Breathing Room

I Miss Ross

The last time I saw Ross in person, I was at the 2007-2008 National Debate Tournament. I was in the middle of chemotherapy. I was bald and green-colored. bumped into him by accident in a hallway outside a room where Wake was debating. We were both waiting on the decision. Ross was outside the door looking in, but when he saw me, he shouted, and came loping down the hallway to hug. When the decision came in, we left together to walk across the campus back to the main assembly area. Like most debate coaches, he knew I had cancer. We’d barely gotten outside when Ross lit his cigarette. At that NDT, most of the smokers walked away from me until I approached them. Others asked permission before lighting up nearby. Ross unhesitatingly chain-smoked as we walked. I guess he must’ve figured that if I had a problem, I’d say something (I would) and I knew what I was getting into when I offered to walk with him (I did).

I really enjoyed that conversation. Ross and I talked about the specific debate we were watching, about the tournament, and about his invovlement in local politics before he insisted on discussing my cancer. I was pretty sick of talking about my health. Somehow, it was a lot easier to chat with him about my tumors while his Camel Light hung precariously between us. I wonder if he knew I was there trying to take my life back from the cancer, and how happy I was that he didn’t alter his behavior to accomodate the disease.

The last time I talked with Ross was by e-mail. I asked him for some help with my speech to the Berkeley Forensics alumni. I asked him and a couple of other coaches to comment on the rebirth of debate at Cal and its significance. I think you can tell a lot about how much he cared for us by his response:

The return of Cal debate to the national scene has been a blessing and a curse.

The Phoenix-like rise from the ashes of whatever Cal debate had been (in the years before the last three decades when I have been in the activity) was a blessed exemplar for all who would aspire to debate well and successfully. Every program, extant, or dormant, can say, “See, this is what is possible.” No excuses.

But Cal’s rise has been a curse for all of those who thought they were ready to get a first-round bid, be the Copeland winner, or win any one of a number of tournaments. Many a school might have reached a milestone in recent years were it not for Cal.

I’m thankful to have heard and known the Cal debaters, that’s a blessing, too. I knew Dave Arnett before the rebirth of the program, that *was* a blessing, but when his teams knoock mine down, I curse.

—Ross Smith

I can’t remember the last time I was kept awake this late dwelling on thoughts human mortality. I feel like that’s an odd thing for a cancer patient to say, but it’s true. I certainly think about suffering, and I’ve dealt with death on a pretty regular basis for the last 2 years. During that time, my life has either been paralyzed by a life-threatening illness, or I’ve been healthy enough to work (on the global war on terror, or whatever-it-is-now) and study (war). Still, my way of dealing with the omnipresence of death hasn’t included much sitting around ruminating about its nature. For me, part of maturing has been learning the kinds of thoughts and ideas that push me onto a dark and unpleasant mental path, and turning away from them as much as possible. One thing I’ve learned from staring at my death - and having a severe atrial fibrillation and breathing through an airway compressed to the size of a soda straw will make you stare - is that thinking about it doesn’t seem to meaningfully prepare you for it. It’s a Thing - the Uknown, the Beyond - and whatever it is, it won’t disclose itself to you until you experience it. It’s a fundamentally unproductive line of inquiry, so why fixate?

Of course, it’s not really possible to live in the world connected to other living creatures and not bump into the trouble with mortality. People and animals get sick, they get hurt, and they sometimes die. No love without loss, and no life without risk, etc. etc. Still, I think there is something different about death - something that distinguishes it from illness and suffering. A few months ago, a teacher and friend I care about very deeply became ill. He was in great pain, and his life was at risk. I was simultaneously going through a medical crisis that ultimately became the return of my cancer, and it seemed that we were sharing a taste of the worst. Still, it rapidly became a long, shared slog, a journey we took the way anyone facing adversity does - with varying quantities of dignity and determination, one foot in front of the other, making steady if slow and painful progress until it resolved itself. Deaths seem more final, more absolute and lonesome.

Since being diagnosed, I have been repeatedly struck by the loneliness of physical pain. When I hurt, no matter how many people love me, rub my back, hold my hands, I still suffer alone - there’s nothing they can do to take my pain away or take some of it upon themselves. Simultaneously, I know they experience a kind of pain I can’t share as they powerlessly watch my discomfort. What we share is, paradoxically, our isolation. Death is like this, only more so, since where suffering can bring the sufferer and others close, death instantaneously sunders us from the dying.

