Revisiting the Montreal Screwjob

Sports Illustrated published an interesting piece the other day that had Bret “The Hitman” Hart revisiting one of the most controversial events in pro wrestling history, the “Montreal Screwjob.” This was a pivotal moment in the history of the industry, which integrally shaped the five years that followed, and, arguably, even dictated the course of professional wrestling all the way to its present decline. I’ve always thought that this particular story could be the basis for a great film, on account of how much it reveals about the sickening truth of pro wrestling (such as there is to be had). Indeed, when Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler released in 2008, garnering widespread critical acclaim and accolades for Mickey Rourke’s performance, all I could think was that a more honest and more relevant pro wrestling picture should instead have focused on the Montreal Screwjob. It should have delved into what a truly dirty business pro wrestling is, defined over the last four decades by a behind-the-curtain megalomania that has always dwarfed any of the on-screen personalities.

To summarize, in 1997, the World Wrestling Federation (WWF), Bret Hart’s employer of more than a decade, was not able financially to fulfill the remainder of his long-term contract, and so he was preparing to pack up and take his talents to World Championship Wrestling (WCW), WWF’s longstanding arch-rival, which had finally overtaken it over the preceding year of competition. There was one problem, however: within the scripted universe of pro wrestling storylines, Bret Hart was the reigning WWF Champion.

With the “Monday Night Wars” between WWF and WCW growing increasingly spiteful and cutthroat, WWF owner Vince McMahon did not want Hart “taking the belt with him” to WCW. Wishing to part amicably, Hart agreed to vacate the title during a farewell show for WWF. But that wasn’t good enough for McMahon, who knew that WCW would jump at any chance to boast that they had gotten the reigning WWF Champion to defect. McMahon needed Hart to lose the title in a match to another WWF wrestler.

From McMahon’s perspective, the obvious venue was Survivor Series, as it was the only remaining pay-per-view event that Hart was contracted for. Hart had two problems with this: 1) Survivor Series was taking place in Montreal in Hart’s home nation of Canada, and 2) Hart’s scheduled opponent was Shawn Michaels, with whom he was in the midst of a scripted (but truly ugly) “U.S. vs. Canada” feud. Hart did not want to lose in Canada to a guy who had spent the preceding weeks and months dissing Canada. Thus, in order for McMahon to get his way, he conspired with a select handful of his employees to go behind Hart’s back and plot a “screwjob.”

Heading into the Survivor Series match against Michaels, Hart received one script, which was supposed to end in his victory. Meanwhile, the other key actors in the ring—Michaels and referee Earl Hebner—would secretly be working from a different script. At one point in the match, Michaels would catch Hart in Hart’s own signature submission hold, the Sharpshooter. Hart understood that he would then reverse the hold, but, before he could get the chance, Hebner immediately rang the bell to signify that Hart had “tapped out” to the Sharpshooter, even though Hart had given no such indication of surrender.

An irate Hart stood up and spat in Vince McMahon’s face at ringside. Shawn Michaels grabbed the belt and was quickly ushered out of the arena, foregoing the traditional in-ring victory celebration. The pay-per-view broadcast cut off right there, and anybody watching could tell that something peculiar had happened, but the result was in the books now.

http://youtu.be/TnjqgiWgSsA

(Video uploaded by illusive255)

I wonder if Vince McMahon ever considered the possible negative repercussions of the Montreal Screwjob. Yes, he had prevented Bret Hart from taking the WWF Championship to WCW, but the manner in which he had handled it actually created more fodder for his rival and other critics to paint the WWF as a disgrace. I suppose the scheme was only as ridiculous as one would expect coming from people who made their living plotting pro wrestling storylines.

In any case, the biggest story in pro wrestling became, in the immediate aftermath and for months following, not any of the scripted feuds at all, but the controversy over the Montreal Screwjob. Discussion among fans was far less concerned with who held which belts in either WWF or WCW, and far more interested in whatever real-life animus might exist between the involved parties. And, in an industry that has never known what it is to sink too low, both WWF and WCW were eager to capitalize by integrating this real-life dirty laundry into their scripts.

WCW responded by getting “Ravishing” Rick Rude to directly reference the incident and call out both Shawn Michaels and Vince McMahon on an episode of WCW Monday Nitro. This sort of explicit trash-talking across competing programs was unprecedented (not to mention risky, since WCW may have been inadvertently encouraging its viewers to watch WWF in order to catch the other side of an unintended “crossover”), but the moment was especially memorable because Rick Rude also appeared on WWF Raw Is War that same night.

In the WWF storyline, Rude was a member of Shawn Michaels’s gang. But, in real life, Rude was a personal friend of Bret Hart. So, when the Montreal Screwjob happened, Rude hatched a scheme of his own together with WCW. With his contract with WWF coincidentally due to expire right after the Montreal Screwjob, Rude made a verbal agreement to extend his stay, only to then go behind Vince McMahon’s back to sign with WCW instead. He then taped his final episode of WWF Raw Is War, where he appeared with a full beard. Then, on the very night that the episode was to premiere, Rude also appeared on live television on WCW Monday Nitro, but with his beard shaved! On the West Coast, WCW Monday Nitro aired hours before WWF Raw Is War, so Rude’s appearances completely exposed that WWF’s program, although always advertised as live, was actually taped days in advance.

http://youtu.be/ChfWHf2w95o

(Video uploaded by WWE)

In the moment, this must have seemed quite the coup for WCW. Of course, nobody could have known it at the time, but this was the beginning of the end for WCW, and it was really WWF that would come out far ahead.

WCW tried to run with its own this-time-totally-scripted “sequel” to the Montreal Screwjob, in which a different corrupt referee was supposed to screw over a good guy wrestler, only to have Bret Hart intervene on the side of justice. Unfortunately, the intervention was so unconvincingly executed that it became a fiasco unto itself, which, naturally, also became integrated into the ongoing plot. Afterward, Hart had no other memorable storylines in WCW, where he effectively ended his career with a whimper due to health issues. Rick Rude’s tenure there was even less remarkable; he never was able to get into ring-ready condition before dying suddenly of heart failure.

Meanwhile, Vince McMahon recognized that the best move he could make was to fully embrace the image that the fans now had of him as the corrupt owner of the WWF. Originally, “Vince McMahon” the character had been only a ringside announcer. Most viewers who only followed the action on TV and nothing behind the scenes wouldn’t even have known that McMahon was actually the head honcho, which was how McMahon had preferred it. But now that he had been fully “outed” by the Montreal Screwjob spotlighting him as this tyrannical mastermind, and finding that the vitriol that fans felt for him was the biggest reaction of any kind that the WWF had gotten in a long time, McMahon shrewdly recast himself as his promotion’s chief antagonist, whom fans loved to hate. McMahon’s scripted feuds with his wrestlers proved wildly successful, as well as increasingly ridiculous, as McMahon began to wrestle himself, and also brought in his real-life wife and children as characters, who, yes, also wrestled.

WWF (later WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment)) was also, no doubt, helped financially by being able to jettison Bret Hart’s massive contract. With the departure of Hart, nearly all of the “old guard” superstars were now gone, which actually freed up WWF to cultivate and thrive off a new generation of edgier characters, while WCW began to flounder off the diminishing returns of the many aging has-been egos still headlining its shows. Less than four years after the Montreal Screwjob, McMahon was able to purchase his ailing competitor, effectively achieving a monopoly, which, in the long term, has been a victory for nobody, as pro wrestling’s cultural currency has continually declined under his absolute control. That's not a subjective qualitative assessment; WWE's stock has also been tanking over the past half-year.

Reading Hart’s thoughts on the Montreal Screwjob now, one of the weirder things, at least for anyone not immersed in the fiction of professional wrestling, might be whom he accuses of having been behind the plot. McMahon was obviously in charge of everything, but Hart believes that the other two key conspirators were Shawn Michaels and Paul Michael Levesque (AKA “Triple H”). This is surreal because Michaels and Triple H were, at the time, not executives or creative directors in charge of storylines, but were, like Hart, mere performers (in other words, actors), so why would they have been calling shots alongside McMahon? Moreover, not only were Bret Hart and Shawn Michaels bitter rivals in the fiction, but the two did not like one another in real life. As for Triple H, he was Michaels’s friend, both in the story and in real life, and, again, someone Hart did not get along with in either. So the lines between reality and pro wrestling fiction get very blurred, and you almost wonder if Bret Hart was the one having a hard time keeping things straight. Maybe he started out only being pretend enemies with Michaels and Triple H, but then he got so method into his performance that he came to despise them off camera as well. Then, when he got screwed in real life (and also in the story, I suppose), he named his pretend nemeses as the culprits only on account of their fictional enmity.

In fact, all parties’ accounts, Michaels’s included, have corroborated Hart’s suspicions, so evidently he’s not paranoid. But isn’t that even crazier? That the heel characters always scheming against him in the storyline turned out to be scheming against him in real life also? And in precisely such an underhanded manner and for precisely the same reasons (i.e. to take his belt) as in nearly all pro wrestling storylines?

Actually, I have always had a suspicion that the Montreal Screwjob was a total fiction—that is, a multi-level angle—and that all the actors, including Bret Hart and maybe even those running things in WCW, were in on it (and still are). There’s almost no way to ever know for sure, but, frankly, every aspect of it strikes me as ridiculous. But maybe that’s the point. If the Montreal Screwjob did not begin as an angle, both WWF and WCW certainly turned it into one. So maybe “real or fake” has never been the proper question when it comes to pro wrestling, and everything instead just exists in this bizarre gray area in between, where every character is but a version of the actor playing them—heightened or fictionalized, perhaps, but still that person at core. And the really insane, disturbing, and frequently tragic part is that the actors themselves cannot clearly separate fiction from reality. That includes all the wrestlers, who are sincerely competitive, even if none of the fighting is real. And it includes Vince McMahon, the principal man behind the curtain, who got swept up in his own stories and onto the stage, where his real-life business decisions, working relationships, and even family members bled into the scripted delusions.

