In 2013, the first year of Cloud9’s existence, Jack Etienne could devote only nights and weekends to his fledgling esports organization. By day, he ran sales at Crunchyroll, a video-streaming platform focused nearly entirely on anime.
The catalyst that sent Jack out of the corporate world and into esports full-time was an acquisition. A company acquired Crunchyroll and wanted to know why the head sales guy, Jack, was getting a 7 percent commission on direct and indirect sales (typically sales commissions are 10 percent on direct sales, and maybe 1 percent on indirect sales, if any). Because nearly all of the company’s revenues were from advertising, that is, indirect sales, Jack’s deal meant that he alone took home 7 percent of company revenues. Jack had been able to negotiate his unorthodox blended rate because he’d started at Crunchyroll as their first salesman. Because he had built the entire client base, the CEO remained happy with him and honored the deal. But now that the machine was humming, the new owners didn’t see the value in paying Jack $1 million a year.
Years later, that CEO would lament to Jack that Jack had received a raw deal in the acquisition, stripped of his income stream just as his four years of hard work were paying off. Jack responded, “Thank God that happened. That’s the best thing that ever happened to me.” For if he had stayed at Crunchyroll too long, Jack might have missed his opportunity in esports, an opportunity that would come to define his life.
He had left Crunchyroll with a solid cushion of savings but also a newborn daughter. He was very unsure of himself. For fifteen years he’d worked in sales, his only job since graduating college, and now he had to figure out how to make money in esports. He owned only one team at that time, in the North American division of the League of Legends Championship Series (NA LCS), the most popular esports league in the world.
That team provided Jack some reassurance, as they’d won the North American summer split in 2013, taking home $50,000 and earning a trip to the World Championship, where they placed fifth, pocketing another $75,000. (The NA LCS played two seasons per year: spring and summer. The team that won the summer split playoff earned a spot in the World Championship, as did the team with the best results across both splits.) “That first year was incredible, but it could have been a fluke,” Jack said, describing the anxiety he felt as he poured himself into managing Cloud9 full-time. His anxiety would be short-lived. In 2014, Jack’s Cloud9 team placed first in the NA spring split, second in the NA summer split, and again placed fifth at the World Championship. Total haul: $150,000 in tournament winnings. Far more important than the prize winnings, though, was the fact that Jack now owned a globally recognized contender, meaning he could sell merchandise and court sponsors.
As Jack was leaving Crunchyroll, Brett Lautenbach, the man who would become president of NRG Sports and therefore Brad’s boss, faced his own career dilemma. His final semester in college, he’d been producing commercials and music videos, when a certain incident became his personal nightmare for two weeks: a local band wanting to do a Detroit early dance-house video that required an elaborate wall of tube TVs, which took a toll on his back and an even greater one on his ambition to pursue film production. Once he graduated, he took a job as an assistant to a well-known film festival producer because it sounded exciting, but when the festival they tried to launch went belly up, he decided he needed something less chaotic, a desk job. The talent agency WME had been an advisor on the festival, so he called his contact there, and soon he was working in their mail room.
The mail room at WME was in one sense exactly like it sounds—Brett delivered mail every day—but in another sense, not at all: it was the beginning of a career as an agent at WME, the top talent agency in the world. Of everyone who got into the mail room, 70 percent “made it to a desk,” or became an assistant to an agent. Because WME New York didn’t have film agents, Brett worked on TV or whatever was needed. He became a floating assistant, filling in for his colleagues when they were out sick or on vacation. Then he became the New York assistant of Ari Emanuel, the co-CEO of WME immortalized in Ari Gold, Jeremy Piven’s character on Entourage, which Brett described, carefully, as “stressful.”
In what way? “A very intense human being,” he said.
Brett recognized the potential of ascendant esports leagues and was trying to convince the executives at WME that they were an opportunity the agency should aggressively pursue. Two years earlier, in 2011, Twitch.tv had become prominent as a platform devoted to people streaming video games, only to be acquired by Amazon three years later for $1.1 billion. In the year of that acquisition, 2014, Twitch averaged 350,000 concurrent viewers. In 2018, when OWL launched, Twitch averaged more than a million concurrent viewers, an average annual increase of 35 percent. Brett could see the gold rush and that WME was missing out.
It wasn’t just eyeballs where there were opportunities but ticket sales as well. The 2013 World Championship for League of Legends at the Staples Center, the 15,000-person arena that’s home to the Los Angeles Lakers, sold out tickets in less than an hour. Many esports veterans cited this exact moment as the moment they knew that esports was going to take off in the United States.
