I Hope My Daughter Becomes a Debater

This week the National Speech and Debate Association (formerly known as, and still called by some die-hards, the National Forensics League or NFL) is hosting its national tournament in the sleepy Kansas City suburb of Overland Park, Kansas. I’ve been lucky in that I was asked to judge in the event now known as “Congressional Debate” formerly called “Student Congress” (again, still called that in certain quarters. Speech and debate is chock full of traditionalists, you see.)

While I am admittedly a nostalgic person and watching these high school students at this tournament almost by necessity reminded me of my own time at the NFL national tournament in San Antonio in the summer of 1984, I didn’t really get all misty thinking of my own alleged glory days. I mean I did, sort of. But what I really did was think of all the great things debate and speech brought to my life and all I could think was how much I hope that my own daughter, a bright ten year old, will one day choose to be a debater. God knows she’s got the bloodlines for it. I was a pretty good debater, winning my share of tournaments, oftentimes with luck and a partner who wasn’t necessarily great with argument but was a great orator and could charm the hell out of any mom or grandmother in our way, and moms and grandmothers are a staple of Kansas high school debate judging. And my wife was a state champion debater. (Although I often tease her that state champion of any state with “Dakota” in it doesn’t count or counts for less, but the fact is, she won a state championship and I never did, whether there was a “Dakota” in there or not.) So there’s plenty of reason to think that my daughter, if such things are genetic, would have a predisposition to getting up in a room full of strangers and arguing non-stop for eight minutes, pausing only to take a breath, about any topic a faceless committee might choose to select. God knows she can already talk for an ungodly length of time without pause. All she needs is some coaching to focus and make her points a bit more cogent. 

As I was watching these kids debate this week, all of them at pinnacle of competition, the national level, I kept thinking of the odd circumstances that led me to debate, what I got out of it and how I owe debate much more than I can ever repay it. While I won’t force my daughter into it, it would be fitting that she goes into it because it’s entirely possible that without debate, she wouldn’t be here. The reason I got into debate was for the same reason teenage boys do pretty much everything: a girl. There was a girl I’d long had a crush on and she was on the debate team and she asked me if I would do her a favor and agree to be a timekeeper for our school’s debate tournament that weekend. Unable to say no to her, I agreed and as soon as I saw what a debate was, I knew it was something I wanted to do. It was too late in the academic year to take the class and join the team, but I was only a freshman and I knew that the following year I was going to join. That may have been the first ever goal I set for myself a full year in advance but it never left my mind and I stayed true to it. (A brief coda about the girl, her name was Joanie and I never so much as asked her out. However, later that year she moved to Canada and when I invented my imaginary Canadian girlfriend, I always mentally pictured her.)

 Until I started debating, I was always a pretty smart kid who lacked confidence and didn’t really know what to do with myself. I had no real direction and no aspirations. I was no athlete and I wasn’t one of the popular kids. I didn’t have much of anything, really. I had friends, good friends, but I was a tabula so rasa that I didn’t have any idea what I was or what I was going to be except a kid who shambled from one class to the next, hoping not to get noticed because nothing good ever came from getting noticed. I wasn’t a troublemaker and I wasn’t depressed, I wasn’t much of anything really. But debate focused me. My coach, a man I credit for shaping me more than anyone else other than my parents, saw talent in me and he worked with me, helped me learn to think critically, helped me learn to sharpen my brain and learn to spot weaknesses and learn to create strengths. I’ve told him before how grateful I am, but I still don’t think he fully understands just how big an influence he had on me. Or maybe he just isn’t all that sappy and doesn’t want to hear it, which is understandable. (All this is to say nothing of my college coach, a brilliantly funny, wry and sarcastic grad student who taught me as much about rock music as about debate and that knowledge as helped me as much as anything else he ever imparted to me.)

 Aside from greater confidence and a sharper mind, debate gave me skills I still use today. I got mad skills in research, public speaking (duh.) and it helped my grades because no debater wants to be the debater with bad grades. And you would think that would all be enough. And you would be right to think that. But debate gave me so much more.

Where to begin? Let’s see…Well, debate gave me a nemesis. How many high school kids do you know that have a nemesis? Not a person you don’t like or even a person you dislike intensely, but a real, honest to god person that was placed there by the gods as divine retribution for the sins you committed? And for that matter, how many of you were someone else’s nemesis in high school? Well, I had Skip. Skip was another debater and damn he was good. He was much, MUCH better than me. He was better than pretty much everybody. He knew it too. And he let you know it. I had a special enmity in my heart for Skip but so did a lot of other people. People liked beating him but they didn’t do it very often because he was able to back up the smack he threw around (also he had one of the best coaches in the country, a true hall of famer, and he always seemed to have an amazingly talented partner right there with him. Sometimes things just aren’t fair.). Still, Skip and I seemed to take a special delight in needling each other, although I can only speak for myself. I can only remember debating Skip two times (although we surely met more often than that) and we each won one. The thing is, the debate that I won was not only the far more important debate, it was also the far more controversial decision. Let me put it this way: If I had been a judge, I would not have voted for us. Now, I never once got an apology for a debate I unreasonably lost so I am not going to offer once now, but debate not only gave me a nemesis, (which, again, is a pretty cool thing for a high school kid to have) it gave me a chance to get pretty deeply under the skin of said nemesis.

The really cool part is that now that we are 30 years past high school, skip and I have developed what I think is actually a genuinely warm friendship (via Facebook, natch, as we no longer live in the same state). We still occasionally argue politics (he calls me a liberal moonbat, but he’s right), but we’re both well past the need to flex those muscles , our mutual respect having been long ago earned. I look forward to one day shaking his hand and buying him a cold beer and not feeling like I’m choking back bile as I drink with him.

“Oh, sure,” my daughter will say. “Debate gave you confidence, speaking skills, a sharper mind and a nemesis who turned out to be a friend but what else did it give you, huh, Dad? What else?” “Well, sweetheart,” I could tell her “How about a first kiss or a first girlfriend?” except that those things would probably send her into paroxysms of either laughter or vomiting because who wants to think of their parents in such a fashion (although both of those possibilities for HERSELF would still doubtless be very intriguing)? I could tell her about the fact that one of the competitors in my Congressional Debate chamber at the national tournament is the son of Anne Gorsuch Burford, former administrator of the EPA and that he is now a Tenth Circuit Federal Court Judge. I could tell her that in my time in debate I went against such luminaries as author Thomas Frank and famous political hack and demagogue, Kris Kobach. I could tell her that she will form friendships that will last a lifetime (seriously, I am friends with so many debaters I'm not sure I can count them. Then again, debaters aren't typically very good at math), that she will be challenged by these friends but always nurtured by the shared experience and that she will be part of a long line of great thinkers and smart people who share their time with the people who come after them because they understand that the people who came before them learned from the people who came before THEM. It’s her life and I’m not going to push her into it, but I really, REALLY hope my daughter becomes a debater. Too much good stuff for her and I don't want her to miss it.