PRINCETON, N.J. » By the time he was a senior at Princeton University in 1992, Ted Cruz had developed an arsenal of rhetorical skills and theatrical gestures that made him one of the most polished performers on the college debate circuit. So when he reached the quarterfinals of the national championships at MIT, with the title that had eluded him so far now in sight, he decided to try to knock his Harvard opponents off balance with one of his favorite tricks.

Instead of the regular practice of defending his proposed topic — the merits of mind-reading — Cruz let his adversaries choose which side to argue. But the tactic, intended to highlight his confidence, backfired. As he waited for them to decide, the two Harvard students conspicuously dithered, eating up Cruz’s allotted speaking time while they whispered and searched their pockets for a coin to flip.

The audience, now on to the stalling tactic, chuckled as a frustrated Cruz snapped: "Gentlemen! You must have decided by now." But Cruz and his partner never recovered, and the national championship for which he had worked so hard went to someone else.

To many former teammates and opponents who recounted his Princeton debating career, Cruz, the Texas senator who has emerged as a formidable Republican presidential candidate, stood out as a remarkable orator in a college circuit brimming with Type A strivers.

But in the upper echelon of a rollicking debating world that exalted extemporaneous thinking, where topics ranged from the concrete to the absurd, and where facts and moral assessments took a back seat to quick thinking and wit, Cruz had a different reputation.

Regarded as a powerful speaker who depended on overly prepared, or "canned," cases, Cruz could be foiled with humor. His emotional zeal, no matter which side he was arguing, rubbed more experienced judges the wrong way. So did his stilted speaking style and standoffishness on the debate world’s vibrant social scene, where kegs flowed at Friday night parties. His raw ambition sometimes soured the student judges, as well as the audiences who voted in championship rounds, on him.

A lawyer who came to prominence arguing before the Supreme Court, Cruz has leveraged his intellectual bandwidth and ability to articulate a defiant brand of conservatism into a political career that has taken him to where he always expected to be. As a presidential candidate, he is now calibrating his arguments to win over evangelical Christians, Tea Party voters and moneyed donors.

Cruz honed those skills as a college debater, an experience that served as a beta version for his national campaign. It was a time when his strengths, weaknesses and occasional self-defeating ploys were all on display.

Princeton was another world for Cruz, who came there as a freshman in 1988 at the age of 17. He was the Canadian-born son of Cuban immigrants who struggled through bankruptcy in Houston and later divorced. In Texas, he had excelled in school and showed early signs of his trademark focus and conservative politics in the Constitutional Corroborators, a team of young, free-market advocates who traveled around the state reciting the Constitution.

That passion for speaking brought him to Whig Hall, a Greek Revival building on Princeton’s gothic campus that houses the American Whig-Cliosophic Society, the university’s 250-year-old debating club.

Some rival debaters of similarly modest means saw in his mannered speaking style an effort to fit in. Others, including Thanos Basdekis, a public school graduate and future champion at Columbia University, looked up to Cruz, who encouraged him to "hang in there" in a privileged and alien environment.

Rail thin but a "fully formed political animal," according to Bob Ewing, a Princeton debate team leader, Cruz did not get along with his first roommate, a liberal who put Super Glue on Cruz’s alarm clock snooze button. But he hit it off immediately with David K. Panton, a 16-year-old freshman from Jamaica and future president of the Harvard Law Review, whom he recruited for the debate team.

"It became an outlet for developing our skills," said Panton, Cruz’s best friend and perennial debate partner.

In the society’s debates, Cruz represented the conservative, or Clio, side with "practical, pragmatic positions," according to Rob Marks, his Whig counterpart and one of several Princeton liberals who said they did not remember Cruz as a firebrand.

But the main event was the American Parliamentary Debate Association, where the competitions pitted two-person teams against each other to evoke the thrust and parry of British Parliament. Cruz showed promise right away.

"He knew how to hold a room," said Stephen Wunker, who was a year ahead of Cruz on the team.

Cruz learned how to read his mostly liberal student judges, tempering his politics and opening with a compelling story instead of a statement of principle. His great talent, Wunker said, was boiling an argument down to its simplest point.