Evo 2014 - Et cetera (plus thoughts on the FGC and eSports)

In addition to the anticipated championships for Ultra Street Fighter IV and Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3, Evo 2014 was also host to a number of other tournaments and events. Among those I happened to catch, one of the more memorable was X-Mania USA, the first American edition in Japan’s premiere Super Street Fighter II Turbo competition, a single-elimination 3v3 team tournament.

X-Mania USA

Three of Japan’s “Five Gods of Capcom Fighting Games”—Daigo “The Beast” Umehara, Shinya “Nuki” Onuki, and Hajime “Tokido” Taniguchi—joined together to form Team Japan 1. U.S. legends Alex Valle, John Choi, and Mike Watson also answered the call to take on their Japanese rivals one more time as Team OGSF. These six players have had so many classic battles between them over the years in Super Street Fighter II Turbo tournaments at Evo, before the game was finally retired from the official lineup after 2008. Nuki might be the only one among them who still practices the game; he placed 2nd in the previous day’s Tournament of Legends II. But those old school skills die hard, as do storied USA vs. Japan rivalries.

http://youtu.be/XIxwjgsZjxA

The new school of U.S. top players was represented by Team Special Forces, composed of Jason “AfroLegends” Nguyen, Damien “Damdai” Dailidenas, and Biran “Ganelon” Su, three Super Street Fighter II Turbo enthusiasts who came up well after the game’s prime years, but have since established themselves as the country’s top specialists, which they would prove here by besting Team OGSF for a respectable 3rd-place finish.

But, in an all-Japan final at X-Mania USA, it would be two teams composed of Super Street Fighter II Turbo grandmasters attending Evo 2014 to compete in this game only. On one side, we had Team M3: MAO, Mattsun, and TMF. On the other side was Team Japan 2: Noguchi, Hanashi, and Kurahashi. These were all near-mythic names, the living legends and true diehards of the game, for whom Super Street Fighter II Turbo never ended and there were no other games.

http://youtu.be/JRYJiux9OYc

Now, all grandiloquence aside, for anybody who wants to argue that the old games were more skillful, more strategic, more balanced, just take a look at what happens when either MAO or Noguchi steps up to the joystick and plays as Vega (claw) (“Balrog” in the video, as they were playing on the Japanese version). These “grandmasters” basically just spam Vega’s wall dive technique over and over again, and their opponents can barely do anything about it. This is a character so mindlessly overpowered that, at one point, he was reportedly “soft-banned” in Japan, meaning that, although there was no written rule against using Vega in competition, everybody in the arcade would shun you if you won with him. And when it’s time for MAO and Noguchi to play one another? Pure slapstick. I bet even Vega players hate Vega.

The King of Fighters XIII

I also happened to catch the finals of The King of Fighters XIII. I find this a dreadfully boring game to spectate, because 1) matches take way too long, 2) there are too many mirror matches, especially involving the DLC characters (which I never quite felt like paying for), and 3) I find that comebacks are less feasible in the 3-on-3 elimination format of King of Fighters, as compared to more typical 1-on-1 round-based games. But there was some minor intrigue to be had from the grand final, between Japan’s Tokido and China’s Zhuojun “XiaoHai” Zeng.

Tokido, one of the aforementioned “Japanese gods,” is probably the most versatile fighting game player on the planet. A perennial top player in whatever the marquee Capcom fighting game of the moment is, he’ll nonchalantly sign up to compete in just about every other Japanese fighting game at any event he attends as well, because it’s easy money if he can win without trying very hard. He was never even really a Super Street Fighter II Turbo player, but, as is his method in all his side games, he quickly picked up the cheapest character, in this case Vega, and subsequently outperformed the U.S.’s most veteran warriors at multiple Evo tournaments. At the Street Fighter 25th Anniversary Tournament, he was the only person on the planet to qualify in all four games (Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix, Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike Online Edition, Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition Ver. 2012, and Street Fighter X Tekken). He is one of only two Japanese players ever to win a major Marvel vs. Capcom tournament in the U.S., doing so in Marvel vs. Capcom 3 right at the peak of that game’s profile shortly after its release. And he has even made Evo top 8 before in some of the 3-D fighting games, such as Tekken 6 and Virtua Fighter 5.

At first glance, Tokido’s success in The King of Fighters XIII would seem to be a case of merely his natural genius taking him far in another side game, where the competitive scene might not be especially developed. But it’s a little-known bit of trivia that Hajime Taniguchi’s long-held nickname, “To-Ki-Do,” actually derives from the most scrubby style of Iori Yagami play in The King of Fighters ‘98 (Tobi = jump, Kikku = kick, Doushita! = what Iori yells when he performs his fireball). And, after a fairly effortless 4th-place finish last year, he had stated his intention to focus heavily on the game, his sights set on an Evo championship for 2014. So this title really did mean something to him; it was not just easy money.

As for his opponent, XiaoHai, this is a guy who made his name (quite literally) by becoming, at a tender age, China’s “god of KOF,” who has made a parlor trick of crushing challengers one-handed in The King of Fighters ‘98. The King of Fighters is a series that traditionally had never had much of a competitive scene in either Japan or the U.S. But it developed a huge following in regions such as China and Mexico, which have not historically been prioritized as lucrative markets for closed-platform video game publishers, but where piracy runs rampant, the old Neo Geo games being among the easiest to clone and cheaply distribute across arcades in these lands. So, although XiaoHai has, of late, proven himself one of the most formidable competitors in Street Fighter IV, it would be proper to say that The King of Fighters simply runs in his blood.

With both Tokido and XiaoHai having suffered disappointing early exits in Ultra Street Fighter IV the previous day, this King of Fighters XIII grand final was now their Evo.

… And it was a miserable bore again, aside from the amusement to be had when the Iori vs. Iori mirror match came up, leading to slapstick moments (witness the opening exchange at 9:30) coincidentally almost exactly like those in the Vega vs. Vega Super Street Fighter II Turbo match.

http://youtu.be/h9qC1shBP8M

(Video uploaded by FRMA.)

The one great moment to come out of this tournament was actually after all the fighting was done (at 36:40). After the top 8 finalists lined up on the main stage to receive their Evo medals, the crowd began a chant. But it was not a boorish “U-S-A” chant, nor any particular competitor’s name. Rather, it was “K-O-F,” a chant in appreciation of the tournament itself, for all the competitors and for a series and scene that has long struggled to be taken seriously by the larger FGC. As all the finalists joined in on the chant in unison, it created an Olympics-style moment of camaraderie in competition through shared love of the game. Awesome. (And then, of course, that gave way to a random “U-S-A” chant from the crowd, which, okay, was pretty great in its own way.)

Killer Instinct

I saw bits of the Killer Instinct top 8. I don’t have a very complete understanding of what’s going on in this game. It looks pretty fun, and I especially appreciate that it includes a smaller roster of very distinct characters (as opposed to most games these days, which have humongous casts, such that even the top players in the world can sometimes be caught having no idea how to approach rarely seen matchups), but, as it’s exclusive to a console I don’t own, I can’t really get into it.

The current competitive scene for it is interesting, though, because Killer Instinct has been, for whatever reason, the one “crossover” game, where top Street Fighter players and top Mortal Kombat players have been duking it out for supremacy. This is the one game that has seen Justin Wong returning to the role that he once owned within the U.S. FGC, as the most-wanted bounty head and invading Goliath. Or, depending on your perspective, maybe the invader is Emmanuel “CD Jr” Brito, one of the greats in Mortal Kombat (2011), and now one of the dominant forces in Killer Instinct as well. Mortal Kombat, as a tournament game, has never enjoyed the popularity or the respect of Street Fighter, but let there be no further doubt as to the legitimacy of the players who have chosen to express their talent through the Western-developed fighting games, as CD Jr has been holding his own (and then some) against the likes of Justin Wong in Killer Instinct.

Of course, the scene for this game is still pretty small, and limited by it being on the Xbox One, so we’ll see whether it grows or just fizzles. I’ll say that, as a spectator, I find it much more entertaining than past games that never caught on, such as Street Fighter X Tekken, or even The King of Fighters XIII, for that matter.

http://youtu.be/z7cLmLtr4Ag

 

BlazBlue: Chrono Phantasma

But the most intense grand final of any tournament all Evo may actually have been for the game with the least hype, BlazBlue: Chrono Phantasma.

BlazBlue could probably be filed under “games that never caught on,” alongside its predecessor Guilty Gear. The 2-D “anime fighters” developed by Arc System Works have never attracted a large competitive community in the U.S.; they’ve been just steady enough to earn typically one Evo spot annually for whatever the most current Arc System Works game of the moment is. This year, however, Arc System Works and publisher Aksys Games teamed together to raise BlazBlue’s Evo profile in a big way, donating a bonus $30,000 to make the tournament’s prize pot the largest of any game at Evo 2014. This boosted entrance numbers by about 100 competitors over last year’s Persona 4 Arena tournament, and perhaps it also played a part in attracting a contingent of reportedly Japan’s top BlazBlue specialists.

I remember, at past Evos, the Guilty Gear XX tournaments would come down to the top specialists in the U.S. getting run over by whichever Japanese players happened to be at Evo, and for whom Guilty Gear XX was merely a “free money” side game. This year, with Japan’s actual best BlazBlue specialists all coming to participate, would the finals prove to be an even more anticlimactic mockery of the weak U.S. scene for these anime games? Would the entire top 8 be all Japanese players “going to work” on Sunday against the same guys they play against every day back home, as though the biggest BlazBlue tournament in North America were just another day at the office for them?

