This Speech Team’s Pluck Is Undebatable

The Los Angeles City College forensics team doesn’t have portable computers or research assistants. It doesn’t have a copy machine for sharing notes. It doesn’t even have an adequate stock of paper, file folders or a regular newspaper subscription.

What it does have is a high ranking--LACC’s team is listed third in the national junior college division and in the top 30 against four-year U.S. colleges--and coaches, students and parents willing to dip into their own pockets and to raise money for the upstart group.

On Saturday, the team will travel to Chicago to compete in the National Junior College Debate Tournament, a feat made possible by superior verbal skills, budget stretching and more than a little lobbying of college officials for more funds.

“Other schools have computers, have everything. [LACC doesn’t] have anything,” said Betty Yeow, whose son Arthur Yeow-Fong, 24, is one of the two team members.

The other member, Daniels McLean, 50, is a former Hollywood film editor who said he landed on skid row after a nervous breakdown and the breakup of his marriage and is now hoping to become a lawyer. The college also has two novice teams that are not competing in this weekend’s tournament.

In February, Yeow-Fong and McLean found out they had qualified to compete against the nation’s top four-year colleges at the National Debate Tournament at Wake Forest College in North Carolina. They represented only the second junior college to attend the tournament in its 50-year history.

School officials congratulated them--but said the college had no money to help finance the trip, said Ken Sherwood, one of the team’s two coaches.

The team didn’t have resources to fund the trip either. But instead of giving up, the pair got the Student Senate to cough up money for two plane tickets and a $12-a-day food allotment.

Betty Yeow donated her frequent flier miles to get the two team coaches to the tournament. A business associate of Yeow’s handed over another frequent-flier ticket toward the forensics squad’s Chicago trip. Yeow also offered office supplies from her real estate investment company.

“She’s been our angel, no doubt about it,” Sherwood said.

“What choice do I have?” Yeow asked. “As parents, you do everything and anything for your children. So I have to work a little harder. That’s fine.”

Sherwood said the team’s annual budget is $4,000 a year, which is spent on local tournaments.

The team barely made the cut for the university-level Wake Forest competition, coming in last among the other two-member teams that qualified. Still, McLean said the trip was a success. “I’d rather be the worst of the best than the best of the worst,” he said.

He and Yeow-Fong expect to do better at the junior college tournament, hoping at least to earn a semifinal berth.

The team’s success is even more impressive because the two students have been competing for only a year. Most high-level competitors, Sherwood said, have debated since they were in high school. “It’s really rare to pick up the activity in a year,” he said.

But Sherwood said he believes his students have plenty of natural talent.

“I would put the two of them against anyone in the country,” he said. Both are persuasive speakers, and Yeow-Fong can read up to 270 words a minute out loud, thus squeezing as many facts as possible into a two-hour debate.

The topic at all the college tournaments this year is whether the United States should substantially increase its security assistance to Middle Eastern countries. Each team has to come prepared to argue either side.

The Chicago match marks the end of the season for McLean and Yeow-Fong, both of whom will spend the rest of the academic year catching up on missed schoolwork. “I do not have a single instructor who isn’t angry at me,” McLean said. They also expect to coach the novice teams. Next fall, both hope to transfer to the University of West Virginia and continue debating together.

“[Debate] helps you think faster; it helps you write faster,” Yeow-Fong said. But there’s an added benefit, he said. “The adrenaline rush is great.”