“I leave when the pub closes.” – Churchill’s response after being advised to retire gracefully

When I watch esports games, there are two things I’m looking for from all players. That is skill and will. Watching sublime skill fills me with an effervescent joy as I am watching the best excel at their craft. But this article isn’t about the awe inspiring skill, this one is about the will. The other thing I want to see from players is grit. The never-say-die attitude, the willingness to get battered and then go out and try again. No matter how bad the results or how unlikely the odds, they will not quit. Players like these have their careers end when they are marched back home upon their shield. This is dedicated to the raw will of those who never give up.

One of the players I think exemplifies this mentality in Dota 2 is Kyle Freedman. For almost the entirety of his time in Dota 2 he was the captain of compLexity Gaming. As a team and as a leader, he never got the results he was searching for. There were many up and downs throughout his career and it wouldn’t have been surprising if he had hung it up. Instead, every time things went bad, he doubled down. When he was released from compLexity, Kyle “Beef” Bautista revealed that Kyle paid for the security deposit on the Florida team house because he believed that it was integral in improving the team. When the team was about to be dropped, he opted to not take salary and defer reimbursement of utlities for months to keep the team afloat.

Kyle is a fighter, someone who wants to win above all else. Even now when he was kicked from the team, he is still aiming to become the best in the Dota 2 world. Among all of the various episodes that can explain him, his heated argument with Bai “rOtK” Fan may be the best. At the Shanghai Major his team played against LGD. It was clear LGD wasn’t practicing and rOtk tried to play it off as they tried hard enough. Kyle isn’t only interested in winning, he is interested in winning against the best. The statement enraged him as he wrote on reddit,

“it’s insulting for someone so obviously half-assing it to claim he’s working as hard as I do, as hard as HUNDREDS AND THOUSANDS of other players are. WE tried REALLY REALLY FUCKING HARD to get this far, and we’re STILL not good enough. In 2013 you could phone it in and still place top 3 in tournaments, it’s no longer possible. EG are all some of the best players in the world, but the reason they’ve been so incredibly consistent is because they never stopped working hard. If you don’t show up to the opening ceremony in your own fucking country you have no right to tell anyone that you cared enough.”

In a pure theoretical sense, the right move would have been for Kyle to corroborate. That is because you could feed rOtk’s laziness with positive reinforcement. Instead he went hard on him and called him out because he refused to let rOtk claim he was trying hard enough. Kyle wanted rOtk to be angry and to practice so that when compLexity did finally beat their team, he could say rOtk was at his best.

In CS:GO, one of the most famed players for his warrior spirit is Wiktor “TaZ” Wojtas. He was part of the legendary Virtus.Pro lineup that stuck together for a little over four years. Their run was incredible as every time they slumped, they found something in themselves to come back up again. TaZ was an integral part of the team as he was a veteran. Someone who knew how to help young star players shine. He was also one of the emotional centers as he could get the team fired up with his loud boasts and actions. While his antics annoyed the team, it also could sharpen the team at times. Force them to play at a higher energy than they normally would and was a part of what made them such an exciting team to watch.

That could only last for so long and TaZ has now been removed from the Virtus.Pro lineup. He had a lot of moves he could have made. His English is fairly good, he has a huge personality, and is still a well beloved player in the CS:Go community. He could have done a multitude of things like becoming a streamer, joining a team organization, maybe joining a foreigner team. Instead he decided that his ride isn’t over yet. After being removed from Virtus.Pro, he has moved on to a new Polish lineup in Kinguin. From there he will use his veteran savvy to show the world that he can do it again. TaZ’s time at Virtus.Pro is over, but TaZ still has a thing or two to say about his career.

The most famous example from Starcraft 2 is Mun “MMA” Seong Won. He was one of the best players in the world in 2011 to the middle of 2012. By the end of 2012 however, his career had hit a slump. He dealt with huge personal issues from his team as they called him “cancer”. His individual slump went down and if it was almost anyone else, they would have likely retired from the amount of hatred he was being given from the community. He didn’t give up, he refused to. He was a player who had seen the light, seen the incredible magic of Blizzcon 2011 when he played in a finals against the greatest SC2 player of all time, Jung “Mvp” Jong Hyun and won.

When he left Korea to play in WCS EU and rebuild himself, he told Duncan “Thorin” Shields that “I always remember the time I played against Mvp, when the crowd cheered ‘MMA! MMA! MMA!’ It’s one of the things that keeps me going to practice hard. So I really want to play in front of Blizzcon one more time.” That interview was done in 2013 after the KeSPA switch which had effectively doubled the competitive player pool in Korea. MMA was in the worst slump of his career and his style had been phased out of the meta. To top if all off, he was a worse mechanical player compared to many of the Koreans he was likely to face, but he never stopped grinding and nearly two years later he made those words a reality as he made it to the Blizzcon finals of 2015, nearly 4 years after his prime.

There is something to be said about players who refuse to give up no matter how unlikely their chances, how deep they fall into the slump. While I watch competition to see the best plays of the era, I can’t help but feel a sense of respect for those who refuse to give up. Even moreso when you consider that many critics and fans feel like these players are tarnishing their legacies by sticking around for so long. I can understand why as many fans don’t remember the best parts of a player’s careers, only the end. For me at least, that glory doesn’t fade. No matter how bad Lee “Flash” Young Ho or Lee ‘Jaedong” Jae dong became in Starcraft 2, I always remembered the glory days of their Brood War careers. For me, it shows a different kind of character, a different kind of strength. Players like Kyle, TaZ, and MMA show how much they want to win despite the ridicule. The will let their reputation or the legacy or their ego get hurt if only to get a chance to keep fighting. That is admirable to me and while players like this don’t get to keep a completely clean legacy without the aftertaste of the bitter fall, they can proudly say they fought to the end, they died on the battlefield. As Daigo Umehara once wrote from his book The Will to Keep Winning,

“I realize that I won’t be able to stay on top forever, and I don’t deny that effort can only trump age at a certain point. Still I chose to become a pro gamer precisely because I want to keep working in spite of those limits. If I’m going to die someday anyway, I want it to be on the battlefield. I’m not the type to take my last breath quietly, holed up in my castle.”

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