When death is sudden or unexpected, and we have no chance to say goodbyes and conduct our rituals of parting, the sheer speed with which our friends and loved ones are torn away makes loneliness that much more stunning. It is everything about the crisis experience that attends illness or injury, except all the agency, contribution through action is stripped, and all the pain is compressed into a single temporal point instead of drawn out agonizingly. Sadly, I feel much better prepared for crises than sudden losses.

Ross Smith’s death smacks to me of the fantastic, the incredible. Staring at the type on my computer screen confirming his departure from our ranks doesn’t seem to make it any more real. I have never been to a funeral, though I’ve lost a couple of people I care about. I wonder if they help with the sense of unreality. Perhaps nothing but time - continual absence - adds a sense of reality to unforeseen deaths. Just weeks ago, I was talking about Ross’ teaching style with Arnett, my college debate coach. He was giggling and e-mailing me snippets of a debate theory lecture Ross was at that very moment delivering to a group of high school students. It was equal parts brilliant and hilarious, as Ross tended to be. I asked him if the kids could really appreciate Ross’ eccentric lecture style.

Some people reading this may never have met Ross. If so, you missed a truly unique character. He exhibited one of the telltale marks of a brilliant speaker - he was hard to understand, but so smart that pretty much everyone put forth the neccessary effort. Winston Churchill and JFK both had thick accents and curious diction that render listening to them challenging. Both are regarded as towering minds and orators, and hundreds, if not thousands of debaters and coaches held Ross in similarly high regard.

Ross was a tall and gangly man with a deep gravelly voice. Like Churchill, his voice was a product of his vices; he spoke, more often than not with a lit cigarette (a Winston, if memory serves) hanging miraculously from his lower lip and wreathed in smoke. Ross could keep a lit cigarette on his lip while doing a handstand and drinking bourbon. That alone borders on the miraculous. When I smoked, I tried repeatedly to replicate Ross’ hands-free posture. Thankfully, I didn’t ever try to speak that way, as I almost certainly would have lit myself and/or my home on fire. I modestly tried to keep a cigarette hanging while reading or typing. The invariable result was tearful, red-eyed catastrophe.

Ross had a mop of dark hair, and although he cleaned up nicely, in most of my memories I see him with an impressive five o’clock shadow speckled with grey and bags under his eyes. Perhaps I see him that way because we spent so many long three-day weekends competing against each other in blissful mutual exhaustion.

He could make me smile just by talking, and I’m not the only one. In the years after I stopped coaching and attending debate tournaments regularly, I would occasionally stop by a room where Ross was judging. I’d listen to him hold forth and explain his decision, just to hear the sound of his voice, his cadence and banter. He spoke in a melody that the deepest, most primitive, reptilian part of my brain has forever associated with college debate tournaments. Like listening to good music through a single headphone, the next tournament I attend will sound incomplete in his absence.

Chuck Jones, the brilliant Warner Brothers animator once said of Bugs Bunny that “every movement is Bugs and Bugs only, just as is his speech developed from a kind of vaudevilliant patois loaded with ‘deses’ and ‘doses’ to a fully cadenced speech in which he studiously inserts an occasional ‘ain’t’ in the same casual way as an Oxford graduate does.” Similarly, Ross spoke Ross, not English: spare sentences stripped of superfluous words and filler but generously larded with rhetorical questions: “ya’ know?” “m’kay?” and an indescribable grunt combined with a cocked head pushed forward on his neck an an inquisitive angle as if to ask, “you follow?” When he spoke, Ross moved. He had very long arms and legs, which he would stretch at seemingly painful angles behind his head and neck while delivering his lines. Particularly salient points would be delivered with both a simultaneous head-neck forward extension, a sudden, glasses-shifting nod and a sweeping, wingspan-stretching two-armed outward flap, and/or a sudden cock of the head and a loud clap of the hands. Every word and gesture was Ross and Ross only.

You may now appreciate why I asked Arnett if the students could appreciate Ross’ speaking style - one never knows if the uninitiated will be confused, intimidated or fittingly entertained and edified by someone as unique as Ross. These young students clearly knew a gem when they saw one: “whenever he claps, they all clap right back in unison.” Ross was the kind of performer who could appreciate the hilarity of this loving mockery without self-consciousness or explicity acknowledging its existence. He knew he was a character, but just as Bugs occasionally acknowledges the existence of the audience without seeming ingenuine, it was clear that Ross was always playing himself. I may be over-thinking this. I learned a lot about how to stage a speech as spectacle from watching Ross talk, but he might have just ignored the clapping because he was in Berkeley and used to being imitated.

