EPTThank you, Lee Young Ho. You have given us our pride back.
I've become very out of touch with progaming and SC in general. I took a break for my senior year because ... well, I don't know. I wasn't in any danger of failing or anything, I just felt I needed to focus more on things that "mattered". I took a 10 month long rest and then decided I was too far gone to try and keep up. I never missed Reach's games, though. And I did try and start back when the ShinHan Proleague began. But things had changed. The game had changed. The teams had changed. And so, I kept only a semi-interest.
I'm not going to say that I'm some kind of talent scout for progamers. I won't be that arrogant. But I've never seen a player like Flash before, and I don't suppose anyone needs me to tell them that he's a good player on an entirely different level. However, I am the same person who spent a majority of his teen years obsessing over the most banal, minute details of a progamer's technique. [Oops]Lee vs Savior on Bifrost in the 2004 SKY Proleague comes to mind. Man. All the little details that make up a progamer on the base level were shining through for Lee, but he still lost the game. It was beautiful. And that building placement? Best ever.
Anyway.
Flash is amazing. But why did I take immediate notice of him and not Stork, or Bisu, or Savior?
I only knew Stork from Korean WCG replays years and years ago. He didn't impress me at all.
Bisu ... well, I just plain never cared about Bisu.
I knew Savior had potential, but I never expected him to perform as well as he eventually did.
But above all else, none of them played for KTF. Korea Telecom Freemobile. Established 1999. Their coaching staff now includes former KTF progamer for FIFA Lee Ji Hoon. Ji Hoon was actually playing footie with the KTF team recently against another proteam. A FIFA progamer playing football. How awesome is that?
KTF is an old team. I'm familiar with them. Somewhat. I know they're building up Bae Byung Woo to become the next Hong Jin Ho (his nickname is Little Jin Ho). Their roster has changed drastically since I last bothered keeping up with them to the point where I really don't know the team anymore. In 2003, they had began calling themselves the Real Madrid of e-Sports. That wasn't a fan term, they made that up for themselves. They quickly bought back Hong Jin Ho from Toona SG and brought in Reach and Sync that summer from HanBit. Things were set.
And then they did ... something. They were successful, of course, but players that were once so dominant had become different people. They bought talent. That talent had then made it to the big time. The motivation and hungry spirit had left them. There was no breathing room to actually raise fresh talent.
So, in true KTF fashion, they bought 30 kids.
Thirty.
That is a lot.
I had some faith since they now had new management. If you remember, Jung Soo Yung wasn't the most brilliant strategist. He had actually rejected Free[gm] when he tried out for KTF. Not only did he reject him, he told him he had no future in progaming. Or so the story goes. But after several replacements, things seemed somewhat stable.
Of course, I would never have admitted it. I was the harshest critic of KTF. I actually used to love everything about the team. Of course, I loved Boxer's team, too. But, if you like Starcraft, you are obligated to like anything that Boxer does in his career. You are permitted to dislike him as a player, but not as a person. He was the first to make whatever sacrifice was necessary for e-Sports. He paid for the growth of progaming out of his own pocket on more than one occasion. He is Him. There's nothing any of us can do to change that. Sorry, anti-Boxers.
So, KTF has all these new coaches, new kids, new uniforms, and a big new house with automatic slidin' doorz n shit. They also had plenty of new drama. First of all, I have to say that I felt the most sorry for Hong Jin Ho even though he wasn't one of the players involved. ChoJJa, aQua, and GoodFriend were all his best friends at KTF. I don't know how he felt about Sync. I don't really know how anyone feels about Sync. I'd imagine most of them are scared to even start a conversation with him. He's silent most of the time, but he has no problem speaking his feelings. His real feelings. His interviews during the selection ceremoies were always hilarious. He's a fucking badass.
Sync once let his hair grow out. He let it get curly and then dyed it. During an interview, he was asked if he thought the new look would attract more female fans.
"I don't know. I did it because I liked it."
That's the Fireworks Terran, folks. I'm sad that his legacy wasn't mourned over more when he retired to become a coach. I'll always remember him best for his game against kOs in the Stout MSL, and not for his actual Fireworks TvZ.
So, ChoJJa and aQua moved on with their lives, Sync became a coach, and GoodFriend went to eStro. And who knows what would become of the veterans. In my perfect, righteous world, every old gamer cheers for the other. But Reach's response after Boxer beat Flash in the Proleague woke me up from that fantasy:
"Old gamers succeeding is always good, but the team is more important. When Im Yo Hwan won today, it was not good."
They're veterans, but above that, they're still progamers. On my end of the spectrum, I see new kids and groan. Especially if they're young. Some of them are so young, they actually piss me off (By.Sun). Some of them are so young, they have absolutely no concept of originality. They're boring. They're fucking boring.
But for the progamer, for the team, these kids are their hope. Or, at least a piece of a hope. A hope that one day, their team can be maybe even a fifth of a tenth of an inch closer to becoming champions. At the end of the day, that is what this is all about: Winning. They're new, they're young, but their sacrifice is still the same.
My childish dislike of everything this new generation was bringing wasn't completely vanished from my thoughts with Reach's comment, but it certainly put things in a different perspective for me.
A different enough perspective for me to at least start watching a few games again. I was going to start small. I was going to start with a team that I wanted to like again: The MagicNs. This was how I "discovered" Flash.
What can you say about Flash that hasn't already been said about Diego Maradona, Johan Cruyff, Zinedine Zidane, or Pele? He's just ... good. Good enough for me to be at a loss for words most of the time. And I love words. I use them almost everyday.
I suppose this is the part where I go into intimate detail about his journey through the qualification process and then his road to the finals. But this isn't TLFE. Even if I wanted to get into such things, I couldn't because I'm too old and out of the loop. And I also didn't watch most of it. Tee hee.
But one thing I did watch was a kid in a KTF shirt winning a Starleague. It was a blending of everything that was frustrating me in progaming. New kids and old teams and talent. It was blended, fortunately, into something delicious.
I'm out of the closet. I'm a KTF fan again. Maybe not on the level I was in the past, though. Actually, what level was I on in the past? I jumped ship as soon as things started going wrong. I'll try and be a better supporter this time.
KTF fans have always been a little different from the rest. If a KTF player is good, he is a MagicN who happens to be good. Not the other way around. As long as they're standing, the fans are going to cheer. I'm sorry, that's just how we are.
It's 8:30 AM and the last time I remember waking up was 5 PM. Not yesterday, but the day before. I'm not sure how many hours that is without sleep, but it's making me type worse than I normally do. I just had to go back and delete a bunch of grammatical errors. Sorry if I missed some.
Thank you for reading.
(Also, for all I know, this could be the 10th Starleague Flash has won. I'm not up to date in any sense of the phrase. I'm trying to fix that, though T_T)
Part of me would rather have a good-looking losing player than an ugly winner. Also, the new Head uniforms piss me off. The Magic Camp is fine. I miss the FILA uniform, I miss every one of the four PUMA uniforms they went through - I just feel neo-KTF is... different.