Well, to the first question, sort of, as indeed 7 of the top 8 (and 10 of the top 16) were Japanese. As for the second question, well… so it seemed, at first.

As with Killer Instinct, I don’t understand this game too terribly well either, and was having to learn the rules as I watched, but the Arc System Works games generally share a few signature characteristics. They are high-execution games, where you cannot expect to compete unless you can perform lengthy combos with consistency, and air-dash around the screen with speed and precision. On defense, there’s usually a metered mechanic that allows you to negate chip damage as you block. And your real lifeline is the “Burst” technique—a combo-breaker, which takes a LONG time to refill once you use it.

So the basic arc (no pun intended) and flow of a match proceeds thus: characters fly around and deal big damage very quickly, but a player with only slivers of health left can still hang in there for quite a while if their defense is on point, and the decisions on when and how to spend one’s precious Burst can be absolutely pivotal, as using it at one point can save your life at that time, but then doom you later when you need it and don’t have it.

I had the top 8 playing in the background and found it kind of a snoozer, notwithstanding some freaky cosplaying exhibited by the Japanese competitors:

http://youtu.be/3Cvwa4J7K9w?rel=0&start=208

But, again, understanding that these guys all probably played against one another every day in the arcade made this all seem very anticlimactic to me. What could this U.S. tournament, populated mostly by competitors far below the level they were accustomed to, really mean for these Japanese (well, other than a big payday)? To my astonishment, the grand final answered that question in a way that completely changed my mind.

http://youtu.be/JO1r6kRiP6s

As Ryo “Dogura” Nozaki, coming from the winners bracket, sat on championship game at 2-2, having just pummeled Keiji “Garireo” Okamoto in two straight rounds in commanding fashion, it looked like our anticlimax was nigh. Garireo, one game away from elimination in the losers bracket, was seriously on the ropes against the competitor who had already beaten him convincingly to send him there in the first place. I must confess, I hadn’t even been paying attention. But then the stream exploded with the sounds of the commentators and crowd going nuts.

In the fourth game, Garireo, facing match point, having dropped the first round and now one hit away from defeat in the second, began to rally! And the 8,000-person ballroom was now behind him all the way!

Garireo pulls out the round. Cue crowd eruption. With momentum on his side, Garireo takes the next round as well, resetting the bracket to send the match to a second, decisive set. And that’s when Garireo lets out a primal roar (14:30) that is to become the single most impressive image of Evo 2014.



Dogura, for his part, unfazed, would answer back with four straight dominating rounds to race to a 2-0 lead in the second set. Garireo, facing the possible end of the road again, looked even more done than he had at any time in the last set. Cheered on by the crowd, he nodded to signify his readiness for the next game, only to find himself again just two combos away from losing it all in the third round. And again Garireo dug deep and somehow found his way back to make it 2-1 Dogura.

The pattern repeated. Dogura, looking at most bemused, took an early lead to within pixels of the championship, only to see Garireo somehow rally back to level the score at 2-2.

At this point, both players had to pause before heading into the final game. Garireo let rip another cry of elation, while Dogura at last succumbed to the tension of the moment, burying his face in his hands, straining to gather himself. Then Garireo also had to bow his head momentarily to the pressure.

These were the moments (27:40), when we knew for certain that these greatest BlazBlue players in the world were not coming from Japan just to brush aside some free Americans and then go through the motions against one another on what would really be, for those in the money, just a paid vacation to Las Vegas. No, the emotions, the passion, the pain were visible for all to see. They recognized Evo for what it truly was: the largest BlazBlue championship ever, here or anywhere. This right now was exactly why they played the game.



When all was said and done, and the top 8 finalists were lined up to receive their awards from BlazBlue creator Toshimichi Mori and voice actress Kana Ueda, the top 3 finishers looked overcome by the moment (even as one was standing there in a ridiculous Strider Hiryu cosplay outfit)—the agony and the ecstasy, and the cheers of an appreciative audience. I’m sure the extra-large pot didn’t hurt, but, for these players who had shed blood, sweat, and now literally tears to get here, clearly the achievement itself was the prize.

*****

But that does raise the question that must eventually be addressed, of how and whether the FGC should grow from such phenomenal but still grassroots community-run events as Evo to something more professional. Community is wonderful. Achievement for its own sake is great. But, at the end of the day, pride doesn’t pay the bills. Even at Evo, the largest fighting game competition in the world, the payouts hardly justify the amount of work—hours a day, every day, approaching a career—that all the top players invest to be able to compete at the highest level. And now that these Twitch.tv and IGN streams have brought all the Evo action to massive audiences and made stars (if only for a weekend) of guys like XiaoHai, CD Jr, and Garireo, does it not seem appropriate that these champions should be compensated with checks truly commensurate to the hours they put in, the number of viewers they draw, the amount of buzz they generate with the shows they put on?

It’s a question that has crossed every top player’s mind, but when the few are outspoken enough to voice it, they get booed, called selfish and mercenary by a community that has always proudly but also fearfully resisted becoming assimilated by the “eSports” world full of flash but without heart, too reliant on corporate interests, and operated by organizations like Major League Gaming, headed by guys who have just never been a part of the FGC and cannot appreciate fighting games as anything other than another market, to go along with their RTS and FPS programming.

In the lead-up to Evo 2014, Japanese publication 4Gamer posted a round-table discussion among top Ultra Street Fighter IV players. It’s a fascinating read for any enthusiast of the game, as they approach a number of points in thoughtful and enlightening ways. Mostly, they talk about the game itself from a critical perspective. But eventually the discussion ventures into each player’s philosophical approach toward competing in fighting games, and this is where none other than Daigo himself broaches the issue of money:

Now prestige and attention definitely have their merits, but in that sense, the past where we only fought for prestige must change. I know we're entering a sensitive topic, but I think everyone here is aware of this issue.

This is the most famous fighting game player on the planet—not quite a household name maybe, but even people who are only casually into competitive gaming have probably watched his amazing “Evo Moment #37” comeback (the top video of it on YouTube currently has over 1.6 million views, and it’s not even the only or original upload of it, as many have disappeared and been replaced over the years, and the clip was even originally distributed pre-YouTube as just a downloadable file). He’s one of the very few “professional” Street Fighter players who probably makes his living entirely off his involvement with the games. He’s one of the lucky ones, in other words. (I mean, I know he obviously worked hard to get here—as hard as anyone who devotes their life to performance in competition, no matter the arena.) Yet even he’s saying that there’s something not quite right about what the players are getting out, compared to what they’re putting in.

Should the prize pots be bigger? If so, where is the money going to come from? Do players need real sponsors that will not just pay their tournament travel expenses but actually go out there and get them lucrative contracts and endorsement deals? Or should “name” players like Daigo, so crucial to generating hype for those tournament streams, get a cut of the advertising dollars? Are there even advertising dollars?

Those are the questions of how to make this more of a realistic profession, which the players, tournament organizers, game publishers, and sponsors are all struggling to find answers to right now. But there’s also the question of whether the game, as we now know it and love it, could even survive transitioning to a more professional model.

Momochi, never the winningest player among the Japanese greats, says that “results are not everything.” In other words, he doesn’t play just to win and to make money. That sounds like an excuse, but he elaborates:

Well if there was a worldwide USF4 tournament for 100 million yen I would probably use Yun. If I say this maybe it will kill the entire discussion, but fighting games have yet to reach that value for pure competition.

If winning were everything, of course he’d use the strongest character, Yun. But Momochi has never been that guy that goes top tier just to win. His signature characters in Street Fighter IV (Ken, Cody) have always been mediocre, and one could say he has paid the price in tournament results for his choices. He believes that there must be something more to get out of playing than just victory. But even he acknowledges that he may only be at liberty to believe this because, as things are now, there is nowhere near enough money at stake to properly motivate a “win at all costs” results-oriented attitude. All the players agree, if the money were there, every serious competitor would pick Yun in Ultra Street Fighter IV (or whichever character might counter Yun).

This is perhaps something that Japan has actually been slower to accept than the rest of the world. As Itazan mentions, they used to give out only trophies, no cash prizes, for winning national tournaments. In Japan, it was considered gambling, and thus illegal, for arcade tournaments to have prize pots made up of money from entry fees, as was always the standard in U.S. tournaments at every level (and even extending to Evo today), so Japanese players were accustomed to competing without money at stake. You’d think that should have been a barrier to them realizing their competitive potential, since they were never monetarily incentivized, as were players in the U.S., to be so cutthroat in training with the specific goal of beating every other person in the arcade. But, of course, we know that the strongest players have always been in Japan, and some have even credited their greatness precisely to their different philosophical approach.

In the early days of U.S. players traveling to Japan to check out the arcade scene there, they would always report back with astonishment, not only how far ahead the Japanese were in Street Fighter, but also how little they cared about tiers while dominating with whichever characters they simply felt like playing. The theory was that, although the Japanese recognized that some characters were more advantageous than others, they never felt the need to rely on the advantage of picking a strong character, because, after all, they didn’t “need” to win either. And so that freed them up to more deeply explore characters that, in the U.S., might have been quickly dismissed as not being viable for use in tournaments.

The “soft ban” on Vega in Super Street Fighter II Turbo is a perfect example. When U.S. player Julien "Zass" Beasley first reported back around the late '90s on what he observed as an unwritten rule in Japan against picking Vega, the immediate reaction among players in the U.S. was something along the lines of "What the hell? 'Soft ban'? That's weak! Do they not have the concept there of 'playing to win'?"

