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"The Founding Fathers" (Part 2)
(Or How 'The Ambassador,' The Grizzly Bear, The Kid Who Ranted and Raved as if He Had Contracted Rabies, And a Whole Cast of Diehards Stormed a Constitutional Convention and Finally Got to Take Hoya Blue to a Whole 'Nother Level (But Had No Comment at the Time--After All, There Was an Election to Be Won))

The Convention

Hoya Blue's Constitutional Convention and Officer Nominations took place on the night of April 12, 2005 in McDonough Arena's Team Room A. Aside from a desire to contribute to the new structure of Hoya Blue, everyone present that night seemed to be linked by one common fact-they had never heard of Team Room A. Asked about the meeting, one attendee recalled showing up in an Athletic Department administration office (it's near a few, but the Team Room itself isn't). Another referred to it as "some small corner of [McDonough Arena] that I didn't even know was there." I had to wait for Kurt to show me that, in fact, Team Room A is at the top of a staircase at the end of a hallway that I had never walked down in the five years since I'd enrolled at Georgetown.

For some, the relatively obscure location and lack of much visible publicity prompted accusations that the meeting was being deliberately shrouded in secrecy. Why, the argument went, would the existing members of Hoya Blue put a great deal of effort into publicizing an event designed to alter the club's structure-and likely its officers?

Just as many people who gave me their perspective on the meeting, however, recalled that while the existing leaders of Hoya Blue who ran the meeting weren't exactly thrilled to be facing a near constant stream of criticism, they were doing so in good faith.

I've asked members of the athletics department staff on multiple occasions over the past year what prompted the decision to "reform" Hoya Blue. Who, I wondered, drove that decision? I never have gotten a straight answer. I've even seen some of Hoya Blue's internal emails from before the first meeting. All they really indicated was the same thing everyone suspected-it wasn't something they were going to go out and publicize, but they were at least going to show up.

Quite a few people showed up as a matter of fact. Thus, in many cases for the first time, JerseyHoyas met hoyabinx and RBHoyas figured out what a GUHoya2007 looks like. StPetersburgHoyas read the recap on Hoyatalk.

The current Hoya Blue leadership was well represented, and did an admirable job in running the meeting under a difficult circumstance. The Hoyatalk contingent-many of whom donned their We Are Georgetown shirts as a way to appear more unified (an idea spawned by Steve Fraser the "strategist")-presented most of the ideas that had appeared online and in an ever-expanding chain of emails and instant messages over the previous week. More than a few, to be sure, also presented rather lengthy diatribes on their opinion of the failed leadership of the Hoya Blue members to which they were speaking.

Without getting into the merits of those diatribes (full disclosure-I gave one of them), one theme appeared to gain almost universal acceptance, even begrudgingly from the current leaders of Hoya Blue. The best way I've ever heard it described was in an email sent to Kyle Ragsdale, the Athletic Department representative at the meeting, by one of the students in attendance:

"Many of us at Georgetown have never signed up for Hoya Blue or their emails, because we (accurately) felt that the group as it stands would be a waste of our time and dedication."

Whether the students at the meeting blamed this on the current leadership of Hoya Blue, a lack of guidance and support from McDonough, Craig Esherick, or just bad luck, most left feeling encouraged that at least there were signs of commitment to changing that perception.

Tom Ryan's wonkishness was on full display that night. The man described as "strangely resembling a grizzly bear with a temperament to match" by one student (he was also sporting a cast on his forearm) distinguished himself with a number of thoughtful suggestions on the next Hoya Blue constitution.

Of greater issue was the structure of the upcoming elections.

Should the election be open to the entire student body? (Nope-despite the eerie resemblance between the Hoyatalk contingent's efforts and that of a small-time city council campaign, there wasn't much support for GUSA-style elections in the room.)

Should the election be open only to those in attendance at the current meeting? (After a lengthy debate, we decided not).

Should people not at the meeting bother to come for the election? (Come one, come all…and bring your friends!!)

Should the election be winner-take-all, or a modified system? (In the interest of promoting some kind of cooperation between the two obviously competing camps, the Vice Presidency of Hoya Blue became a surrogate for a Second Place ribbon).

Shouldn't there be, you know, a treasurer? (If Hoya Blue was going to be an official SAC organization, as was the point of this whole enterprise, there had better be one.)

