Fruit flies like a banana.
This erstwhile saying is a linguistics staple for demonstrating syntactic ambiguity and garden path sentences. Placing these two clauses in the same sentence makes the latter part ambiguous — how are fruit flies like a banana? — although we still parse it fairly easily as simple wordplay or a joke, due to conditioning. When hearing it from an opposing Zilean in League of Legends, we recognize the latter “like” as “enjoy” rather than “is similar to.”
Yes, this post is about sports, both traditional and electronic.
Tsurune: Kazemai Koukou Kyuudoubu has a lot to say about time and devotion to a craft. Minato Narumiya is only a first-year in high school, yet he’s already experienced the ups and downs of doing something he loves — something that captured his attention so singularly as part of a bonding experience with his now-deceased mother — as part of a competition. Once a beloved hobby or sport becomes a career, suddenly everything changes, especially as that person or player grows older and the environment becomes more competitive.
I have seen this transformation countless times while writing about esports.
This post wasn’t originally going to be about former Royal Never Give Up top laner Liu “Zz1tai” Zhi-Hao. Instead it was going to touch on the framework of South Korean League of Legends pros like recently-retired Hong “Madlife” Min-gi, Kang “Ambition” Chan-yong, or even Kim “PraY” Jong-in who has not retired but, after weighing his options, is taking a bit of time off to stream. These three are big names in LoL esports, the latter of whom was still near the top of his position at a professional level.
Zz1tai officially retired yesterday and his announcement, more than any other, struck me as a reflection of the exhausting grind once a player reaches the top. Zz1tai was still arguably one of the best playing in his position in China’s LoL Pro League. He began playing the game in 2011, and attended his first League of Legends World Championship when he was 14 years-old. Zz1tai was known for his ability to play anything and everything. When a new champion was announced for the game, Zz1tai would play it at a professional level before all other players. He was not just talented but prodigious, and was able to swap between the mid and top lanes due to his vast champion pool.
He retired at the ripe old age of 21. The reason certainly wasn’t money.
Through the years, Zz1tai matured from an upstart cocky teenager with a seemingly lackadaisical attitude into a true professional. His career began with an Invictus Gaming team that was essentially a group of young men who played for fun and bragging rights. Zz1tai joined them at a remarkably young age and grew up in this environment. He saw new champions as challenges — mastering them before anyone else fed his showmanship and his love of the game burst onto the Rift every time he went all in for a 1v1 duel. As outsiders, we can only speculate, but maybe the game wasn’t fun for him anymore. Perhaps after taking it seriously for so long, the grind finally wore him down. He was one of the last remaining of the LPL original players with Ming “Clearlove” Kai as 001 and Zz1tai’s former iG teammate Ge “Kid” Yan as 002. Kid retired this past year.
“It’s just like when I developed target panic. I was trying to win then. Beating other schools, beating Seiya, beating Shuu… That was all I could think about. I’m sure that’s how Onogi is feeling. The more obsessed you become, the further and smaller the target gets.”
-Minato Narumiya, Tsurune, Episode 8
Once a rising talent himself, Narumiya suffers from target panic. It hit him during a junior high school competition and caused him to briefly abandon kyuudou altogether. He returned because he couldn’t leave something he loved so much.
“Don’t focus on winning. What I’m aiming for is…” Narumiya never finishes this sentence. Instead, for a brief moment, he forgets the pressure of competition and focuses on the sound, the tsurune, that initially inspired him.
It’s silly to suggest that the love of the game and making a career of that love are mutually exclusive. It’s also silly to suggest that love will conquer all fears of losing, letting your teammates down, or the tedium of scrims on top of solo queue on top of scrims on top of solo queue day in and day out. I don’t have any answers, but I am sad that we’ll not likely see Zz1tai play professionally again.