Shunning a player simply because they wanted to win? Okay, that may have been a bit extreme, and maybe a cultural thing. But the Japanese did not soft ban Vega because they were afraid to face him in tournament. Rather, all the serious players chose not to play him, because they found him uninteresting. Keep in mind, the game was already years old at this point. Even in the thriving arcade scene of Japan, the only people still devoting serious time to Super Street Fighter II Turbo would have had to have been doing it for love of the game. Among these veteran enthusiasts, what more was there to be gained or proven from doing wall dive after wall dive? For the Japanese, there was neither money nor pride to be gotten from winning that way. The character’s presence did not add anything interesting to competition, actually rather detracting from it. And so, unlike in the U.S., where Vega has always been a tournament staple, the regulars in Japan agreed to stay away from the character (and also the likewise overly cheap and soft-banned "Old" Sagat, and, of course, Akuma—the one character, to my knowledge, that has always been banned in the U.S., purely on the grounds that he is too powerful), instead devoting their energies to the rest of the cast, subsequently taking even supposedly “low-tier” characters to heights never imagined possible in the U.S.

X-Mania, the largest Super Street Fighter II Turbo event in Japan and in the world, is a format that never could have come out of the U.S. scene, where team tournaments are a foreign concept. In Japan, big U.S.-style multiple-day, double-elimination majors were never the norm. They never served much purpose, for one thing, since, Japan being much smaller geographically, the top players all lived within relatively close proximity and could regularly play one another at the arcade, leaving little mystery as to who was best. (This is another reason that competition among Japanese players tends to be less serious than rivalries in the U.S., and why perhaps the Japanese BlazBlue players at Evo were so emotional—as often as they played one another back home, they had never competed before in such a dramatic format. At least, I hope those guys don’t cry like that just every time they have a close set in the arcade.)

Rather, many of the most prestigious events in Japan have been 3-on-3 team competitions like X-Mania. The rules typically are that each player on a team must use a different character (no repeats), and players must stick with one character through their entire time in the tournament (no switching). This encouraged Japanese players to master characters outside the top tier in a number of ways. First, since no team could be allowed to have, for example, three Vega players, there was actual motivation to try to make your name as a specialist with a different character. You might never be the absolute best in a 1-on-1 format, but if the absolute best needed a teammate in a 3-on-3 tournament, then suddenly you had something to offer. Second, since you were not allowed to switch to different characters, this meant that, if you ran into an unfavorable matchup (e.g. you’re Zangief and you run into an E. Honda), you would have to just do your best and figure out exactly how Zangief wins that theoretical 1 game out of 10 on the matchup chart. You could not take the easy way out and “counter-pick,” a tactic widely employed by all top U.S. Super Street Fighter II Turbo players. Third (this point following from the previous two), there was special incentive to master characters that may not have been dominant but possessed unique advantages, as a way to provide balance to your team, so that it would not instantly collapse the moment it ran into a player whose character happened to have the advantage against every member of your team. The key concept was, thus, “cooperation” rather than absolute victory.

In playing not just to win, the Japanese actually came to know the game on a deeper level, learning the value of different approaches, and more fully realizing, along the way, the hidden potential of characters and strategies beyond the shortcuts to success. And the way I’ve presented things is actually backward. It is not that the team tournament format was responsible for the Japanese mastering Street Fighter on levels and in directions unheard of in the U.S. Rather, team tournaments like X-Mania only came about in Japan because such uncompromising character specialists were already the norm, in this land where players never felt the need to win with top-tier characters, but were free to use characters simply because they liked them.

(On the flip side, is it possible that ducking Vega made the Japanese more vulnerable to the character than U.S. players, for whom the character’s cheapness was something everybody just had to learn to deal with? Well, considering that Tokido’s day-old Vega basically lit up all the top U.S. veterans in 2005 (and even more so in 2007), it would seem that the U.S. was no better than Japan at combating this character.)

As interactions between different regions have become more frequent over the years, with Evo especially growing into a truly international affair, these philosophical distinctions have lessened. As we saw at X-Mania USA, there are a number of Japanese players now unashamed to win with Vega. Meanwhile, in the current Street Fighter IV generation, nearly all of the top players, even outside of Japan, are nowadays character specialists, who have realized not only 1) the practical benefit of fully mastering a single character, as opposed to picking up only the rudiments of multiple top-tier characters to cover all one’s bases, but also 2) how performing on one’s own terms has value in itself, apart from the pride and prizes that come with winning it all.

But is this something that would all go away, if fighting game players were to become true professionals and not glorified hobbyists, as is the reality right now? What would the value of performing on one’s own terms be, next to that of a lucrative and exclusive contract contingent on your winning against other such professionals in high-stakes championships? If there were a million-dollar tournament for Super Street Fighter II Turbo, would everybody just say, “Screw it,” and go to Vega?

In that case, maybe we should say that the onus is on the game designers to balance their games such that there aren't blatant easy-street characters, like Vega or arguably Ultra Street Fighter IV's Yun, with no real weaknesses. But if you look at major professional sports, which now exist beyond criticisms of design, you'll observe that the highest levels are almost always defined by symmetry in play.

In professional men's tennis, for example, what are the different styles and strategies at the top of the game? Every player is a baseliner. Analysts will distinguish between offensive and defensive baseliners, but successful examples of the latter are rare. Where have all the serve-and-volleyers gone? Dead now, along with the wooden racket. Even Roger Federer, although hailed as a complete all-court player, would, when playing baseliners (i.e. everyone of his generation and the following), spend most of his time trading groundstrokes from the same distance behind the net. What, then, was the practical difference between a Federer and a Davydenko? Only that Federer was a lot better at doing all the same things.

The differences in style in fighting games are precisely what I find makes them interesting to watch. As long as two players are using different characters, their combat will necessarily be asymmetrical, and the tension is in seeing how the clashing personalities interact. On the other hand, mirror matches, like Fei Long vs. Fei Long in Street Fighter IV, for example, are often unbearable to watch. And, man, there are already a lot of Fei Long players in Ultra Street Fighter IV, which is not surprising, since he's a really strong and simple character. I would really hate to see fighting games devolve entirely into that.

Just Dance 2: Sochi Edition

After all the high-minded headlines about host nation Russia's deplorable human rights record, and after morbid speculation that the political volatility in the region might not see these Olympic Games pass without incident, ultimately the one controversy out of Sochi 2014 that got the most viewers up in arms was strictly sport-related. That is, if you can even consider figure skating a legitimate sport.

In ladies' figure skating, Russian teenager Adelina Sotnikova dethroned South Korea's Kim Yuna for the gold medal. Kim had come into these 2014 Olympic Winter Games with barely a record over the last two seasons (albeit one that included gold at the most recent World Championships), having gone into a sort of semi-retirement following her career-culminating Olympic victory at Vancouver in 2010. Summoned back to the ice for one last skate to defend her title, she proved she had lost not a step, and she led all skaters at the end of the short program, though only by the slimmest of margins—less than three tenths of a point separated her from Sotnikova in second place.

Up to that point, fifteen-year-old Yulia Lipnitskaya had been pegged as the Russian favorite to challenge Kim Yuna. I didn't even know Russia had another female skater at these games. In the new team figure skating event, Lipnitskaya had skated both the ladies' short program and the ladies' free skate for Russia, which ended up winning by so wide a margin that, you figured, if they'd had a skater of Sotnikova's caliber in reserve, surely they could have had Lipnitskaya sit for one of the routines, so that a greater number of Russian athletes could have shared in the team gold. But, no, the Russians left Sotnikova riding pine and off the team, so little confidence did they have in her to not blow what ended up being a ten-point lead over Canada, which had entered without any strong representatives in the ladies' programs.

After Lipnitskaya fell in her short program, however, Russian hopes for a gold medal in the Winter Olympics' marquee event transferred to Sotnikova. Feeding off the energy of the home crowd, Sotnikova skated cleanly and powerfully, also managing to incorporate some eye-catchingly beautiful techniques, like the rarely seen one-handed Biellmann spin.

Heading into the free skate, Sotnikova was in striking distance of Kim. Moreover, as NBC's analysts pointed out, Sotnikova was planning a free skate with a technical base value of 61.43, to a mere 57.49 for Kim, the difference reflecting the much higher degree of difficulty of Sotnikova's program.

As little as I understood the scoring system for figure skating, I thought this meant that all Sotnikova would have to do was nail her routine in order to win the gold. It seemed to me that Kim was pinning her gold medal chances on the likelihood that Sotnikova was going to fall during the free skate. Relying on others' failures instead of on one's own ability is, in my book, a strategy unworthy of a champion. So, when Sotnikova ended up posting a whopper of a score for her free skate, I really hoped Kim would maybe call an audible or something and attempt to add another element to raise her base value. Instead, Kim skated her planned routine, and, although she skated it immaculately, she ended up losing the free skate by a substantial margin of more than five points (149.95 Sotnikova to 144.19 Kim). It looked like the difference indeed lay in the higher base value of Sotnikova's technical elements, and that was all there was to say about it. Or was it?

Even at the moment that Kim's scores were announced, before any of the scandalous accusations and online petitions that followed, there was something that left a bad taste in my mouth. The judges' scores suggested that there had been a clear victor, but that had not been evident to me. More than feeling that Kim got robbed, there was just something deeply unsatisfying about how the judges, who have too often been discredited to take seriously as authoritative, seem to almost arbitrarily elevate one winner in the absence of certainty.

On the one hand, Sotnikova had skated the discernibly more challenging program. She had performed more triple jumps, and her spins had been more impressive. On the other hand, there is something to be said of Kim Yuna's vaunted grace on the ice, as she really did strike me as the most elegant and polished skater of the night, exiting jumps with the same speed she entered them. Whereas all of Sotnikova's jumps looked every bit the daring feats of mustered athleticism that they were, Kim's every movement was sold with an effortlessness giving the impression that skating came as naturally to her as breathing.

