the Clipperton Suite: the ranking computer, fed raw data, makes him #1
some Mexican systems analyst—who barely spoke English and had never once even fondled a ball and knew from exactly zilch except for crunching raw results-data—this guy stepped in as manager of the O.N.A.N.T.A. computer and ranking center in Forest Lawn NNY, and didn’t know enough not to treat Clipperton’s string of six major junior-tournament championships that spring as sanctioned and real.
Context
The institution's ranking machine is a data-cruncher with no body-knowledge at all — a manager who "had never once even fondled a ball and knew from exactly zilch except for crunching raw results-data" — and so it does the one thing the old hands knew never to do: it treats "Clipperton’s string of six major junior-tournament championships... as sanctioned and real." The number gets assigned by pure results-arithmetic, blind to everything the body underwent to produce it. E.T.A.'s whole pedagogy is a warning against exactly this — the #1 that's just a computed output, reached without the votaried process — and here the machine hands it over, and it's lethal.