A List Of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago

IN DEFENSE OF TRACY FLICK: Some time ago, when Aaron Gleeman was still a college student posting about 10,000 words a day about the Twins, Elisha Cuthbert, and the embarrassment of having your parents move you into your dorm, he wrote of some baseball player or another that he was playing like the second coming of Roy Hobbs. A day later, he printed a portion of my email to him, reminding him that some people might not find it a compliment to be called a reincarnation of a surly ass who took money with the intention of fixing a game and then promptly killed (accidentally, but callously, with a foul ball) the woman carrying his child (er, spoiler alert). Part of my point was that there was a side to the Hobbs character that baseball people sometimes forget (caveat: I haven't seen much of the Redford movie, so I kind of doubt he comes across the same way as in the Malamud book).

There's been a lot of talk here the last day or two about Tracy Flick, the name representing some kind of mild villainess, a fireball of brusque ambition, and I think that's unfair to the character. Flick was a child of a single mother with a modest income surrounded by the children of wealthy two-parent families, and she refused to let any of them condescend to her, to think that she was entitled to any less than they had or would have. She did this by developing a hard exterior, smooth and rounded and brittle as an eggshell. As I read it, the tragedy of Tracy Flick is that she didn't get the protection (even, in part, from herself) that she needed -- and that everybody else in that school would have gotten -- because nobody thought that she, with her smooth hard shell, needed protection. Least of all herself, which, in my reading, is why she fools herself into believing that she was not the victim of the affair. In any event, if you allow her that context, you can see where the sharp elbows are coming from.

I have no idea whether our putative Tracy Flick (and I'm not using her name because I don't want to make it easier for her to find this by googling herself) needs the same kind of context. It's easy to say that she's a home-schooled kid living in a house halfway up and flush against the side of a mountain, surrounded by forest, subsisting upon the companionship only of two parents, a pair of much-younger siblings, and a regular Friday night IM session with a fellow speller, and that somebody should have expanded her habitat and prevented her from building her entire life around the dictionary. It seems plausible, and understood that way, a spelling group easily could be an awkward way of making other social connections, rather than just another manifestation of an esoteric compulsion. If that were true, I would hope that we would cut our putative Tracy Flick the kind of slack that I want to give the other Tracy Flick. But we don't know that that's necessary -- for all we know, her family has friendly neighbors and the kind of church life that makes up for the lack of school interaction.

What I really hope is true is something else. Maybe our putative Tracy Flick, like few other kids, found that she had both a rare talent and a singular joy in competition -- the kind of joy that appears as satisfaction in the mastery of a word (the cockiness at the microphone) and bubbles over into the thrill of victory (the touchdown signal after a correct spelling). There is an element of chance in the Bee -- a point at which an elite speller still has to guess whether to lead schwa-pificer with an "o" or an "e" -- and I just have to marvel at a speller so good that she beat back that randomness through five regional bees to sit on the prime-time stage two or three times and still had enough enthusiasm that a light went on in her eyes at the exact moment that she found the key to each new word.

Last year's winner openly admitted he didn't like the Bee. He spelled as much out of chemical imperative as anything else. Given the choice between him and our putative Tracy Flick, I'll take pick Flick every time.

Edited because Adam reminded me of the slogan.