Thread by @Thorin

I grew up as a little autistic kid in the North East of England wearing hand-me-down clothes.

There was no esports for hundreds of miles from me when it began and the dot com bubble had burst and tanked all the early industry. I was told I'd missed "it".

https://twitter.com/LifeMathMoney/status/1407074622542008321

Once I got them to send me to London I had to get them to send me to the US over hiring Americans who were already there.

I went to that event, my first on a plane, with something like $50 wiggle room for anything to go wrong. Madness when I look back now.

I put in a lot of effort and I could get a few ideas out through my sloppy and cliche-riddled writing, a subject I had never focused on in school or as a hobby.

I also always followed my curiosity about what I wanted to know in an interview.

Volunteering for another site on the side I went 4x above the expected output and they rewarded me by sending me to events with Izn0 - THE coverage guy.

He would tell me to interview people and my lack of social skills meant I took 4-5 rejections for every yes.

The interviews were audio only so even when I would secure one I was nervous and the moment I got lost or felt awkward I'd end the interview. The average length would be 2-3 mins.

We'd come home each night from the event and I'd have barely any money for food, nevermind to buy alcoholic drinks.

Izn0 had to get the site to make a small food budget part of my trips. I was pretty underweight at the time.

As the years went on I poured more and more time into my craft. I became a writer people wanted to read. My interviews became definitive.

The age of video had arrived and the old flaws were looming. If you couldn't work with video you couldn't cover events.

I never let rejection limit me. I would ask for 30 interviews a day to get five. I would ask a player next event if he said no. I would ask the star player even if other journalists said "he doesn't do interviews".

They could say no but I could keep asking.

I practically never attended afterparties for the first 12 years. I had no money but I would have just been stood in the corner with the other weirdos anyway.

Even a lot of pros thought I was a loser who took the games "too seriously" as it was "just a game".

For four years straight I attended CeBit in the week of my birthday. We had to stay in low class hostels and with old German couples because the hotels were all booked out by tech companies.

I never told anyone it was my birthday.

After working enough to learn the skills to interview on camera and handle silences or coming up with a question on-the-fly I got a couple of lucky breaks to do commentary.

People said my game knowledge was good but I was boring.

Later I got hired to be an analyst at the first CS:GO major and quickly occupied by the vacuum of the fresh creation of that role to fire off trivia and historical context and begin story-building.

I was beginning to be appreciated for on camera work.

My second event saw me fired on day one because I roasted the fuck out of the host country and went off in an irritated rant on a show a day before.

Carmac, an ex-journalistic rival, was a key guy there and I'm told organised a viewing for all native staff.

ESL branded me a xenophone, racist and bigot and said they did not want to associate with people like me. They also privately reneged on their arrangement to pay some of my travel costs.

I determined in that hotel room I would become the best analyst CS:GO had ever seen and work every big event not run by ESL.

The following year I was everywhere and my new style of banter set reddit and social media alight.

By two years had passed even ESL wanted to hire me again for their majors. They called me "impossible to ignore" and Carmac has repeatedly denied they ever suggested I was xenophobic or racist.

I have now hosted hundreds and hundreds of talk show episodes too and am notorious for my ability to go off-script, lead a conversation on-the-fly and entertain to carry the down moments.

5-6 years ago the first political ideologues had turned their eyes towards esports and I soon became a target of their ire. I was told my skin colour and genitals had gifted me everything in my career and I should never work again for having made jokes.

My "privilege" was that by never giving up and never being held back by excuses or limitations I had reached the point where I was considered a "natural" and thus it was assumed I hadn't worked for any of it.

That's how bigotry works.

People like Frankie Ward came into the industry from the mainstream and virtue-signalled what great people they were by making their first ever interactions with me calling me out as a bad person whose behaviour "didn't belong in esports".

I didn't plan any of my career. I wanted to be what I was not but I had no idea how to get there or how to do it. I just knew I would keep trying regardless. There had to be a way!

"You just can't beat the person who never gives up"
-Babe Ruth, baseball legend.

Along the way I met a kindred spirit in Richard Lewis, a guy who grew up poor without his dad in a coal mining village in Wales.

He became the best investigative journalist and polemic columnist the space has ever known.

When the industry finally recognised him with the Journalist of the year award in 2016 a games journalist called Victoria Rose tweeted that the definition of "white privilege" was being "given" all your leads and awards.