02. losing my edge (week 4)

Time compression in league fandom is a funny thing, especially to a new fan. In 2010, YellOwStaR, as part of Against All Authority, played in the Season 1 equivalent of worlds, the season championship. In 2010 I graduated college. That doesn’t seem that long ago. Telling me that YellOwStaR has been playing since Season One makes him seem ancient, a grandfather to even Madlife and Score, who had played in the granddaddy of LCK tournaments, the OGN invitational. Telling that to a new fan — “YellOwStaR has been playing before Korean pro league of legends existed” — is mind-blowing.

Because that was only 6 years ago, and YellOwStaR’s progaming career is, for the moment, over. He’s 24 and retired. I’m older, and my career feels like it’s still just beginning.

Hai is also 24, but he’s retired, come back, moved to the bench, and then joined a challenger team that has since been promoted and bought out. He’s been kicked out of his team and invited back; he’s replaced his substitute and trained his substitute; he’s switched lane assignments twice. I’ve worked for almost as long as he has, and feel like I’ve only accomplished a quarter of what he has.

He was parked in the driveway of C9’s old gaming house in Northern California with his whole life packed into the little egg of a car. He was about to drive away, but the reality of what he was leaving behind finally caught up to him. For two years, he’d lived with his team. They’d become his family — the first real semblance of such a thing in over a decade. They were the people he trusted most, and together, they had pioneered a path into professional gaming. And he was their leader.

But the calls for his retirement buried those memories in the past. The perception of him being a weak player crept into the team and chipped at him from behind. Every time he made a mistake in practice or in a game, the little holes grew. He tripped over them again and again until he fell in. And at 22 years old, he retired his dream and wondered what was next.

- Kien Lam, “The Hai Road”

Where was I at 22? Certainly not standing on a precipice, peering down into the pit of obscurity, wondering if this was the end of the road for a dream I spent so much of myself pursuing. Even now, way past 22, I see my future as a series of paths that could branch out to ever broader worlds, hidden by the fog of war that is simple, human uncertainty. Maybe these paths are no longer as multitudinous as it used to be; maybe they are not multiplying the way they had when I was 18, but the paths that I am on are even better lit by the wards other people who have traveled ahead of me have placed. So if even I think there are unknowns I should pursue, if even I think that the path I am on has not yet ended, will split into more, if thinner and less well-traveled, footpaths, why should Hai’s path have ended at 22? Why should we have thought that one peak was enough, or that he needed to have peaked at all?

In America, at least, how we read any great athlete’s ending still seems influenced by Michael Jordan’s merciless stage-managing of his own second retirement… . Hit the last shot, seize the title, never lose, never show weakness, end on a big banging chord that the audience remembers forever; then you’re a champion for all time, in the same way Cheers never closes. That this is, actually, such an impossibly grotesque and dehumanizing approach that not even Michael Jordan could resist coming back to screw it up should possibly tell us something. But there it is, an ideal that every generational-apex-type star has to contend with on some level.

- Brian Phillips, “The Sun Never Sets: On Roger Federer, Endings, and Wimbledon”

Self-confidence is a double-edged sword: it means you’re not afraid of failure, but it also means failure shakes your sense of self. I think of it like the reverse imposter syndrome: instead of play-acting the successful person, always afraid that you’ll be caught out faking, you can’t recognize the person who is actually losing. An in-game dysmorphia. “Is that defeat really me? Why does no one believe me when I say I can still win?”

But then he gets off a boat, comes home to a struggling team. He feels his competitiveness kick in, almost a chemical thing, and he starts working out, and he wonders: Could he play at 50? What would he do against LeBron?

What if?

“It’s consumed me so much,” he says. “I’m my own worst enemy. I drove myself so much that I’m still living with some of those drives. I’m living with that. I don’t know how to get rid of it. I don’t know if I could. And here I am, still connected to the game.”

He thinks about the things Phil Jackson taught him. Jackson always understood him and wasn’t afraid to poke around inside Jordan. Once during his ritual of handing out books for his players to read, he gave Jordan a book about gambling. It’s a Zen koan Jordan needs now, in this new challenge: To find himself, he must lose himself. Whenever he obsesses about returning to play, he tries to sleep, knowing that when he wakes up, things will be better. He knows he won’t get to 218. He knows he won’t ever play pro basketball again. He knows he’s got to quiet these drives, to find a way to live the life he worked so hard to create, to be still.

- Wright Thompson, “Michael Jordan has Not Left The Building”

Maybe that’s why the greats keep coming back. They can’t recognize the person who isn’t playing the game as them. In retiring and hoping they can “find themselves,” the self they find is a stranger who shares their body. As Kien Lam wrote, “There was supposed to be relief in retirement. And yet he cried.” Not content to rest on what they’ve accomplished, always sure they could accomplish more, they put on the clothes of the game or team that felt most like them.

