Chris Crowe
Ken Strange was an enigmatic force for the early and mid-2000s Wyoming Debate team. Matt, sometime later in our junior year, asked us to start ranking all of the “old-timers” highly on our pref sheets. It wasn’t until late in our senior year, in the doubles at the University of Texas tournament, that Ken finally judged us, in an unremarkable 3-0 defeat. Before that, my knowledge of Ken was relegated to Travis Cram's description of his judging as essentially some sort of pre-Game of Thrones High Septon who would only periodically descend from a misty mountaintop to grace us with his wisdom. Ken was actually far less mysterious than that it turns out, but even more legendary.
Brian and I snuck in a few pretty good wins over the years with some wily Wyoming trickery, and we were well-defended against similar trickery from other ragtag styles of debating. Not much really ever caught us off guard strategically, but we could not beat a top-tier Dartmouth team for the life of us. In the fall of 2005, Dartmouth debuted the season with an affirmative case that seemed facially nontopical to the rest of the debate community. Dartmouth knew this, of course, but I think underestimated the type of in-round investment it would take early on to defeat a big topicality push. By the end of that tournament, they were reading topicality cards in the 1AC to get ahead of it, and Brian and I lost going for topicality against them in round 8 (a debate in which Dartmouth went for “conditionality is worse than being nontopical,” something for which I hope Ken ribbed them a little).
Importantly, we knew from that moment that the way we needed to beat Dartmouth was head-on and to work at least as hard as they did.
Fast-forward to the Wake tournament in 2005, and we got our second chance. Kathryn and I have had some playful banter about this debate for a long time and hell, maybe we actually should have lost, I don’t know at this point. But I can tell you this with confidence: that debate was the hardest the Wyoming squad had worked to win a single debate up to that point in our generation’s history. Eric Forslund produced hundreds of pages of evidence turning every angle of the case. Forslund probably spent 100+ hours preparing us to be negative for this exact debate, including several strategy meetings while he was definitely on the third level of the dream about Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense in Taiwan. I retroactively like to think this emulated Ken’s argument strategy conversations that everyone is talking about since his passing.
In a sense of cosmic topicality justice, and because Dartmouth made us rise to the challenge, we started reading their case the opposite way as our affirmative. Years later, recounting this narrative to Charles and Kade, I learned that Dartmouth was unsure which way to read the case in the pre-season and spent an unreasonable amount of time figuring it out. It now feels like we replicated their pre-season just a few months later. One of the reasons Dartmouth was so difficult to defeat was that they always appeared to have one of the truly great pre-season preparations, and at Wyoming we were awful at pre-season work. I don’t mean we didn’t do a lot of work, I mean that we never had a good angle on the topic or a good prediction of how other teams were going to treat the topic. It took essentially replicating a Dartmouth summer of work midseason to get one measly victory. That is how hardworking Ken and his debaters were.
I worked tirelessly at several smaller debate camps for years before I could break into working at Dartmouth. I finally showed up to the Dartmouth Debate Insitute in the summer of 2011 with luggage full of imposter syndrome. Debate is funny like that. I was an accomplished-enough debater and coach with confidence in my teaching, but Dartmouth impressed me in a way no other program does. I was not afraid, I just wanted to prove I belonged on the teaching staff.
I quickly shed that syndrome thanks entirely to Ken Strange. Ken somehow took a liking to me, and that felt like an immediate free pass to all of his debaters and colleagues at Dartmouth. I have lifelong friends that only took that initial 4 weeks in Hanover to obtain. I spent 6 more years working with and around Ken at the DDI, a fraction of what his closest friends got to spend with him, and yet I consider Ken and the Dartmouth family my extended family. It was that easy to fall in love with Ken.
At the DDI, we had a lot of inside jokes and stories. I will not reveal the progenitor of the following, but we used to have fairly long conversations about how if there was one person in the debate community that you could punch without repercussion, who would it be? It sounds vicious, but it really wasn’t. It was one of those silly things that just comes up after several years of being cooped up in the Choates. We even had an entire list of conditions and clarifications trying to prove how innocent it was. Well, anyway – we would have this conversation in front of Ken from time to time and prod him to answer. It feels like it took several years of massaging the thought experiment to make it sound more nonviolent, less like it was talking shit about another debater, asking ken again and again – before he even considered answering. My memory of wearing him down on this question is probably clouded. It felt like it took years, but maybe it only took a couple days. It was probably most of the summer. Ken Strange - the consummate professional, the High Septon, the most influential debate coach of the last half-century -- never answered.
Or did he?
Rest easy, Ken. I can’t imagine what my life would be like without you.