Some have framed it as a contest between the technician, Sotnikova, and the artist, Kim, and, in this case, technique simply won out. Were it truly the case that Sotnikova's technical advantage outweighed Kim's artistic edge, I'd be inclined to stand by the result. The artistic component to figure skating is, honestly, the part I think makes it hard to take it seriously as a competitive sport. It's all so subjective, after all. And while, yes, we do judge works of art against one another and hand out awards to those deemed best, surely no serious filmmaker, for example, pursues their craft with an Academy Award as their ultimate goal, the way that a figure skater's four years of hard work and preparation are all for that Olympic medal signifying that a panel of judges appreciated your work more than they appreciated that of your peers.

But even if you were to factor out the highly subjective artistic marks governed by the "program components" score, which makes up one half of a skater's total score (technical elements making up the other), and on which Kim did very narrowly outperform Sotnikova (74.50 Kim to 74.41 Sotnikova), what was news to me, brought to light by this controversy provoking closer scrutiny of the judging system, is that even the way the technical elements are scored is highly impressionistic.

When a skater takes off for a jump, it isn't simply a black-and-white "nail it or blow it" score that results. Whether or not you blow the landing, you get the base value for performing your rotations. But then there's also a "grade of execution" (GOE) on top of that. This is where judges can award bonus points (up to +3) or deduct penalties (up to -3), depending on how well they think you executed the element. There are definite guidelines for deductions (e.g. -3 for a fall, -2 for a step out), but the rationale for awarding bonus points is far less precise (e.g. +3 for "superior technique or execution"), and, even where deduction protocols should be clear, judges largely score at their own discretion. This is where things get gray, and where, if you take a close look at Sotnikova's scores, the subjectivity of the scoring becomes evident even on the technical elements.

As Lawrence Yee, blogging for Yahoo! Sports, observes, Sotnikova had an incorrect entry on her opening element, which should be a mandatory -1. In fact, only one judge dinged her for a -1 for the element, and another entered in a 0 for GOE. The rest all awarded her bonus points, one of them even giving her a +3! Without arguing that that one judge was necessarily crooked, just the wild variance in the scores here undermines the legitimacy of the system itself. There was also the matter of Sotnikova stepping out on one of her landings—the one visible slip-up in her routine, which made it harder, even for viewers at home with no concept of GOE, to understand how she scored so far ahead of Kim, who had no errors. Sotnikova's stumble, impossible to miss, is typically a -2, but most of the judges only docked her one point.

Editorials have come out on both sides, either upholding the fairness of the results or crying foul, and I must say I've been persuaded by the conspiracy theorists. The case in defense of Sotnikova's humongous score tends to either 1) take the form of a "deal with it, this is figure skating" dismissal, or 2) come from people like Johnny Weir and Tara Lipinski on NBC, who would obviously stand to lose if the public stopped buying into the seriousness of figure skating as a sport. Critics, meanwhile, point out that the judging panel included a guy who was previously suspended for trying to fix the Nagano 1998 ice dancing competition, as well as the wife of the director of the Russian Skating Federation. Whether these two judges actually acted improperly, the mere appearance of impropriety is, in this case, as damaging as the reality, and it's shocking, given history of corruption and clear conflict of interest, that these people were ever allowed on the judging panel.

Putting things in context, skeptics also note that Sotnikova's free skate score at the Olympics was more than 18 points higher than her previous best in international competition. Did she really improve so drastically in just three weeks? Well, it's worth pointing out that, when Kim Yuna won gold in Vancouver, her combined score was about 18 points higher than her previous best, so maybe there's just an Olympic bump for performing on the bigger stage. Still, Sotnikova's 149.95 in the free skate also happened to be the second highest score of all time, just barely off Kim's record of 150.06 from the Vancouver Olympics. In giving Sotnikova such a huge score, the judges were basically saying that, but for the one stumble, she would have had the greatest long program they had ever seen. And, even with the step out, she was more impressive than anyone else ever, save for Kim four years ago. That's pretty nuts.

Even so, I wasn't really convinced that the fix was in until I investigated further. In my opinion, the most impressive skate of the night had been given by neither Sotnikova nor Kim, but by Mao Asada of Japan. Having suffered some devastating mistakes in the short program, Asada was no longer in medal contention by the free skate, and so her scores were basically an afterthought. But I thought she absolutely crushed it with her free skate, and indeed she was awarded a new personal best score of 142.71, vaulting her ten spots into a sixth-place finish. What's notable is that Asada's base score of 66.34 on her free skate was by far the highest of anyone in the field. Sotnikova and American Gracie Gold were the only other ladies who had base values in the 60s—respectively, 61.43 and 60.64. And Asada skated very cleanly, with no errors as big as Sotnikova's step out. Yet her final technical score from the judges was a mere 73.03, behind Sotnikova's staggering 75.54. Asada even landed a triple axel, the hardest jump performed by any female at these games, which no other competitor even attempted, and still she couldn't beat Sotnikova on the technical score, despite Sotnikova having a much lower base value. So, for those that seriously believe that Sotnikova beat Kim by out-gaming her on the scoring system with a more technical routine, observe that Mao Asada had the most technical routine of all, yet she still scored below a girl who performed one fewer triple jump (Mao had 8, to Sotnikova's 7), whose program included no triple axel, and who visibly stepped out on a landing. Ultimately, gameplan can be more than canceled out by how judges choose to hand out bonus points, and we've already seen that they're all over the place on GOE.

We can even go back to the short program, which left Sotnikova breathing down Kim's neck—a pressure Kim almost never had to deal with during her period of dominance. Sotnikova had the lowest base value (30.43) of any of the skaters in the top four in the short program, yet her technical elements score, 39.09, actually ended up higher than Kim's at 39.03. Both skated cleanly. Again, it's those subjective GOE bonus points that make all the difference.

I haven't even touched on the program components scores—the artistic factor—for Sotnikova and Kim. Most of those claiming that the results were outrageous especially think that it was Sotnikova's components score that was absurdly inflated compared to Kim's. They say that Sotnikova exhibited the artistic sophistication of a teenager (which she is), while Kim delivered a regal master-class performance. Once more, that's all subjective.

After all that, I'm still not even saying that Kim Yuna was robbed necessarily. I thought Sotnikova's short program was spectacular, and her free skate was also very good but not without visible defect, let alone worthy of so many +3's as some judges awarded her. As for Kim, I was not a huge fan of her four years ago, when I thought her less ambitious than her rival Mao Asada of the triple axel. But the seemingly world-weary Kim Yuna of 2014 was strangely a vastly more compelling character to me. No more stupid James Bond routines as four years ago, I felt there was a real depth and maturity to her performance, not to mention she landed all her elements cleanly, the only skater to make it through both programs without any deductions.

For me, the winner was too close to call. The only way to call it, as the judges did, was purely subjective—those five points Sotnikova won by were not based on any objective technical superiority, no matter what anyone tries to tell you—and that's what exposes figure skating once again as kind of stupid. Even without necessarily disagreeing with the final result, I am able to declare the judges wrong. How, after all, can they be right when they're not even consistent, and the calls they make so often seem at random? And the system is beyond repair, because, at the end of the day, figure skating really isn't a sport in the competitive sense, as purely subjective scoring is going to pivotally determine any remotely close contest. Its recognition as a sport—the intense coverage of Olympic figure skating in the sports section—has never been based on any kind of logic, but persists because it is an institution, dating back to a less enlightened era, and it will continue to be for as long as people tune in to see it. The question is, how long will people continue to put up with this?

I turn to U.S. competitor Ashley Wagner: "This sport needs fans and needs people who want to watch it. People do not want to watch a sport where they see someone skate lights out and they can't depend on that person to be the one who pulls through."

Wagner, a non-contender, earlier came off kind of boorish and narcissistic, when she complained about her own scores being too low. But she has a point here, and I appreciate her being that person that says these things, thereby freeing up the more adored darlings of the same sentiment to take the high road with gritted teeth.

Wagner also suggested that the Russian skaters enjoyed home-ice advantage, which, perhaps likelier than conspiracy, could account for the inflation of Sotnikova's scores. It was probably hard to resist being swayed by the energy of that partisan crowd ("Look how she commands the crowd!" "Well, yeah... she's Russian"), which did not shy away from commencing a "Rus-y-a, Rus-y-a" chant even right as a clearly anxious Kim Yuna's scores were about to be announced. If home ice did make the difference, I suppose you could just chalk that up to a case of the "conditions"—not unlike weather or a competitor's health—simply favoring certain skaters that day.

Realistically, I don't see figure skating changing in any significant way. I mean, you could make figure skating into a legitimate competitive sport, but it would involve so many rules changes that, by the time you got there, it would be unrecognizable, and nobody would want it. No, people will get over this, then tune in again in four years to see the athlete-artists they love to watch, and when it blows up again, we'll just have this same debate once more, to no meaningful result.

For me, the more compelling narrative at these games was that of Russian short track speed skater Viktor Ahn (formerly Ahn Hyun-soo of South Korea), who, after having fallen out with a South Korean team that must have thought it was strong enough even without him, emerged to become probably Russia's true MVP at Sochi, unambiguously winning his new home country 3 gold medals and 1 bronze, while the renowned South Korean men's short track team left empty-handed.

Yeah... I predict, when South Korea takes over in four years as the next host of the Olympics, things could get real ugly. Well, only as ugly as they've always been. I mean, was it not only four years ago that the Russians were the ones crying conspiracy when the judges elevated U.S. men's figure skater Evan Lysacek to the gold medal over Russia's Evgeni Plushenko?

