The fallout.

To quote Happy Gilmore, "Holy shit! Talk about your all-time backfires." Alma and I did not air our complaints with the questions because we wanted the top of the TRASH pyramid to collapse. And I know, based on their posts, that James and James did not decide to vacate their posts because of that one individual thing, but we were mentioned in both of the posts. The thing is that, while I was troubled by certain of the questions, ultimately my enjoyment of the tournament as a whole was not hugely diminished. And I really like both of the Jameses as people. I feel like Frank Wills if he'd voted for Nixon in 1972.

Obviously I understand that there is always a time to move on, and based on their posts it seems like any number of things - most notably, "real life," which is certainly understandable - converged all at once. But I do have to wonder, what happens to TRASH now? Do two other people step in seamlessly? Does the whole thing collapse? I sure hope it's the former. I have no idea who those two people would be, of course. It's kind of ironic, though - JD and JQ were both very "we want to make sure this never happens again." So they decided to step down, thus all but ensuring that neither will have much of any say in whether or not this sort of thing happens again. And depending on who takes over the reins, and who was responsible for those sorts of questions in the first place... well, there's a chance that this sort of thing could happen more, isn't there?

This isn't a eulogy for TRASH (yet, anyway). It is a Happy Trails to the Jameses, who I think combined to give TRASH the consistently best public face of any of the four formats. I wish them well in their future endeavors, and I hope that my comments were, at worst, a drop in a very full bucket, because that's really all I think they should have been. This was an unfortunate episode, but certainly no one's head needed to roll because of it. And again - James and James are the good guys. We need more people like them involved with the game, not less.