New York Times, Tuesday, January 29, 2019

As a lifelong volleyball player, I have a soft spot for this puzzle. Not everyone knows the sport inside out, though, so I feared the idea might be too rinky-dink and get blocked. Still, I hope you dig it.

The classic bump-set-spike progression seemed ripe for a crossword theme. I was lucky to find symmetric entries among limited options for bump and spike, so the grid came together without my typical struggle. The puzzle was originally submitted with SOFT SERVE and THE BIG DIG replacing LIP SERVICE and VOLLEYBALL. Will and Sam were rightfully concerned that an early-week theme would be lost on some solvers without a revealer.

If anyone's ever looked at the team names in a volleyball league, you know the sport lends itself to punning (shout out to my teammates on "That's What She Set"). I wanted badly to come up with a groan-worthy revealer in that tradition. Alas, no great ideas were forthcoming, so I went with the direct approach and resubmitted as is.

Thanks to the editing team for their guidance and for working the clues into Tuesday shape. Thanks also for leaving intact mentions of my favorite book and TV show ("Catch-22" and "The Wire"). I hope my devoted test-solving dad will also appreciate seeing "The African Queen." Happy puzzling!

Many moons ago, I tried to make this theme work with just ___ BUMP, ___ SET, ___ SPIKE. But I was fixated on using BABY BUMP, CHEST BUMP, FIST BUMP, or GOOSE BUMP — I couldn't get the lengths to work out with crossword symmetry, so I abandoned the idea. Wish I had thought of adding in ___ SERVICE!

There aren't that many ___ BUMP or ___ SPIKE phrases, so great discovery in the same-length COLBERT BUMP / GOLDEN SPIKE. I'm not sure if COLBERT BUMP will stay in the language, but I'll enjoy the phrase while it lasts. He was hilarious on Seinfeld's "Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee."

The only themer I might have swapped out was TELEVISION SET. Not nearly as interesting as DRUM SET or (warning: nerd alert) MANDELBROT SET. The latter wouldn't be friendly to newer solvers, so I'd ultimately have gravitated to DRUM SET. Much easier to build around a central 7, anyway.

Amazing how little crossword glue Benjamin employed. With such a theme-dense puzzle, I'd expect maybe five dabs. To end with just ANET and POS is amazing work.

I hitched on a few of the longer pieces of fill, though. OPERANT … okay. An oddball, but okay. MARLO crossing ADLER? Huh. And as much as I like interesting fill, QUINOA, PAELLA, TATOOINE, OUZO made for a tricky solve, perhaps even unsatisfying for some newer solvers who might look at their completed grid and wonder if it could be correct.

ENSLAVED. I wouldn't use this in one of my puzzles, but I can see how others could deem it perfectly fine, clued to a movie like "Amistad." I'll personally always default to trying to make puzzles entertaining and uplifting, without potentially triggering ill feelings within some solvers, even if that subgroup of solvers is small.

Congrats to Benjamin on making a theme work that I had deemed impossible!