Where is the champion? Where is Daigo?

The Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition Ver. 2012 tournament at this year's Capcom Cup featured some amazing play from eight of the strongest competitors in the world. Notably missing from that field, however, was Japan's Daigo "The Beast" Umehara, a two-time Evo champion in the Street Fighter IV series, last year's runner-up at the Street Fighter 25th Anniversary tournament (the precursor to Capcom Cup), and overall someone who is always in the conversation when discussing the best in the world at the game.

Daigo's results had slipped in recent years, with other top players, most notably South Korea's Seonwoo Lee (AKA "Infiltration") and Singapore's Ho Kun Xian, seeming to have his number. Infiltration, the most dominant player in 2012, was consistently standing in Daigo's way at major championships, trouncing him two Evos in a row, and also ultimately dismantling him in the 25th Anniversary tournament grand finals, despite Daigo having obviously trained hard to try to get back on top for that event. Xian, the Evo 2013 champion, had beaten Daigo convincingly in long sets on two separate occasions. Daigo was still a perennial top 8 finisher at Evo, but quite a number of people were ready to write his obituary as a serious contender for the title.

But fighting games, while not without a significant physical component, are not exactly like athletics, and the professional gamer's career need not mirror the athlete's arc of irreversibly declining performance over time. Capcom Cup winner Naoto Sako is in his mid-30s and has been playing competitively since the Street Fighter II days, and he is still regarded as the most dexterous player with the finest execution anywhere in the world. Age isn't that big a factor, and sponsored Japanese players like Sako and Daigo also aren't really going to "grow up" and out of heavy gaming like the rest of us adults. Sustained success has more to do with keeping up the will to win. Daigo's feeble loss to Infiltration at Evo this year, and the ensuing talk within the community that the fight was gone from him, perhaps reignited his determination to be the best, as he responded by subsequently delivering some high-profile beatdowns that were brutal even for "The Beast."

The first came a little over a month after Evo 2013, when Daigo was booked to take on Xian in a "Mad Catz Unveiled" first-to-10 exhibition at the PAX Prime festival in August in Seattle, WA.

http://youtu.be/Va7lYoUL3bo

Going into the exhibition, Xian led their head-to-head, but the ever-humble Evo 2013 champion acknowledged that Daigo had seemingly adapted, narrowly prevailing 12-10 in their most recent encounter in the Topanga Asia League in May 2013. So a victory for Daigo would not have been a total shocker. Still, this was the reigning Evo champion he was up against—a player only a month removed from having fought his way out of a field of over a thousand to claim that title. A 10-0 demolition, such as Daigo rendered here, was something nobody could have predicted, but Daigo made the champ look like a helpless chump.

As much as it restored respect for Daigo's game, that result also raised questions about the legitimacy of Xian's crown and about the legitimacy of Evo itself as the most coveted title in the fighting game community. Some pointed out that Xian had been fortunate, on his path to the 2013 championship, to dodge Infiltration, whom many still had pegged as the no. 1 player. Another first-to-10 exhibition, this time between Daigo and Infiltration, had already been scheduled for September at the Tokyo Game Show expo.

http://youtu.be/CO17wK-4BqM?start=65s

The final result was 10-2 Daigo, with Daigo winning the first 5 (meaning Daigo would have come out on top, even if it had been a more standard best-of-3 or best-of-5 set). This result may have been even more impressive than the 10-0 blowout against Xian, since Infiltration surely would have been aware of the earlier exhibition and had a month to prepare himself in order not to have the same thing happen to him as happened to Xian. But, whatever preparations Infiltration made, Daigo's must have been superior, as he finally figured out and paid back his recent nemesis in emphatic fashion.

Whatever his disappointment at Evo, with the potentially even more prestigious inaugural Capcom Cup scheduled to close out the season, all eyes were once again on Umehara as the man to beat. But then the tournament came and went, and Daigo wasn't even present. What happened?

Well, the very next day after his remarkable steamrolling of Infiltration, Daigo did compete in the Capcom Cup Japan qualifier, which was also being hosted at the Tokyo Game Show, but he lost in the second round to Yuki Ishigaki (AKA "Kyabetsu" or "Cabbage"), one of Japan's better C. Viper players. Daigo lost 0-2 to Kyabetsu, not even taking a single round.

http://youtu.be/qn7CBTuWcvY

Infiltration and Xian also both entered the 64-man tournament and, although they fared better, it was not by much. Infiltration went out in the third round, and Xian made the fourth-round quarterfinals, both of them losing, interestingly enough, to a Japanese Sakura player known as Juso.

For some, the takeaway here was that Daigo may be some kind of rock star when he comes to the U.S. and beats Justin Wong at Evo, but, amid the abundance of very good players in Japan, he (and Infiltration and Xian) is just another guy. Maybe winning Evo isn't as impressive an accomplishment as the U.S. fighting game community believes. Maybe Evo is a bit like the Olympics, which is certainly the largest, most prestigious event for most of the sports it features, but which, for some sports, maybe doesn't actually feature as high a level of competition overall as some countries' national championships.

The obvious example is Olympic basketball. A contest of nations in basketball could never field as many strong teams as the NBA playoffs, because the majority of the best players in the sport all come from a single country, the United States of America. Any American recognizes that the NBA championship trophy counts for a lot more than an Olympic gold medal in basketball. But there are many Olympic sports which are similarly dominated by other nations, and those of us in the U.S., who don't follow those sports except during the Olympics, might not realize that their national championships might actually feature a higher level of competition than what we tune in to see only every four years.

Likewise, some have speculated that a Japanese Street Fighter player might be able to find better competition on any given day at their own local arcade than they would by flying over to the U.S. to compete in Evo. Just about every non-Japanese player who has visited one of those Tokyo arcades would agree that there is no place in the world harder to win. But I'm not personally convinced that Japanese tournaments are more accurate than Evo in determining the best player in the world.

For one, most Japanese tournaments historically, including that Capcom Cup qualifier at TGS, have been single-elimination, which most tournament organizers outside Japan would agree produces less reliable results, since it's not that unusual for even a top player to suffer a random loss, but it's far less likely that they'll suffer two at the same event. For another, we've observed how Western players travel to Japan and then note how hard it is to win there, but it may be more of a two-way street than many realize—a lot of those lesser-known but very talented Japanese players are lesser-known, not because they don't come to Evo, but because, when they do, they don't fare as well as they do at home. Kyabetsu, for example, was at Evo this year, and he didn't make it out of his qualifying pool. As another example, Japan doesn't even have a serious national championship equivalent to Evo here, but their highest-profile competition is the Topanga League, a round-robin series featuring the alleged best players in the nation competing in a more intimate, more relaxed format for a million-yen grand prize. Well, in this year's Topanga A League, Daigo came in 5th. Of the four players above him, three of them attended Evo 2013, only one of them making the round of 16. The Topanga A League winner, Masato Takahashi (AKA "Bonchan"), tied for 17th at Evo. Daigo, meanwhile, tied for 7th. Rather than it being the case that simply whoever wins in Japan is the best in the world, I think being the best in the world means being able to win consistently in tournaments across the world. That's what Daigo, Infiltration, and Xian have done.

Back to Capcom Cup, however it happened, the fact is, Daigo wasn't able to qualify in Japan. There were still other opportunities to earn a spot. Daigo could have traveled to one of the qualifiers in other countries, as Naoto Sako and Hajime Taniguchi (AKA "Tokido") did, qualifying in Brazil and Australia respectively. But he just didn't.

What did he do instead? Well, other than the Topanga League, the only other event he entered following that early exit at TGS was the SSFIV tournament at DreamHack Winter 2013 in Sweden. "The world's largest digital festival," DreamHack hosts multiple eSports competitions, and, although the SSFIV tournament is not one of its bigger events, this year's tournament did boast reportedly the largest ever prize purse for the game. Held on November 30, the tournament featured many top European players, as well as several well-known Asian competitors, including Daigo and Xian.

Ultimately, at the end of a long tournament that included many high-level matches on a par with what was seen at Capcom Cup, it came down to Daigo in the grand finals against another one of the biggest names not at Capcom Cup, Taiwan's Bruce Hsiang (AKA "GamerBee"). It was a spectacular finals, the first round perfectly encapsulating the legend that is Daigo "The Beast" Umehara.

http://youtu.be/ySz7GUty2rs

As amazing a player as GamerBee is, this was no blowout, and yet it had the feel of one. Daigo was simply on fire, and, even when he would lose a round, he would seem to retain momentum. It was almost like GamerBee was only there to build hype toward Daigo's inevitable victory.

With Daigo looking as sharp as he ever has, it really was an unfortunate blow to Capcom Cup that he wasn't there, but, after 2013 passed without any clear "man to beat," anyone who follows the competitive scene for SSFIV should now be anticipating Daigo's next appearance at an international major, where I have to believe he'll enter as the favorite. (Of course, Ultra Street Fighter IV should be the new standard by Evo 2014, so maybe that will just completely destroy the status quo anyway.)

Skylopper

It amuses me how, when we dream, we often don't just dream in discrete narratives or about how tomorrow or the next day might go, but sometimes we'll dream entire alternate lives for ourselves, complete with false memories of past events that never actually transpired. For example, I dreamed I was at a party, and, as I was speaking with an old friend, I reflected on a brief stint I'd had as a major league baseball player for the San Diego Padres.

For some reason, I had had a contract with the Padres, although I had not anticipated ever taking the field for them. But then, one day, the manager called me up, saying he needed me to hit. As he explained, there was someone in the crowd that night that we needed to impress. In order to secure something of theirs in support of something of ours, we needed to sell them on the viability of our something, and the only way to do that would be to demonstrate our slugging. At the time, the Padres were a team known to have a strong pitching rotation, but we were losers because we didn't have anyone who could hit worth spit. That's why the manager now needed my bat in order to show that we could hit for power.