Berkeley students of my generation were slavishly devoted to Ross. This began with long nights in tournament bars and playing poker. A good number of my teammates were excellent poker players, as was Ross. I suspect that Ross believed poker was a good measure of a debater’s intellect, and that as a result he came to respect the Cal debaters’ prowess long before some of his colleagues did. Ross didn’t just hang out with the students, either - he taught constantly, with complete candor and generosity, and universally. The most stubbornly stupid student would get an bottomless earful from Ross if the exhibited even a modicum of interest in what he had to say. He saw no lost causes. I know I learned a lot about debate from cigarette breaks and bar time with Ross. Cal debaters quickly grew to love Ross, and at some point began impersonating him.

At first we did this out of loving mockery. The Berkeley Debate patois was mostly comprised of strings of movie quotes, so quoting Ross-isms was a logical next step. We all learned Ross’ hand gestures, his posture, and his diction. At a certain point, we stopped quoting and started improvising. It’s hard to explain, but there were certain topics that by consensus could only really be discussed when all parties were imitating Ross Smith. I occasionally notice that even after I go months without seeing my old teammates, when we see each other, people slip into their Ross. Possibly the most entertaining aspect of our shared fascination with Ross is that it became a bit like code-switching. Code-switching occurs when a multilingual or multicultural person slips into the accent or language of those around them without thinking. Many of the Cal debaters of my generation were first generation immigrants, and I think they are intuitive code-switchers, like me. When talking to Ross, we sometimes would slip about 50% of the way into our impersonation of him. He never complained about this, to the best of my knowledge.

I did not meet Ross until college. At my first college tournament I was informed that Ross was someone deserving attention and respect. People sometimes forget that the UC Berkeley Golden Bears didn’t have much institutional credibility at the turn of the millennium. A lot of folks didn’t take us seriously. Ross never took anyone too seriously, but he made it clear that he respected us. I have always felt personally indebted to Ross and Al Louden, the head coaches at Wake Forest during my debating. Wake Forest is a historical debate powerhouse - my high school coach did his graduate degree there, as did many of the most prominent coaches. Being accepted and respected by Wake helped me - and I suspect, some other Cal students - come to respect myself.

In the college debate community ‘freshmen’ is a word usually pronounced with a sneer. They’re put through a certain amount of grief as a matter of course because they’re just learning the ropes both socially and competitively. Talented freshmen receive a unique brand of disdain from their older competitors fueled by a mixture of fear and justified aggravation. Generally, the more talented the student, the more arrogant and accustomed to respect he or she is, and the more aggressively negative the reaction from older students and coaches is. I’d already won national championships when I got to college, so I was fairly insufferable. The first adults I met in college who came from a school outside of Berkeley’s unofficial life support system and treated me decently were the Wake coaches.

My first memory of Ross is actually one of the most frequently quoted Ross-isms among Cal debaters. It is telling that what I remember is how Ross stood up for me. At our second tournament my freshman year (e.g., my third college debate experience, lifetime), we had yet to prove ourselves competitively. We were thrilled - and very surprised - to make it to the quarterfinals. There we encountered a team of two well-known and respected seniors. Despite the fact that we had clearly caught them flat-footed, they treated us generally, and me particularly, with disdain. I don’t think Ross was intentionally protective; in retrospect I think he was aggravated after two hours watching a team make losing arguments against a competitor they considered beneath courtesy.

At the time, I basically assumed we would win the debate just because we were technically ahead. These were arguments I wrote, I advanced them in my speeches, and I knew we were winning on the merits. If I were coaching me, I’d have taken this opportunity to disabuse myself of some freshman naivete. It takes a courageous judge to vote against an established and respected team in favor of a team with no reputation. We’d made arguments that many judges dislike for valid, if subjective, intellectual reasons - given the reputation factor and their preferences, most would take the safe route. In my experience, Ross was utterly above such concerns. One of our opponents, infuriated, tried to shout Ross down. He insistently, and increasingly loudly, insisted that he be heard. He then dissected the debate and made it clear that he thought our competitors had been undone, at least in part, by their stubborn arrogance.

Debate coaches are intensely competitive people. Rivalries can become intense, personal and mean. Races for the Copeland Award, which recognizes the best team of the course of a season can become downright ugly. Such races usually are waged between two, or at most three teams. I have seen several such competitions get completely out of hand, and coaches do not always stay above the fray. They care about their students, and care about the award, emotions run high, and suddenly they lose the capacity for civility. Bad blood accumulated in those races can last a long time. Ross was a mentor to me and my teammates. He was also the coach of the team we contended for the Copeland with most closely. Our race came right down the wire; our debates with Wake were exceedingly close and often infuriatingly so. Ross was always - and I mean without fail - friendly and supportive.