Kurt Muhlbauer's nomination as a candidate for the Presidency of Hoya Blue was a fait accompli-within a few hours of the announcement of the first meeting, the normally soft-spoken and modest Ray had confidently predicted that Kurt had the election locked up.

The treasurer nomination wasn't quite so clear cut. For all of the effort the Hoyatalk contingent had put into presenting a unified front at the meeting (in both message and shirt style), one detail had eluded them. Shouldn't they have planned to nominate, you know, a second candidate-just in case?

As the call went up for treasurer candidates, Hoya Blue's current board nominated a potential successor in the making. As for the Hoyatalk contingent…

...they looked like a bunch of deer caught in the headlights.

Fittingly then, the impasse was broken by a man strangely resembling a grizzly bear.

"Not the position I was best suited for," Tom Ryan recalls, "but better than nothing."

Thus spoke the grizzly bear's friend Greg Muha: "Uhhhhh…I nominate Tom."

The Hoya Blue election was set.

The Campaign

"How do I," Tom wondered on Hoyatalk after the meeting, "as someone with no experience as a treasurer, convince people to elect me as such?"

Fortunately, Tom had the help of the man he referred to as Jersey "Karl Rove" Hoya34.

Steve Fraser earned a number of nicknames during the interim period between the first meeting and the Hoya Blue elections. The most famous (and to this day unexplainable) one was self-imposed: the Hoyatalk contingent had a Presidential candidate, a Treasurer in the making, and "The Ambassador". Steve's a proud soon-to-be-graduate of the School of Foreign Service. He's also a bit of a political junkie. Where Tom distinguished himself among the voices in Team Room A with several insightful comments on the future structure of Hoya Blue, Steve did something far more memorable though still, like his nickname, to this day unexplainable:

He quoted the Founding Fathers.

Easily his best one-liner of the entire Hoya Blue election saga was a response to a question on Hoyatalk as to whether a certain group of undergrads was preparing to take over Hoya Blue.

"No comment," Steve replied somewhat cryptically, "There is an election to win."

Shortly after his segue into a rather different Constitutional Convention, Steve authored an infamous "strategy memo" that laid the groundwork for the efforts of the Hoyatalk contingent's "campaign"-from "grassroots organization" (get-out-the-vote), "on the ground efforts" (in which he predicts that publicity on their part will be "very much shock and awe") and the ominously titled "covert ops".

The format decided on at the previous meeting had left doubts as to whether the Hoya Blue election would become a contest of ideas and merits or Facebook friends and E-vites. "It's going to all boil down to which contingent brings more people, the Old Guard or the Reformers," Ray concluded after the first meeting.

Inasmuch as they had been defined all year by their constant discussions about new ideas for Hoya Blue and building school spirit on campus, the emails exchanged by the so-called "Reformers" in the weeks leading up to the election often bordered on obsessive attention to turnout. Of all the bullet-point recollections he gave me about the process for this article, these emails were the one thing Steve remembered the most about the "campaign".

One exception to this rule was a strategy session Steve organized prior to the election. Held in a darkened ICC Galleria one weeknight (which made the meeting "even stranger," Ray recalls), the session brought together in person for the first time the five people on Kurt's hastily-assembled list of those who "Want in on the New Hoya Blue." With Steve "totally going Josh Lyman on the whole thing," the five attendees spent about an hour going over themes for Kurt and Tom's election speeches, and casually suggesting that for all of his exclamation point-influenced online treatises, 007 might need a little speech coaching.

The date of the Hoya Blue election was changed twice because of scheduling conflicts amongst the key participants. The first (unpublished) delay pushed the meeting back a week. Then, just prior to the original date, the elections were moved back a day to Wednesday May 4, 2005. By the time the elections would be held, over three weeks had passed since the Officer Nominations.

Again, the secrecy and lack of publicity were a cause for concern. A little over a day prior to the meeting, the announcement on GUHoyas.com and a newly created Hoyatalk thread (titled by Tom, channeling his inner 007, as "ATTENTION ALL CURRENT GEORGETOWN STUDENTS!!!!!) were the only publicity outside of word of mouth. What's more, the elections were held during Study Days at Georgetown, typically a no-event period on campus. It seemed likely that many casually interested students would have either long forgotten about the elections, or would be too busy to attend.

