EPTI've never been a person who enjoyed watching sports. Or cheering for teams. I mean, back in high school I would go to events to cheer for my ex-girlfriend (who was very good at tennis), but that was just to be supportive. I never understood the 'fan' mentality that made people irrationally cheer for someone they don't know, and caused them to celebrate when their favorite team won.
I'm pretty sure I was a bit of a stick in the mud about it, actually. I'm sure there was much eye-rolling as a teenager at people who could 'get all excited over some athlete they don't even know winning a bunch of money and getting even richer'. I didn't understand how people could enjoy watching teams throw a ball around 100 times a year and still have fun watching it every single time...because I didn't understand the 'fan mentality'. They weren't watching because (American) football is an incredibly entertaining game to watch in and of itself, they were watching because they were cheering for their favorite team, and they had personal emotional investment in that team doing well.
Enter Starcraft.
I've never been very good at Starcraft, but I've been with it since it came out. I played casually with my friends a bit (we all played Protoss because omfg the units are like invincible and have a billion health and storms and carriers are insta-win ahmagawd, and when one of us got too good at PvP we would force that person to play Zerg/Terran instead while we caught up). Yeah, we were bad. Time moved on, we moved on to other games, and Starcraft was mostly forgotten.
I knew about the Starcraft scene in Korea, but I never followed it until the GSI. One of my old Starcraft buddies sent me an IM like "Hey man, you've got to watch this tournament, it's gonna be cast in English, just give it a try, come on." I was pretty skeptical. Again, I didn't really get the point of cheering for people I don't know, but I figured "Hey, what the hell, I may as well see how the game looks when played at the top levels."
The first thing that struck me was how different players had different styles. Both in personal appearance, demeanor, and of course in how they played the game. Tasteless helped a lot with that, making the players seem more 'human', and talking about all the interesting quirks each player had. I didn't know anything about any of these players (except Boxer), so his commentary was a life-saver.
As the tournament went on, I realized that whenever Flash was playing, I was on the edge of my seat, sending all my energy at the monitor thinking "Come on kid, win, you can crush this guy, win, WIN!". I guess the whole 'child genius destroys older players' storyline was something that I instinctively wanted to cheer for. It reminded me a bit of the Ender's Game book, a favorite of mine as a young teenager. I distinctly remember stopping myself at one point and thinking "Hey, what the hell, wait a minute...am I...am I acting like a sports fan here?"
I was. I resisted it a bit at first, and then I realized how silly I was being and just gave in to it. I had never had as much fun watching a game as I had when I watched the GSI finals. I got together with the friend who first introduced me to the GSI (incidentally, a huge Stork fan) and a couple other guys, and we watched the games together, acting as irrational and boneheaded as any American football fans would act about their favorite teams. It was an absolute blast, and the feeling when Stork typed out in Game 5 and made Flash the winner of the GSI was amazing. It was the Fan Experience.
Anyway, that's my little hungover rant. Thanks Starcraft, South Korea, TeamLiquid, and Tasteless, for making an irrational fanboy out of me.
Your story is very close to mine, except I found out about the pro scene 1-2 months before GSI started.