The Princeton team was tightly knit. When the team’s so-called van czar told them their ride was full, members would pile into Cruz’s 1978 Ford Fairmont, known as the Green Bomb, to travel to tournaments.

"He was an extreme fan of the Les Misirables soundtrack," Wunker said.

And when they returned to Princeton late on Sunday nights, Cruz pored over the judges’ ballots with Panton, obsessively asking his exhausted roommate: "If we were fighting against us, what would we have done to win? What could we have done to get more points?"

In debates, Cruz almost always took the lead government or opposition positions, and he often chopped the air as he called on what Panton described as a photographic memory. Without notes, he employed his trademark strategy.

"Ted was not about responding to anything," Panton said. "He would reframe the whole debate."

For emotional resonance, Cruz often invoked his father’s coming to America from Cuba with $100 sewn into his underwear. When an Amherst team argued at a tournament in 1989 that Ricky Ricardo should have let Lucy work, Cruz said, in an incensed voice: "Well, guess what, I’m Cuban! And no self-respecting Cuban man of the era would let his wife work."

Letting opponents choose which side to take was one of his patented pieces of debate brinkmanship. His "flourish," according to Scott Angstreich, a former teammate, would be to crumple up a piece of paper of the side not taken. In reality, the page remaining in his other hand had both the pro and con arguments written on opposite sides.

"Nobody was better at setting traps," said Austan D. Goolsbee, a Yale debater who became a leading economist for President Barack Obama. He recalled Cruz’s attempts to control debates with carefully constructed arguments that always seemed to anticipate his opponents’ rebuttals.

But Goolsbee and other top debaters on the circuit who frequently beat Cruz discovered it was easy to get under his skin, especially with humor.

"It would unravel him," Goolsbee said.

In one round, Goolsbee pointed out that the story of Cruz’s father coming to America, as compelling as it sounded, was not entirely relevant to, say, the federal deficit.

"How dare you insult my father!" Cruz replied.

Cruz’s own attempts at humor sometimes missed the mark. In one debate, he proposed a method to detect infidelity, in which God should "give women a hymen that grows back every time she has intercourse with a different guy, because that will be a ‘visible sign’ of the breach of trust," according to a recollection by David Kennedy published in a Harvard debate team reunion booklet in 2001.

Kennedy’s debate partner mocked Cruz’s knowledge of the subject matter by contorting herself to see how the anatomy in question could be "visible," according to the booklet.

Cruz was "very funny," said Panton, who recalled the debate.

Cruz initially declined to comment for this article. But Wednesday afternoon, after it had been published online, his spokesman, Jason Miller, while not disputing anything specific, said in an email that "college campus recollection stories should typically be taken with a grain of salt, and 25-year-old alleged college campus recollection stories, based on anonymous hearsay and reported as ‘fact,’ shouldn’t be taken at all. This is ridiculous."

Sometimes Cruz showed a capacity to laugh at himself. During a break in a tournament at Yale, Marks recalled, debaters watched as Cruz argued at a pizza counter over his order before stomping out in a huff. Back at the tournament, the final-round speakers used their speeches to mock Cruz’s lunchtime antics. But rising from the audience, in his best Nixon impersonation, he declared, "I’m not a crook."

That flash of self-deprecation was not enough to endear Cruz to his fellow debaters. When his peers learned of his intention to run for president of the parliamentary debate league, they held a late-night meeting in a hotel to recruit a protest candidate, who eventually won.

Even after his defeat at the nationals, Cruz had one last shot at glory — this time debating for Harvard Law School. In 1995, as so-called circuit dinosaurs, he and Panton, now his law school classmate, teamed up again and made it to the semifinals of the world championships.

Cruz’s reputation had gone intercontinental. His Australian opponents warned the crowd at Princeton against the rhetorical slickness, but substantive weakness, of what they described as the famous Teflon Team, according to audience members. For a final time, Cruz lost.

But his legacy lives on at Princeton. On a recent afternoon in Whig Hall, students in suits preparing to debate under portraits of their precursors James Madison and Aaron Burr passed by a cluttered trophy case. On the top shelf, behind locked glass, sat a wooden plaque reading, "These Trophies Donated by Ted Cruz ’92 and David Panton ’92."

Jason Horowitz, New York Times

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