04. work is never over (iem katowice)
It’s been a tough week. Without LCK, I thought I could sleep in more, but instead work blew up and the fact that I’ve been out of the office every Friday for the last three weeks has finally caught up with me. Maybe no one has ever said this, but thank god for IEM — Katowice aired for the most part during hours when I was already sitting down with my first cup of coffee in the office, and I could put the games on in the background for noise. It wasn’t the best idea in the world, as I found myself invested, despite myself. Since noticing Karsa and Maple from All Star, I’ve been idly following the Flash Wolves Twitter and YouTube accounts, but I’ve neglected to watch any LMS games (it’s hard enough to follow one league on such a huge time difference!) so it was nice to see them in action and out-performing other people’s unexpectedly low expectations. ROX, the little tiger who thought it could, turned out to be the first team to make it to semifinals, and Mickey managed to pop off enough against H2k to reassure us it’s not a fluke.
But I, your patron saint of loving failures, want to talk about Kongdoo Monster.
It’s easy, or maybe in my case just easier, to love a team when they’re winning; to be a fan of a losing team, a team that is last in the rankings, having won only one match, and that against the second worst team in the league, is masochism at best and insanity at worst. KDM’s brightest point so far has been before the season even started, when they went to the finals of IEM Gyeonggi against a shaky but ultimately victorious Samsung Galaxy. Then, against teams with brand new rosters and very little practice, KDM looked like it was going somewhere, and they even got their first and what will probably be their only promotional trailer of this year, where IEM took advantage of KDM’s unusually fashionable uniforms and Edge/Roach’s almost kpop-like looks and styling.
KDM has been here before. In 2016, when they were newly rebranded, they ended spring season in last place and had to play a relegation match against MVP, who knocked them all the way back to Challengers Korea. They won against Esc Ever, now bbq Olivers, to win a spot back in LCK. And just so we all know, KDM‘s already lost to bbq 0–2. It’s still first half of spring split (the first of the Telecom War skirmishes hasn’t even happened yet!) but I’m not optimistic. I can hope for KDM to win against JAG another time, but then what? Pray that come the 28th and the 5th, I see the Afreeca that lost to JAG and not the Afreeca that won against SKT?
In another part of the world, spring training has started and it’s the beginning of baseball season. Me, I don’t watch baseball, and I don’t get it, but — and you’re going to get real sick of this after a while — I’ve been on a real Roger Angell kick recently. In June 1962 he wrote “The ‘Go!’ Shouters” on his experience watching five days of Mets’ games. KDM fans might find in Angell’s essay a gut-punching, bittersweet recognition. The Mets started the season with a nine game losing streak and would go on to extend their losing streak to fifteen under Angell’s watchful eyes. Later, Angell writes that they would go on to win six games and lose twenty-three, a fate I’m afraid is in store for KDM. Angell describes “two attractive youngsters” that emerge from the Mets’ “kiddie corps,” Kanehl who hits and run bases “with an opportunism and an energy that are conspicuous on this team” and Chacon who is “an eager, hilarious base-runner,” which made me think of Edge, a stand-out player on KDM, and Punch, their eager rookie jungler. Angell, embarrassed of the Mets’ poor play, tries to explain to his daughter that “baseball isn’t usually like this,” putting me in mind of all the jokes of Korea disowning KDM. Angell’s daughter sagely tells him, “Sometimes it is; this is like the fifth grade against the sixth grade at school,” and I’m sure anyone who watched that SSG vs KDM game where Roach did nothing but die and Edge didn’t get a single blue buff would understand.
But I didn’t turn back to that essay out of anger; Angell is, if nothing else, always uplifting and inspiring. Watching Edge on LeBlanc in game 2 against G2, you might remember Angell writing that he and the Dodgers’ pitcher, Sandy Koufax, had learned “the same odd lesson: It is safe to assume that the Mets are going to lose, but dangerous to assume that they won’t startle you in the process.” Angell might have also described KDM when he wrote that the Mets “displayed their perverse, enchanting habit of handing over clusters of runs to the enemy and then, always a little too late, clawing and scratching their way back into contention.” And, of course, there is the coup de grâce of this essay, the moment where it occurs to Angell why so many people cheered on the Mets, the paragraph everyone quotes when they talk about this essay:
Suddenly the Mets fans made sense to me. What we were witnessing was precisely the opposite of the kind of rooting that goes on across the river. This was the losing cheer, the gallant yell for a good try — antimatter to the sounds of Yankee Stadium. This was a new recognition that perfection is admirable but a trifle inhuman, and that a stumbling kind of semi-success can be much more warming. Most of all, perhaps, these exultant yells for the Mets were also yells for ourselves, and came from a wry, half-understood recognition that there is more Met than Yankee in every one of us. I knew for whom that foghorn blew; it blew for me.
I can’t tell you why I love KDM and why I am so invested in their future, win or lose. Maybe it is just because, in the end, I love failure. But even more than the Mets, this week I feel what Angell meant when he wrote, I knew that foghorn blew for me. Work is work, for me and KDM. There is always more of it. Just as I’m excited for a vacation or a weekend away where I can forget about my job, I’m sure all the members of KDM wish to be ROX or the Flash Wolves at IEM Katowice, getting ready for Spodek. But win or lose, no matter what happened at Katowice, they’d still have to go back to LCK. While I am stuck in the office for another late night, doing work I may have been excited for a year or three ago, KDM is probably also sitting in front of their computers, grinding out yet another scrim, another solo-queue game, trying to beat Afreeca twice, getting ready to play ROX and SKT and JAG all over again.
After KDM lost to G2, I watched as GuGer and SSol stood up to shake hands. I watched them turn and quietly observe the rest of their team do the same. They had their sleeves rolled up. They looked like tired exam students or the young man straight out of college who has had to put in his first 12-hour work day. I watched GuGer take breath. I watched Punch reach for his glasses, then decide against putting them on. I watched Roach sit back down, hands on his arm rest. There was no crying, or almost any expression at all. Then, right as the camera cut away from them, I watched SSol and GuGer get back to work, disconnecting their peripherals.
Coolly, calmly, on that IEM stage, they packed away their things and turned their minds back to the long road ahead of them. And so did I.
