Journeys of Jack Tripper

Mike Price dead at 41

Despite my ethos of schadenfreude, and my overall caustic demeanor and black sense of humor, I'm not one to dance on people's graves. Yet finding out today that Mike Price is dead has me... a bit.. confused.

Most of you don't know who Mike Price is, but a few of you do. Mike Price was the speech coach at Grove City College, and was an enormous thorn in my side for most of my career as Director of Forensics at Muskingum College. Price is most famous, or infamous, for walking out on the Rhetorical Criticism speech of Ohio State's Jordi Matsumoto in the quarterfinal round at the 2001 National Forensics Association tournament in Bowling Green, Kentucky. Jordi's speech analyzed the messages presented in a Bible-related theme park. Grove City is known as one of the most conservative four-year schools in the country, and for reasons never fully explained, Price became extremely offended by the speech, and simply walked out in the middle of Jordi's speech, an unprecendented act in Nationals history.

It necessitated a drastic, but proper, scoring decision by the tab staff, though that decision continues to be debated. Jordi went on to finish 5th in Crit at that tournament, emerging from the quarterfinal despite only having four ballots. But Mike Price did a whole hell of a lot more than that. During the tournament I was hosting in 2003, he famously refused to leave the extemp prep room (coaches are not permitted inside it while speech preparation is going on) despite being ordered to by Ryan Donaghy, who was running the extemp room for me. He would regularly screw up ballots on purpose, judging speeches not on their merit but on his own religious principles. His students commonly would be disruptive and antagonistic toward other competitors, and his grasp on the rules of forensics was tenuous at best. We avoided having him judge at all, if possible, and when postings would go up for final rounds, students would audibly groan if they saw his name at the bottom as one of their judges. He was a prick, in and out, and the cause of a large amount of stress on the part of myself and other speech coaches. He was a true nemesis to me, often barging into the tab room (off-limits to all coaches) to argue about some issue or another.

And now he's dead.

(Betsy, remind me of any other Mike Price stories I'm forgetting, as my mind isn't working as well as it used to. Mad Cow, you know.)