Ross was the first college coach to trust me to teach a group of high school students on my own. He also taught me about judging. My first year out of college, I made a very difficult judgment call in a late elimination round. It was a debate that hinged on a subjective matter of opinion, and one of the teams involved was from Wake. The Wake debaters clearly thought they were winning, and there were three judges on the panel. I and another judge voted against them. An older coach who won Judge of the Year a number of times voted for Wake. They were visibly and not unjustifiably upset. A few weeks later, we were at a party when one of the Wake students commented about my decision in that debate. At the time, I’d just been pushed around (physically, publicly and by a girl) and I was in no mood to let the matter lie. I took up the gauntlet and - politely but firmly - justified myself to the increasingly agitated student.

Ross was there. He could’ve stayed out of it, or taken his very upset student’s side. But he gave me the benefit of the doubt, and told the student that I was trying to give him useful information about how I, and possibly some other people who agreed with me, understood debates. He sat there and made sure that I was able to get my point across. Only in retrospect did I understand how wise this was: he was trying to teach his student how to treat judges, and the fundamental lesson that a debater’s job is to adapt arguments to suit the stated preferences of his/her judges. But he also made it clear - without saying anything - that I needed to be consistent in my judgment calls, or I’d permanently lose credibility. A dispute like this between a debater and a judge, if poorly handled, can result in a permanent breach. This student contacted me shortly thereafter to lavishly apologize, and I consider him a friend.

Yesterday I took my first walk in Harvard Square after two months indoors. I’d been confined to a hospital room, and then my apartment. As I walked past the campus, it was hard not to think about how much I wanted to get back to school and teaching. I suspect that I love teaching in part because I’ve been blessed to know so many great teachers, many of them Ross’ students. I set out to visit the Harvard Book Store. I love book stores almost as much as I love libraries. For a month, I couldn’t read books without wearing plastic gloves. Since the gloves make my hands sweat like crazy within a matter of minutes, that meant no printed books (Kindle only). The month after that was also book-deprived, because I couldn’t go into a bookstore without a mask and gloves (thus, no book stores). Finally, yesterday I enjoyed an hour or two of carefree browsing. The book I’d come for was gone, but I found something unexpected and wonderful. If you stay in a book store or a library long enough, you’ll find something new and lovely: one of the most basic and important life lessons I’ve learned. Ross Smith helped keep me around debate long enough to learn it. I don’t know exactly what I was doing when he passed. But soon after I got to the book store, the Leonard Cohen song Hallelujah started playing on the store’s speakers. I’d like to think he left us then, although it’s not terribly likely.

Ross made me feel welcome when very few others would. He taught me when plenty of folks were pretty sure I wasn’t willing to or capable of learning. He made it clear that he respected my opinion when it would’ve been costless and crowd-pleasing to treat me like a particularly stupid and foul-smelling patch of sphagnum moss. I wasn’t ever officially Ross’ student, but I always felt like he was teaching me. The funny thing is, when I think about all the stuff I learned from Ross over the years, I think the most important is what he taught by example. Every time I saw him, it was obvious that he was doing what he loved and that he cared about his chosen profession and the students who shared it with him. His speeches at the Wake Forest tournament awards ceremony were legendary, and like everything else about him, quintessential Ross and only Ross. He did what he loved, and he loved doing it. He was his own man, and drunk or sober, morning noon or night, haggard or well-tailored, he was full of life, ahead of the pack and dragging the rest of us along for the ride. Although he embraced self-improvement and loved the role that debate played in improving his opinions and ideas he was always and first true to himself. He was not a perfect man, but that made him a great one.

I think if I had passed away, Ross would probably have lifted a glass or two of bourbon in my honor, even if he had someone else drink them in his stead. I can’t drink - I take oxycontin, and you’re not supposed to mix alcohol with hilbilly heroin. Cigarettes and radiation to the chest combine to produce lung cancer. I am now a bit paranoid about smoking, and don’t plan to have so much as a celebratory cigar as long as I live. This is obviously not terribly rational. I quit smoking when I stopped professionally coaching debate. The only time my willpower truly slipped just happened to be the week I was diagnosed with cancer (finals, first semester of graduate school). I know the two facts are totally unconnected, but it’s made me a bit gun shy about smoking. Still, I feel a powerful compulsion to order a drink and smoke a cigarette as I say a mental goodbye to Ross. I won’t smoke or drink, but I suspect that were our positions reversed, Ross would. But that’s him, and I’m me. To thine own self be true.

Having searched my e-mail for the messages Ross and I exchanged about debate at Berkeley, I realized that the note above actually isn’t the last one I have from him. The last thing he told me was that he’d been missing me. I miss him too, but I won’t ever forget him.

DS