EPTLet me tell you it really sucks being handicapped. I must admit I denied it for a long time, always trying to ignore the warning signs, never even thinking of trying to diagnose myself. Anytime the disease started to show up I would just proxy 2 rax bunker rush sending the cancer back into temporary remission. But it was always still there...like that feeling you get in your throat the day before you become really sick. You can feel it coming and you know when you go to sleep you will probably wake up unable to move but you continue to deny, you fight against it. allining became my way of hiding the truth, it seemed to be the only way to possible achieve success in fighting this disease. As time went on the sickness would just spread and get worse and worse, it would creep everywhere turning everything purple. I would break out into all of these pox like pimples that required some sort of detection to remove, but whenever I would try to even move massive floods of shitstorm would just crush me so eventually after months of trying to mask it I just gave up.
I had to give in after a couple months and admitted myself to a mental hospital. unable to walk anymore I became confined to a TvZ deficiency wheelchair 24/7 and those were some of the darkest days ever. I would look out the window and see all my friends improving at great rates and having much success while I'm stuck in this wheelchair in the corner of the mental hospital fungaled to the ground unable to move an inch. As soon as the eternal fungal is about to wear out flocks of mutas swoop in and clean up any thoughts of success or any hopes and dreams of one day getting good. The issues were as mental as they were physical at this point. climbing the actual mountain would be insanely difficult as it was but now the mental hurdles to overcome felt impossible.
I've been trying to ditch this disability for years now dating back to the broodwar generation. As a young pup learning the ways of the brood wars everything seemed to fall into place nicely for the other two thirds of my life. But something dark in one area wouldn't seem to leave me no matter how hard I tried to escape it, it was always following me. Everywhere I went I could feel it watching me, mocking me, harassing me, preventing me from being all I could be. It started getting so bad as I was improving in the other two thirds of my life this darkness third would hold me back so hard. vs P/T was getting ready to graduate high school while vs Z was bogged down in prepubescent middle school. I would play games on iccup and beat a progamer Protoss one game and then lose a massgaming C zerg the next. That's how bad it became near the end. At my absolute best at the end of 2009 during the TSL2 ladder stage on iccup I could consistently beat B/B+ level protoss and struggled to scrap wins against mid C+ zergs. The variance there actually drove me to quit for 3 months and when I came back to fight through a messy 2010 wcg campaign the only thing I could do in broodwar anymore was timing push tvp...I was completely mindfucked my only wins against any sort of decent zerg was with cheese (proxy fact into 2port wraith was amazing for one game in a bo3 but I'd always lose the next two standard games really horribly...)
I put in many hours into improving TvZ. I sought out gosu TvZ users, kawaiirice in 2009-2010 had quite solid TvZ and I was always obsing him/asking him for advice and playing top Z users. I couldn't find any consistency or even playstyle that I felt comfortable with. I even got coaching from Light[alive] at one point when I ran into him early on in an iccup season and he played 5 games of him Z vs my T but I still continued to fail... Seemed like nothing could work for me....The lights went out in broodwar with me being pretty terrible in every matchup but my interest was already fading because the broodwar scene was dying, the only events to play in were wcgs and an occasional other tournament but that was it.
fast forwarding through sc2 beta...
As I waited in line for a midnight release of star2 I wondered if a new game would cure my seemingly incurable illness that was Terran vs Zerg. Through the beta I was too scared to face reality so I played protoss. Playing protoss was fun and all but I was born a terran and wasn't ready to leave my roots... After release I switched back to T main and it's honestly been a TvZ struggle ever since. I've messed around with mech, bio, bio/mech, turtle styles, queer shit, proxy rax builds allins, marine tank, double and triple expos. nothing seems to feel that good and I find myself yet again not able to compete vs solid Z....
Alas I have come to the conclusion that I must be genetically deficient in the matchup. That's ok at least now I understand my place in this world and I'm o.k. I can look back now and tell stories of horrible marine micro vs muta harass and horrible timings. Fail vessel control losing shittons of vessels to scourge pointlessly. Losing to 9pool into 2hatch muta every game even when I know it's coming...My tears have turned from tears of hold position lurkers into tears of mass fungal growth on huge clumps of marines and neural parasites on all my thors. Like a natural progression the woes have just continued...
Regardless of my personal experience with the game I will always look back with fondness in the TvZ matchup. Although I was never able to really grasp it at a level I was shooting for in broodwar it was always my favorite matchup to watch and as Flash plays Zero tonight in the MSL finals I'll be reminded of my personal journey with the game and can't help but smile at the beauty of the game regardless of my personal skill... My first OSL finals that I saw live online (in the early days of 2007 when streams weren't nearly as easy to come by) was Nada vs Savior...ridiculously epic TvZ....As 2007 went on we were treated with tons of epic finals TvZ, Iris vs GGplay later that year for the next OSL finals was probably more epic than Nada vs Savior.
as a fan of bw/sc2 I think anyone can appreciate how epic and awesome the game is and for me personally tvz will always be the hardest and most beautiful matchup to watch/play in bw. (the verdict is still out with sc2!)
Well that killed an hour, still got 40 minutes to go... lol :D
tldr:
+ Show Spoiler +
I don't actually have cancer ! (although it feels like I do when I play tvz I'll tell you that D
=p
=p
