? It's not like anybody we debate is going to have a single piece of whales evidence to read against us. Plus, we were so much smarter and better and all of that, you see.
So we head to Bellingham with our whales files tucked neatly away in some file labeled "Super Secret" or some such thing designed to amuse us. We blaze through the first seven preliminary rounds with a 6-1 record, I believe. All is going well, and the Moby Dick strategy is still under wraps (in our minds, anyway).
We go into round eight, and we face one of our main rivals, a team from Missouri-Kansas City. (Don't let the college names fool you. Little schools have great teams for some odd reason, while many big schools don't.) We'd like to stick it to these guys a little bit, so we figure we'll harpoon them in style with our super secret case. Besides, we needed the practice with it, because we hadn't had it very long.
Ding, ding, ding! Warning! You see two extreme problems with this decision. First, we haven't practiced with this case very much at all. Never mind that we have literally dozens of rounds of experience against top-flight competition with our other cases. We haven't supported our plan with preparation. Second, and I know this seems somewhat obvious now, in retrospect, but if we run that case in round 8, when the main elimination rounds are to take place tomorrow morning, wouldn't that give time for, you know, word to get around about this new case?
Yes. Yes, it would. But we were so much smarter and better and all of that, you see.
As it turned out, I think we lost that last round on some kind of non-whale related issue. Hard to say, since there was a TV in the room and we were busy watching KU play North Carolina in the Final Four. Always good for a debate. But no matter. We were going to charge through the rounds of 64 and 32 that night, then be one of the final 16 starting the day tomorrow, and then charge on to the Finals on the back of Moby Dick.
We slept like babies that night, while unbeknownst to us, the other 15 teams in the tournament caught wind of the whales and feverishly set about finding evidence. Gee, who could have anticipated that?
First thing in the morning, we hit a very good team from Gonzaga. (Isn't it just like Gonzaga to get to the Sweet Sixteen?) They were smart guys that we liked a lot personally, but light on the whales evidence, and the outcome went our way.
Ah, the Elite Eight. Our draw? UCLA. They were a good team, but we had pretty much had our way with them in the few times we had met in the past. And what do you know? We flip the coin, and we end up affirmative.
Do we "Dance with the girl we brung", meaning we run either of our two established and feared cases, Bowers v. Hardwick or aerial surveillance? Or do we opt for our shiny (not-so) new plankton-eating toy. Hell, I don't even remember us having a discussion about it. There were over 200 people in the auditorium. How could we not show them our brilliance and versatility?
I stand and read the case to open the debate. Jim and I smirk at one another, as if to say, "Wonder who we'll be debating next round?"
Then, it's their turn to speak. The first guy, John Dean was his name, stands. "Hmm," I remember thinking to myself. "He sure does seem to have a rather large stack of papers that he wants to read..."
And then he started. He started fast, and got faster. It wasn't the speed that was the problem, not at all. It's that he was making specific arguments. Arguments about whales. Reading specific evidence, also about whales. Also about the Japanese economy, and a host of other very specific things that had to do with our case. And he kept reading, and reading, and reading. It was almost as though they had known we were going to be running this whales case. But how?
There was another problem, a much larger problem. Their evidence was better than ours. It was also substantially newer than ours. It probably took us about three minutes to realize exactly what was happening, and few more to realize the extent of it, how incredibly fucked we were. Bear in mind, all of this is happening in a room packed with people, most of whom we knew. It was so embarrassing, all we could do was laugh, really. It was a bad way to go.
In the end, we did lose the debate, with all three judges voting against us, though it ended up being closer than it should. When it was all over, and the room was clearing out, all that was left for us to do was to start drinking, heavily. Fortunately, Jim's future wife Melissa was there with a giant bottle of Southern Comfort, and we nursed that quietly as we watched two teams that we beat all year long match up in the semifinals. The UCLA team ultimately lost in the finals to Kansas State, who was a deserving winner.
It coulda been us.
But we got caught up in the heat of the moment, and somehow we lost sight of our strengths and fell in love with this clever little trick that wasn't all that clever or tricky in the first place. We were like a football team that pounded teams with the run all year, then in the game to get to the Super Bowl fell in love with a bunch of finesse, trick pass plays. Oh, and had the other team steal our play book before the game. No, wait, we left the play book out in their lockerroom before the game. Yeah, that's about it.
Our coach knew not to say much to us after the debate. He didn't have to. But late that night, as he and I lagged behind the rest of the team walking into a restaurant, he told me in his deep Oklahoma drawl: "Doug, sometimes you got to dance with the girl you brung." At the time, I just wanted to punch him in his fat face, although that was probably the Southern Comfort influence. But it turned out to be one of the smartest things he ever said to me in my five years with him.
Too bad he waited till after the debate to say it, but we wouldn't have listened anyway.
2:33:43 PM 
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