I circled the Evo 2016 stage set in the middle of the Mandalay Bay Events Center, looking for an older gentleman rocking an East Coast Throwdown t-shirt and sunglasses. It was right after Joe “LI Joe” Ciaramelli’s Cinderella run at Evo ended at the hands of Fujimara “Yukadon” Atsushi. I waited for LI Joe to receive hugs from friends and family before stepping up to introduce myself to Bill Ciaramelli, or as some have dubbed him, LI Dad.

“I know who you are,” he told me.

It caught me by surprise, because I had never spoken to nor met Bill in person. I only knew what I was told by LI Joe last November when I interviewed him for a profile. Over the course of the interview, LI Joe and I talked pretty extensively about his parents and the affect they had on his life.

LI Joe has been playing fighting games since he was about 7 years old. He wasn’t even tall enough to reach the controls without using a box or a stool to stand on at the arcades. Bill has been there nearly every step of the way, supporting LI Joe’s passion. That attitude didn’t start when Bill became a father, but when he was just a boy himself.

View photos Bill Ciaramelli (right) at Evo 2016 (Stephanie Lindgren) More

Musical youth

Bill’s passion for music started when he was about 8 years old. A fan of The Ed Sullivan Show, he sang chorus in school and banged pots and pans with butter knives in front of the TV. The first time he ever touched a guitar was at a friend’s house.

“His father put a guitar on the couch. I started plucking on the guitar,” Bill told Yahoo Esports in a phone interview. “It got to me. I played a song on one string. That’s how it started.”

Bill’s father took him to a pawn shop to get his first guitar. But unlike the unwavering support LI Joe gets for his interests, Bill’s love for art and music was met with skepticism.

“When I brought my guitar home, my brother said, ‘And what are you going to do with that?’” Bill said. “I said it’s something I really want to do.”

Anywhere Bill went, if he saw a guitar, he had the natural inclination to pick it up and play. He said his family constantly scolded him, telling him to not touch musical instruments. Despite the fact he grew up to be a musician, that left a lasting impression on him. He hoped to avoid doing the same to his own children.

He let Joe’s brother Billy practice with his heavy metal band at his house when none of the other parents in the neighborhood would. When Joe wasn’t old enough to go to arcades by himself, Bill would go with him. They would come home late, often getting in trouble with mom, who wasn’t thrilled about the idea of Joe going out to play video games at local arcades.

“Mom was not very open to a lot of things,” Bill said. “She was one of seven kids. Her two brothers weren’t allowed to ride bicycles because her mother thought they might get hurt.”





The pink backpack

When she first got cancer, Joe’s mother, Eileen, expected to live for a year. She managed to live seven more, and the entire time, Joe was there.

Before her death, LI Joe had the opportunity of a lifetime for fighting game players: an invitation to play Street Fighter in Japan. He hesitated. He had the trip booked, but offered to cancel it all if his mom didn’t want him to go.

“You better go to Japan,” she told him. And he did. Three days after he came home, Eileen passed away.

“Joseph was the reason,” Bill said about Eileen hanging on as long as she did. “He never left the house. He stayed close. When she passed, Joseph was the one sitting in the room holding her hand.”

Even though he was his son’s biggest supporter, Bill underestimated how much Joe had grown from the experience because he and Eileen had separated before she got sick.

“A week or so after she passed, I told him, ‘Joe, I know how you feel,’” Bill said. “He looked at me like he was 20 years older than me and said, ‘Don’t you dare tell me you know how I feel. Were you there every single day for the past seven years? It was just me. You have no idea.’ My son had grown up. He put everything in perspective.”

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