Word: geoff
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When I talked to the captain of the team, senior Geoff A. Smith ’10, he wore a green and white polo and talked with his hands. He seemed to be consciously slowing down his speech patterns so that I could perfectly understand him. He told me that this year, the team would be debating the following issue, as determined by the Cross Examination Debate Association, at all of its tournaments (he recited it from memory and I had to replay it three times on my recorder just to get it right): “The United States...
Such long-range attacks don’t materialize out of spontaneous witticism. Geoff described the summer of background reading, learning everything there is to know about the nuclear issue, and then as school got closer, beginning to zero in on specific arguments, searching for large quotes from obscure magazines, piecing the quotes together to make the case, then organizing them in files and sharing them among the team...
...down across from each other at a plastic table. This was my first interview with a debate person, before Geoff and his patient helpfulness, so I asked informational questions, and then just some silly ones...
...none of this could help me visualize PJ. I decided to cold e-mail them, without going through the captain or coach first. Geoff had told me their civilian names: Alex A. Parkinson ’11 and Eli J. Jacobs ’11. They e-mailed back quickly, but they were too busy to meet with me (schoolwork and prepping for tournaments). I could imagine them sitting at vast, thickly papered desks, sifting through files, and passing folders back and forth...
When I interviewed Cata Santos ’12, Geoff Smith’s debate partner, I tried to put PJ out of my head. Cata said things like, “You can think of debate as a game. Sometimes you have to play affirmative, sometimes you have to play negative. That’s just life.” When she says “topicality” she traces a “T” with her fingers, and when she reaches a driving point in her argument she pinches the tops of her fingers together...