"Their best regular hitter at the time was Kouzmanoff," I explained. "So I was immediately stronger than anyone they had."

Yeah, in the dream, I was apparently, at some point, physically stronger than Kevin Kouzmanoff. Even in the dream, however, the way I explained it, it was as though I was only realizing the details as I was telling the story. I didn't at first remember having been a meaningful contributor to the team; it was only as I reviewed the facts, remembered that Kouzmanoff was the Padres' best hitter (only in the dream history, not real life), and that Kouzmanoff sucked (true enough, both in the dream and in real life), that I came to the retrospective realization that I must have been carrying the offense for that brief stint that I was on the team.

Anyway, as the story went, I got the call late in the game, the manager explained the situation to me, and I was brought in to pinch hit. Then, on the first pitch, first swing of my first major league at-bat, I knocked it out of the park. And the rest was history.... Except, it wasn't.

Even in sleep and in dream, during which my faculty of reason was suspended, I retained sense enough to be incredulous at my own memory. Something didn't add up, and I wasn't even thinking about all those unspecified "somethings" that were allegedly at stake leading up to my at-bat. But if I really did play for the San Diego Padres, even if it was only for a game or two, why wasn't I more famous? Why was I having to explain this story to my friend, as if he wouldn't already have known it? If the manager really did recognize my power far above anyone in the regular lineup, why wasn't I called up sooner? If I really was good enough to carry the team's offense for a while, why did my career end so quickly and unceremoniously? How did it end at all? Try as I might, I couldn't remember. And if I really did hit a home run in the major leagues, why wasn't it the proudest moment of my life? Because it certainly didn't feel that way; it felt like an obscure bit of personal trivia that I trotted out for parties.

Was it all a dream, I wondered, not realizing, of course, that even that question was being posed within a dream. No, I thought, I knew well enough the difference between a dream and a memory, and I wouldn't have spent those last several minutes detailing an accomplishment that wasn't real. Unless... my very memory and mind were unraveling, which was not just a possibility but the sensation that I was faced with, as I couldn't make sense of the events of my own life.

No, I thought to myself, if it really happened, and I still needed to believe that it had, then there must have been some record of it. It must have been in the local news, and I must have kept a copy of the story in the paper. Indeed, I seemed to recall that I had, and so I raced home and dug through my keepsakes.

I found it quickly enough. There, on the front page of the sports section, read the headline, as if it had been only yesterday: "Hot shot skylopper hits shot out."

What the hell is a skylopper? But, no, I didn't ask that question.

Who Remembers Marion Butts?

Fair enough, if there are kids today who are too young to have been football fans when Marion Butts, former NFL running back for the San Diego Chargers (and later the Patriots and Oilers), was playing during the early 90s. But I am shocked and appalled that, even on the Internet—that supposed repository for all information, no matter how useless—there is hardly anything on this two-time Pro Bowl-er. Google his brilliant name (which, as you can imagine, made for some classic sports page headlines back in the day), and you'll find a few NFL reference sites providing his career stats and little else. There has seemingly been more written on one "Lee Marion Butts, Sr.," a deceased Dallas photographer, than on one of the best RBs in Charger history. By the second page, already the majority of search results have nothing to do with our Butts. The very first result, his perfunctory Wikipedia page, didn't even have a picture of him—an oversight I saw fit to correct posthaste (by inserting the only pic I had of him: his 8-bit Tecmo Super Bowl mug shot)*:



 

* Update: My image has since been taken down by Wikipedia Nazis.

Really, must there be a Super Bowl EVERY year?

Ugh. That time of year again.

Not that I'm "too good for sports talk"—you'll note that I do enjoy discussing plenty of sports on this very blog—but I just happen to have no interest whatsoever in the NFL.

"Sorry, Henry," a friend once offered, apparently perceiving my lack of interest in the topic at hand. "Is our football talk leaving you out?"

"No, it's all good," I assured. "I just won't have much to add, other than Marion Butts jokes, and I'm going to run out of those pretty quick. In fact, that was my only one."

And I held for applause that never came.

"Did you say 'marrying butts'?"

They didn't know who Marion Butts was. They, the self-described fans of football, had never heard of one of the great San Diego Chargers to have played in our lifetime. It was down to me, the guy who misidentified Drew Brees as Peyton Manning in the recent Pepsi commercial, to educate them.

"He was a Charger," I explained. "Early 90s."

"Oh, I was just a kid then."

So was I. It seemed odd to me that a person's enthusiasm for football (or sports in general, for that matter), should actually intensify as they matured further into adulthood, because, in my case, boyhood was the only time in my life when I had even the remotest interest in the NFL, probably owing in large part to the objective excellence of Tecmo Super Bowl for the Nintendo Entertainment System.

The conversation resumed without my participation. Nobody else seemed to care about Marion Butts. Well, at least I came away with potentially one more joke to work with. "Marrying butts"—somehow I was going to figure out a way to make that work.

The Scallenge

From CBS Boston:

Sick of hearing that the average Joe could beat him out on the hardwood, Brian Scalabrine was on a mission.

And given the results of last week’s “Scallenge,” it was mission accomplished for the “White Mamba.”

Scalabrine, who retired over the summer after a very serviceable 11-year NBA career, took on four of Boston’s best ballers in 98.5 The Sports Hub’s 1-on-1 “Scallenge,” put on by morning hosts Toucher & Rich. [...]

Scalabrine — who spent the last few seasons of his career seen as the “human victory cigar” — easily defeated all four of his opponents, throwing down monstrous jams and sinking smooth jumpers as he beat them all by a combined score of 44-6.

Reminds me of that time BloodRayne director (and former amateur boxer) Uwe Boll invited his harshest critics to vent their frustrations upon him in a series of boxing matches, and then pulled no punches, pummeling the five nerds foolish enough to take him up on the challenge. Also reminds me of a dream I once had, wherein former NBA All-Star Alonzo Mourning challenged me to a one-on-one and promptly thrashed me 11-1.

As for this Scalabrine guy, I haven't regularly followed the NBA in years, but I definitely took notice every time I saw him come in for the Boston Celtics. For the most part, he seemed to be used only as a situational defensive substitution brought in for single possessions during the closing seconds of games. As the lone white guy (and extremely so) on a team once known for having most of the league's best white players, and often as the only white guy on either team, he kind of stuck out. And, although clearly someone must have thought highly of the redhead's ability to do whatever the hell he was supposed to do, seeing as how they were bringing this benchwarmer in cold at a pretty critical moment, I always remained skeptical, based on nothing more than his physical appearance, that this goofy-looking ginger really belonged in the NBA. Well, I guess he showed me too.

Strong Second Half

Somehow, three years after an unceremonious end to a once promising NBA career gone ignominious, irrelevant, and finally ignored, Stephon Marbury's story has turned around to become, for me personally, the most refreshing narrative in sports this year. Two weeks ago, in his third season playing in the Chinese Basketball Association, the former New York Knicks point guard led his Beijing Ducks to their first ever championship, also his own first championship of his professional career.

When Marbury announced that he was taking the 2009-10 season off, following several tempestuous seasons with the New York club he had grown up watching and loving, and which ultimately exiled him while he was still technically on the team, I figured, as did a lot of people, that he was finished. His career demise appeared confirmed when, in 2010, he returned to play, not in the NBA, but in China instead.

It seemed a pathetic end to one of the NBA's more tragic stories. Drafted in the first round in 1996, this was a guy who had been a starter right out of the gate, and quickly grew into a two-time NBA All-Star and one of the league's top point guards. It was all downhill, however, after Marbury was traded to his beloved New York Knicks in 2004. Marbury publicly feuded with his coaches, while the team continually underperformed as one of the league's losingest over the next several seasons. New York fans, the press, coaches, and teammates pointed fingers at Marbury (and everywhere else) to lay blame for the team's embarrassing descent into becoming the biggest joke in the NBA. An overpaid, ineffectual star on a non-contending large-market team, Marbury surely deserved his share of criticism, though I doubt that made it any easier to take. Even in the face of the millions he was making, I don't imagine life was anywhere near as sweet as he might have dreamed the NBA should have been. But his hard days must truly have hit a low point on December 2, 2007.

Although it was a home game, the crowd at Madison Square Garden may have been more hostile than any other arena to Marbury. Knicks fans were booing him even during the pregame introductions. Perhaps the only person on his side was his own father, who was in attendance. At least for the first half. Around halftime, Marbury's father suffered a heart attack, and he was declared dead at the hospital before the game was over. Marbury stayed in the game and played on, however, unaware that his father had even been taken to the hospital. Marbury had no idea until after, because apparently his own family felt he didn't need the "distraction" while he played this meaningless regular season game, which the Knicks ended up losing to the Phoenix Suns anyway.

After that, thinking about Stephon Marbury just made me sad. I could no longer laugh at him, not even as he decided to get in front of a webcam to host a 24-hour live stream/meltdown, whose bright spots included scenes of him smoking marijuana and swallowing Vaseline, amid far more aimless stretches of him responding to viewer questions or even just taking his meals. This was during his break from basketball, after no NBA team would pay him his asking price, and before he set sail for China.

I expected that move to a foreign league to be just another sad stunt in a protracted flame-out. I expected that to be the last I would hear of Stephon Marbury, barring the possibility of some "Former NBA star arrested" story somewhere down the line. I didn't expect a happy ending. I didn't expect him to turn his life around. I certainly didn't expect his story to inspire me. But he has.

