Well, you all know what I ended up choosing to do. I realized that opportunities like this are once in a lifetime, and I had worked so hard to get to that point, so why stop? Within a month, I was confident I had made the right choice. We played against NiP in the finals of the next major, and there was nothing like it. Your nerves are going crazy as you walk up on stage, but your mind shuts them down — once you hop in the server, a strange calm sets in. This is the culmination of everything that you’ve worked for, and somehow, you just keep pulling out play after play.
You play at 110%.. Then 120%.. Then 150%..
By the end of it, you’re playing like you’ve only dreamed you could. Even though we lost, I knew what the taste of victory was like, and I wanted it more than I ever had before.
The next two years are a happy blur. Hundreds of thousands of miles of travel, thousands of rounds played, countless time spent in demos, hoisting trophy after trophy. We never rested on our laurels, each win just made us want the next one even more.
And then someone hit the brakes. It wasn’t Coldzera. It wasn’t Pasza. It wasn’t karrigan. As luck would have it, my worst enemy would end up being my own damn body. Around the turn of the year, I started to notice this pain growing in my arm. It wasn’t bad, just a bit of a tightness and a burn around my wrist, like when you bench press just a bit too much. At first, I didn’t think much of it. I would ice it a bit, maybe take an Advil, and play through the discomfort. But as the months went on, it got sharper and sharper. I found myself grimacing with flickshots and trying to massage the pain away in between rounds. Eventually, it was too much. After trying to play through the Major, I told my team that I had to address this.
When I said that the competitive spirit resided deep in my soul, I meant it. I will put my fullest effort into anything and everything — football, Counterstrike, school, even walking from the movie theatre back to the car. I needed to win and now I had a new challenge. It was me against my injury. I did everything to get the edge. I tried therapy after therapy, treatment after treatment. I must have called every doctor in my county, trying to find someone who could tell me exactly what was wrong. I finally managed to find a doctor who had confidence in his diagnosis, and we set out to make this roadblock disappear.