The Green Zone: Rubicks Cube

You know, I'm sure Jesus started with a pretty small outfit, too.

Not that I'm saying super-senior Brian Werner is the second messiah or anything, especially at a good evangelical Lutheran school like this one.

But I am fairly certain, however, watching him lead his small flock through Rubik's Cube algorithms has got to be at least somewhat similar to watching a bearded Arabic man turn water into wine.

He's already performed miracles, working through Rubik's Cubes with such speed that I don't see how you could call it anything less than divine.  The 4x4 square was easy, and now he's working on a 5x5, spouting out gospel about how to best solve these little suckers.

"Look everyone," he says, pointing at his nearly finished cube, "I could put the green square and blue square and the green square right next to each other and in the end, it really wouldn't matter.  It's almost too easy."

Profound. 

I know that the Rubik's Cube club shouldn't be in the sports section of this paper.

I know that it hasn't brought a dime of revenue into the college, let alone the sports program, but there's something to them that makes them seem worthy of the highest tier of athleticism.

They have crafted their hobby to a science.  To them, it's not about finishing the Rubik's Cube, it's about finishing the Rubik's Cube faster than anybody else.  They slather Vaseline on their spring-loaded cubes to quicken their times in much the same way an old gunfighter would have greased his holster to reduce his draw time.

Werner is almost done with his 5x5 cube and I almost have two white squares on the same side of mine. 

Veteran "cuber," junior Emily Tekavec, sits down next to me to calmly offer some words of encouragement.  She's an elementary education major, and I can tell, because when she talks to me, she does so with a practiced patience that is generally used on thick-skulled first-graders who can't sit still in their desks for more than 12 minutes.

"You have to make The Cross, hon," she says.  "Oh! Look at you! Good job!"

The Cross she speaks of is the first step into completing the Rubik's Cube.  You need to line up the middle squares both horizontally and vertically before you can proceed to the next step.

Of course, it all starts with The Cross.  It makes so much sense.  Alpha and omega stuff.

"It's not that hard," she says.  "Here, like this."

She shows me some algorithm that makes me feel even more inadequate as she closes her eyes out of habit and solves my cube for me.

This whole group—small as they might be—is truly the epitome of nerd-ship.  It's strange that a record-breaking track athlete like Werner has somehow landed in the role of Rubik guru, but hey, Jesus was a carpenter as well as being the Son of Man.

Still, he's an athlete through and through, and as a true trackster, he is always in pursuit of a faster time.  After an hour and 23 minutes, I finally finish a cube by myself, and ask Werner how fast he could do it.

  He picks up a fresh cube and finishes in 52 seconds.

Now, I've been beat by athletes before. There's almost a purifying feeling of getting bested by basketball players or losing a match to the tennis team when you know you gave it your all, but having your intelligence insulted by someone who is mentally superior to you is just humiliating—even if he is the embodiment of the Way, the Truth and the Cube.