Scouting the blind nine-year-old prodigy and breaking C.T. down

texture · late Aug YDAU, recalled 10 Nov; restated ? Nov

• When: Late August YDAU (Orientation period, before Convocation), recollected by Hal in the Headmaster's waiting room on 10 Nov; the scouting restated in an undated-Nov conversation.
• What: Watson's scout's eye lands on the strangest prospect in the book: a nine-year-old from Philo IL, legally blind despite "several eyes in various stages of evolutionary development," his huge head supported by a rolling IV-stand appliance with a welded halo brace, and still "an extremely solid player" — and it is admissions muscle, not just scouting: "Tex Watson and Thorp had broken C.T. down over the kid's admission and tuition-waver," after which Tavis wanted Hal to take the boy in hand. (The kid had "some kind of either family or cerebro-spinal-fluid crisis" and deferred to Spring.) In scene 114 the blindfolded Idris Arslanian relays the same scouting coup about the deferred blind matriculant Dymphna — "Thorp and Texas Watson were who scouted this player" — including Thorp's theory that the boy's uncanny anticipation may be a function of the blindness itself. The identification of 102's unnamed Philo kid with 114's Dymphna is an inference chain, flagged (see Dating notes), but the scouting credit is co-stated in both scenes: Watson, of all people, is half of the pair who found and forced through E.T.A.'s most anomalous admit.