At the age of 32, his game clearly in decline, his life seemingly having unraveled, Stephon Marbury left to play for a Chinese league that most Americans remain unaware of. At age 35, Marbury, playing on his third Chinese team in three years, after having failed to make the playoffs with the first two, was still sticking with it, while guys like Bonzi Wells and Rafer Alston apparently hated playing in China so much that they just went AWOL in the middle of their contracts. Not only that, but Marbury seemed happier than he had ever been in the NBA. He was growing accustomed to the climate, the cuisine, the culture, maybe not the language. Chinese basketball fans were far quicker to embrace him, and maybe that made all the difference for Marbury. After having endured the boos of his fellow New Yorkers for five seasons, he was now met by a people that didn't know or didn't care how badly he had screwed up before. Ironically, he had had to leave America to get a clean slate, in a land that allowed him the second half to his life that he needed, and he was determined not to waste this one. He broke down in tears after leading his Beijing Ducks into the championship series against the favored Guangdong Southern Tigers, a team that had played in the last nine CBA finals, winning seven of them. And then came the exultation when he finally got to hoist that trophy over his head, his expression to be immortalized with a statue that over 1 million Chinese fans campaigned for online.

Admittedly, the level of competition in China is not comparable to the NBA, despite a temporary influx in the CBA this season of American players who turned to China during the NBA lockout. This is a league where the points-per-game league leaders list is completely dominated by imported players. And I'm talking guys you've never heard of, like Marcus Williams (32.0), Charles Gaines (29.1), and Josh Akognon (28.2). This is a league where J.R. Smith, always a good shooter but perennially a backup in the NBA, was able to score 60 points off the bench in one game this season, en route to leading the CBA with a 34.4 points-per-game average, before bailing to sign with the New York Knicks, once his Chinese squad failed to make the playoffs.

But that's not really the point, as I see it. No, Marbury isn't champion of the world. His victory probably won't inspire any Coney Island kids to set their sights on playing in the CBA. Maybe New York, the NBA, the United States never even deserved Marbury. Or maybe he didn't deserve them. Whatever. For me, what I'll take away from this story is that the game is not won or lost in the first half, or even the first three quarters. It's a story of second chances. Of getting a clean slate in your 30s, when you're not sure even what your life has been. Of becoming what you were meant to be, when you feared your best years were already lost to you. Of having to wake up after the dream has died, finally to find a life that is better than the dream.

A.I.

Back when I still cared about the NBA, my favorite player was Allen Iverson. When I tell people that, it sometimes takes them by surprise. First they're surprised that I ever followed the NBA to begin with, since I don't come off as a sporty person myself. Then they're surprised that my favorite player would have been such an outspoken thug type as Iverson and not more of a respectable straight shooter like Ray Allen or Tim Duncan. True, my all-time most admired (former) professional athlete is probably David Robinson, because of his well-documented humanitarian efforts. (If you don't know David Robinson's story, I won't get into it, but please read about it here, because he is one of the few true role models in sports.) But as a player—we're talking what happens on the court—there was, for me, no one more exciting to follow than Allen Iverson.

In a league largely populated by freaks of nature (relative to the rest of humanity), Allen Iverson was one of the most anomalous players precisely because he wasn't abnormally tall. By many accounts 5'10''-5'11'', he was officially listed at 6'0'', which is admittedly still taller than the average person. But he was nearly a midget by NBA standards.

Most boys, growing up, at some point dream about becoming a professional athlete. The dream doesn't usually last long or grow serious enough to make it too heartbreaking when they have to give up on that to set their minds on something more practical. Basketball can be harsher in that respect, however, because kids can make it all the way through high school as the best player on their local squad. They may feel themselves able to compete, and their game may even be legitimate to an extent, but if they're not a certain height by a certain age, then they have no realistic chance of making a career out of it. Their best prospect is to make it as a point guard, playing more of a supporting role by knowing when and how to pass the ball to the team's designated scorers. This is more of a specialized position that virtually does not exist in the schoolyard, where most kids just want to hit the big shots, and nobody keeps track of the assists stat. To be an effective point guard in the NBA also requires a strong grasp of the fundamentals of court vision and ball-handling, which most young dreamers are unlikely to practice to the same extent as their jump shot and layup.

It is a rare and driven personality that is able to commit from an early stage to develop toward becoming a dedicated point guard. But what is rarer still is the six-foot-nothing hopeful who can aspire toward anything else and actually succeed. More than any other player in history, Allen Iverson was that rare individual who had what it took.

Iverson was technically his team's point guard, yes, but he never played the supporting role. No, he was his generation's most prolific scorer, four times the league's scoring champion, sixth all-time in terms of points-per-game average in the regular season, and second (only to Michael Jordan) all-time in points-per-game average in the playoffs. These results were absurd, unthinkable for a player of his size and physique. And the numbers alone don't do justice to the reality of his scoring ability. Seeing him in action was to witness quite possibly the sport's most unstoppable phenom on the offensive end, able to drive and penetrate at will. He was incomparably quick, the rookie who made the still-dominant Jordan and Pippen look foolish when they tried to take on the impossible task of defending him. In the post-Jordan era, I truly believed Iverson was the league's brightest light and its future.

I was never more mesmerized by the game than when watching his duels with fellow rising stars Vince Carter and Ray Allen in the 2001 Eastern Conference playoffs. Then, when his Philadelphia 76ers managed to steal game one from a stacked and believed-to-be unbeatable Los Angeles Lakers team in the NBA Finals, it was one of the most inspiring efforts I ever saw. Of course, Iverson and the 76ers would not manage to win another game against the Lakers, but his one win still meant more to me than the Lakers' four.

No, not even Iverson could single-handedly stop the unstoppable Shaq-and-Kobe Lakers. Ultimately, only Shaq and Kobe themselves and their infighting could bring the Lakers' winning days to an end. But, even in losing, Iverson suggested that maybe “impossible” was not always what it seemed, because his own career was something theretofore unimaginable, and if he couldn't quite tear down its walls, he at least chipped away at “impossible” and inspired me at times to believe in the unbelievable, which, really, is what is best about sports. He defied the odds, defied common sense, defied nature itself, defied what everyone else thought it meant to be an NBA superstar.

And this tiny David, in a sport of Goliaths, so upset the established order and balance, so upset everyone's preconceived notions of what the NBA was supposed to be, that the league actually changed the rules of the game specifically to contain him by lifting the prohibition on zone defense, after he had proven consistently that no single player could defend him man-to-man. Yes, for some reason, thinking that the natural handicap of his small stature was not enough, they felt the need to institute additional artificial handicaps to keep him low. Maybe I'm an Iverson apologist, but I still believe that they did it just because they didn't have the guts to face what he represented, which was an overturning of basketball as they understood it. He had changed the game, but everyone was so stuck in their old ways that, instead of embracing that change, they just tried to shut it down and forcibly fit him into the old system they already knew and understood.

So what did Iverson have that made him so exceptional? Yes, he did have extraordinary God-given talent and athleticism, regardless of his size. But the qualities that really drew me to him, made me admire him as a man and not just a spectacle, were his indomitable will, his unflagging ambition, and, perhaps most of all, a certain unbreakable pride, stubbornness, refusal to compromise on his ambition. Yes, it was his pride that appealed to and touched something within me in a way that Tim Duncan's cleanness never could.

Duncan is the quiet and steady giant, who plays within the rules and exemplifies the game's fundamentals. He tells us how we should play, modeling the game perfectly by being the model student of the game. Iverson, on the other hand, was the brightly burning candle lighting a view beyond any existing model and toward new frontiers of what a person could be, if only they wanted it badly enough and, against all reason, never stopped wanting it. His ambition was to be the best, and nothing—not his physical limitations, not the common sense offered by armchair analysts, not any amount of coaching or advice from others—could ever deflate his dream or his ego. Simply put, he was too stubborn to submit to his own limitations, and so instead he overcame them. It was in that way that he “had what it took.” Well, at least for a while . . . .

Where is Iverson now? Well, his 76ers were never again able to equal the success they had in the 2000-2001 season. What followed instead were a number of disappointing years where he butted heads with coaches and management and got traded around from one mediocre team to another until virtually no one was willing to take him anymore. Although his skills were still elite, his personality made him intolerable, and nobody cared any longer to build their team around him. In 2009, he announced his sudden and premature retirement from the NBA, following his statement that he would rather retire than play off the bench as a support player. He came back briefly when his old 76ers gave him one more chance, but he lasted only 25 games before departing the NBA again. By that second time, seemingly everybody had given up on him, even the news, and this former league MVP just quietly faded into oblivion. Now he's off in some second-tier European league in Turkey. I wouldn't even know if he's getting playing time, let alone starting over there, because nobody cares what goes on over there.

Seeing him wasting away the last vital years of a once luminous career is frustrating. He just seems like a fool now, a petulant child who refused to grow up. Reading his comments about refusing to come off the bench—basically, refusing to operate according to anyone's plan but his own—my initial reaction was that he was being ridiculous. I thought that he should have been more willing to compromise for his own sake, to simmer down and listen to reason. It was better than not being able to play at all, right?

And yet, wasn't it his refusal to compromise that made me admire him in the first place? His pride made him unreasonable and eventually impossible to work with, but wasn't it also what drew me to him? If he had been less proud and more willing to compromise at any point earlier in his career, he never could have become that favorite player of mine. He's just being consistent now with those same qualities that made him strong originally, sticking to his guns all the way to the ultimate and bitter end. A part of me wants to insist that pride is the young man's stimulant, but humility the mature man's sustenance. It's sad to see what his hubris has led him to. But another part of me would actually be disappointed if he did change now, if he did compromise. Because there's a part of me that values the personal commitment in one's own pride over the chance of success won through compromise, over the possibility of peace, over hope, over happiness, over anything else. And that part of me wants to see that a man will break before he bends.