To say nothing of trying to find Team Room A.

In the end, one conclusion ruled the day on the Hoyatalk boards:

Turnout was still going to be crucial.

The Piano Room

Somewhere on the ground floor of the Southwest Quad complex at Georgetown, there's a spare room with a piano in it. In the few times I've been back in that building this year, I've never been able to re-locate it. It gave off the vibe of an audition room-not so much "American Idol" as "small town dinner theater".

As it turned out, it was a rather fitting vibe. About an hour before the 8:30 start time of the Hoya Blue elections, about six or so friends gathered in the Southwest Quad. Less than four months later, I'd watch from the top corner of the balcony in Gaston Hall, standing on my tiptoes to see over a crowd of about 1,500 freshmen, as Kurt and Tom conducted their first pep rally with Hoya Blue. Tonight, I was sitting in a folding chair with half a dozen people in a spare room with a piano, watching Kurt and Tom audition for Hoya Blue.

In the same article where I talk about the pep rally in Gaston Hall, I refer to Tom as a combination of a carnival barker and a used car salesman. For all of his insecurities about his job qualification as a treasurer, Tom was perhaps better suited than anyone in Team Room A that night to be a Hoya Blue executive, purely on the strength of his persuasive power. It's no accident that Tom was the unofficial emcee of the NSO Pep Rally. The man gives a good speech.

I'd known Kurt Muhlbauer by reputation for two years by the time we were sitting together in the Piano Room. We'd met in early September that year, and spent a number of those 90-minute waits in front of the ticket line at the MCI Center talking about Hoya Blue and our common interest in Georgetown sports. That spring, Kurt and I had sat together at all of Georgetown's men's lacrosse games at North Kehoe Field, occasionally becoming a de facto two person student section. Taking a step aside for a moment and writing not as a (probably much less than) semi-objective columnist/essayist, but as someone who considers himself a close friend of Kurt's…

…I think, all in all, that the best part about his speech performance was that a year later, it's still one of my favorite go-to topics for a guaranteed laugh at his expense.

"He didn't like to speak then and still doesn't," says Steve "Jersey-Karl Rove-Hoya34/The Ambassador/Josh Lyman" Fraser.

The Election

Fortunately (or unfortunately?) for the Georgetown community, Kurt only had to give his speech once.

After 22 days of waiting, the Hoya Blue elections…started off with another delay. Tom and Kurt had each, in some way, distinguished themselves enough to become candidates for Hoya Blue offices through their dedication to Georgetown sports over the previous years. Now, on the night of the election, they appeared to have distinguished themselves from the group of candidates opposing them by…actually showing up.

Among the great still-unsolved mysteries in my years as a Georgetown fan:

• What if Darrel Owens had hit the three-pointer against Florida in the Sweet 16?
• How did three referees and two coaching staffs not catch Seton Hall with six men on the court?
• What were the other candidates doing during the Hoya Blue election?

The last question, at least, was probably a moot point. Tom the future treasurer turned out to be the King of Turnout, bringing what seemed like a few dozen of his friends to Team Room A-he'd even roped in the captains of the women's soccer team and both swim teams with a promise that Hoya Blue would have at least one event the following year at their games (Hoya Blue followed through on the promise). In all, Tom estimates that about two-thirds of the crowd in Team Room A was in attendance solely because of him.

More than one person who I talked to recalled that they were sure that Kurt and Tom were going to win based on how many girls were in attendance that night.

To quote election attendee and future Hoya Blue Personnel Officer Michael R. Segner: "Mr. Holmes would not be needed to solve this mystery."

There was the formality of speeches, however, candidates or no candidates. Rather than individual speeches, Kurt and Tom went to the front of the room together to give a few brief remarks about the future of Hoya Blue…well, Tom did anyways (this, incidentally, also describes almost exactly the NSO Pep Rally). Kurt gave off the impression that he wasn't exactly keen on having to give his speech. I say that because he told me before the meeting.

And during the meeting.

And roughly every hour in the days prior to the meeting.

Regardless, Kurt's reputation as the champion of all things school spirit on the Hoyatalk board was more than enough to have earned him the vote of every reform-minded Hoya in the room.

Or was it?

To Be Continued...