While on the Wizards, Michael Jordan was just average. They never made it to playoffs. YellOwStaR on TSM frustrated everyone, including himself; on 2016 Fnatic, he was joyless. Federer is still winning, but as Brian Phillips points out, it’s no longer effortless, invincible, second to religious certainty. Even with all these narratives, though, it’s still the nature of the fan to hope for the impossible and the impeccable — that their hero remains unbeatable from beginning to end, never having to suffer the indignity of loss. We don’t want to see someone struggling to find themselves; even here, we prefer the Faker of 2013, tearing through an unbeatable run to Worlds, and not the Faker of 2014, struggling against Samsung White. We want to see them fully formed, like Venus arriving in the arms of Nike — well, this metaphor is getting away from me.

Fans have an idealized narrative that sports heroes are supposed to follow. The seasoned veteran works excruciatingly long hours to achieve an end, he climbs the ranks and makes a name for himself. When he’s reached his peak, when he’s won it all, he retires gracefully because he can rest well on his laurels.

That ending can also be that of a coward who is afraid to want to achieve more. YellOwStaR was no coward. He didn’t quit at his peak; he kept doing what he loved until he became weary of the game. His final year in the LCS was a disappointment, likely not just for his fans but for the widely celebrated support player himself. But no pro should know his limit until he reaches it and the drive to push it vanishes. That sort of heroism is what kept us searching for YellOwStaR’s face when the camera panned away from the Nexus to show us the emotions of the players and the crowd.

- Kelsey Moser, “YellOwStaR’s final year”

C9 is playing FlyQuest tomorrow. It’s possible by the time you read this, you’ll already know the results. Did Hai win? Did he body Jensen? Did he show that OG C9 is still the best C9, that greatness, even in league, can be intrinsic, and not just a function of taking advantage of the meta or drafting into OP champs?

Or was FlyQuest just a fluke? Did C9 stomp over them? Has their ceiling been reached? Was it too much to expect that our past can be equal to the present, that the young won’t always bury the old?

I want Hai to succeed, not because I respect him as a player, or because I think that storyline is the most interesting for the casual viewer like me, even though those things are both true. I want him to succeed for purely personal, petty reasons: I like Hai, I see in Hai something of me, and I want him to carry that small part of my investment to a victory over the current best team in NA LCS, to spring split playoffs — hell, even to worlds. I want a mouthy, hyper-competitive, scrawny-as-fuck Asian-American man to be an inspiration. I want to prove that League of Legends is not just a young person’s game. I want to make Kien Lam happy.

If YellOwStaR had retired at the end of 2015, I would always wonder what he could have achieved in 2016. Romantic notions are one thing, but the reality of watching him confront difficulty this year, of accepting that he had struggled and failed to replicate results, was almost more fulfilling. I will always remember that in his final year of professional play, YellOwStaR wanted to keep playing and challenged himself until he came to a realization he felt too exhausted to continue… . YellOwStaR simply dared to dream. It would do us well to remember that, sometimes, to fail is also heroic. (KM)

I can’t speak for you, but me? I’ll take Federer’s version. Before we even get to the question of whether being no. 2 for a long time and winning minor tournaments enhances or damages the résumé of someone who was once no. 1 and winning majors, what I find most admirable in Federer’s late career is simply the vision of freedom it implies. The idea that you can make your own way. That you don’t have to give up what you love simply because you’re told to. That what hurts you might also fulfill you, or even make you happy, because life is not simple. (BP)

But reading about YellOwStaR and Federer, I’m comforted by the feeling that failure is not always failure. More than “loss is improve,” failure is a door to other opportunities. It frees us from the prison of thinking we gave up too soon. It closes the path behind us, so that we can’t keep turning back. And it forces us to find what is next, be it the analyst’s desk, the coach’s chair backstage, or, in Hai’s case, right back to where he started.

This is why I feel for people who’ve been fringe LCS players for a long time. I wonder what kinds of things they’ve given up to just chase the dream. What are they eating? What’s their living situation? And in the long run, maybe it’s worth it. (KL)

Here’s to standing at that precipice, seeing the darkness, and vaulting face-forward into that pitch-black unknowing anyway. Here’s to failing as a way of discovering yourself, not in the way defeat helps young players to grow, but in the way losing helps us make piece with our limitations, even our eventual mortality. Here’s to playing for yourself, because you don’t owe anyone anything, not a good game, not a graceful game, not even a mediocre one. Here’s to YellOwStaR who put his own demons to rest. And here’s to Hai, who chased his dream to the end and back again, who stands before us on Sunday not the idealized sports hero but my ideal sports hero.

Good luck, buddy.