Jack Etienne’s Cloud9 team placed fifth at that tournament, and after attending, he headed back to San Francisco to his day job, Crunchyroll. The winner, SK Telecom, the same organization that took home the €10,000 prize at Dhak’s first tournament, the team that employed Lee Sang-hyeok, better known as Faker, the best LoL player ever, took home $1 million.
To convince WME of the opportunity in esports, Brett pitched every angle he could think of—player representation, team representation, running tournaments. They were on a buying spree, having just acquired IMG Worldwide for $2.2 billion in 2013.
He found an organization called Global eSports Management that was doing exactly the kind of business that he believed WME could profit from, reached out to them, and within sixty days they were owned by WME.
The head of Global eSports Management, Tobias Sherman, basically demanded that Brett work for him as a condition of the deal, and they put together an ambitious plan to launch a broadcast TV–based competitive esports league.
The league they created would be available not just to potential network partners, as was typically the case, but also on Twitch, where anyone with an internet connection could stream it for free. When the dual-broadcast idea was brought up, at most networks the notion of giving away free viewership to a competitor digital platform was not well received. At least until they met with Turner. “Tobias had this whole two-page script about how it had to be dual broadcast,” Brett recalled. “He got maybe five sentences into his pitch before Turner said, ‘Yeah, of course it has to be dual broadcast.’”
That was the origin of ELEAGUE. The league began with Counter-Strike, for good reason. On the surface level it’s easy to understand—point, shoot, kill—but there was also depth and complexity to the strategy. As you learn more about the game, you start to appreciate when to use your flashbang grenades, how to approach the corners, and so on, in the same way that someone might understand an NFL offense. And even if you might not know why they’re running the ball versus throwing the ball, or how they decide when to use a flashbang, you can still follow what’s happening.
T-Mobile was the client that helped them launch their esports dreams. Tobias had heard the wireless company was looking for a new agency of record just for esports, so he coordinated a meeting between them and WME’s esports and brand strategy groups, where Brett would represent the esports interest. As with every brand he’d talked with before, Brett was sure T-Mobile execs would ask how they could get their intellectual property into the games (e.g., a T-Mobile store inside an Overwatch or Counter-Strike map), and he was afraid that nongamers at WME might make foolish promises about what they could deliver. The answer to how they could get their intellectual property into these games was simple: they couldn’t. Blizzard were as protective of their intellectual property as Disney—there was no chance they would allow brands and logos into their games. Brett was at the meeting in large part to make sure none of his bosses made impossible promises.
WME ended up winning the business. As Brett and his team started their work on the esports strategy for T-Mobile, the rumblings began that Activision-Blizzard were up to something with their new game, Overwatch. Brett wondered what the league would look like, thinking it might be a good fit for a T-Mobile sponsorship. T-Mobile wanted a game that was inclusive, and the brightness and futurism of the Overwatch aesthetic fit T-Mobile in a way that most popular esports games didn’t. By contrast, games like Counter-Strike were more realistic, with bloody gore and one team playing as terrorists. Half of CS: GO matches end in the proclamation “Terrorists win.” That didn’t seem to fit as well. So WME advised T-Mobile that Overwatch was probably the game they wanted to get behind, assuming the rumors about Blizzard’s ambitious plan for the league were true.
Brett set up the T-Mobile executives with Nate Nanzer to give them more familiarity with the as-yet-unannounced league. Just as this was coming together, Andy Miller, co-owner and operator of NRG Esports, called Tobias, letting him know he was looking for someone to come in to run operations at NRG and wondering whom Tobias might know. “Easy,” Tobias said. “You should talk to Brett Lautenbach. He’s been a rock star for us, and he told me, literally a week ago, that he wants to learn the team management side.” After doing eight interviews in fourteen days, all while keeping on top of his job at WME, Brett called Andy and told him he needed to shit or get off the pot. “I’m flying out to Los Angeles in two weeks,” he said, “and my brother lives in San Francisco. I can visit him, and come by Palo Alto while I’m up there. Why don’t we wrap this up? Either I’m the guy or I’m not.” This bold move paid off. They met, and Brett got the job. He accepted and gave his two weeks’ notice at WME the next day. Brett had spent four and a half years at WME. He’d helped the company acquire Tobias’s esports agency, landed a major client to assist their push into esports, and launched an entire new esports league. And now that he’d seen the inner workings of the esports industry from the highest level, he wanted to understand what it would be like on the ground, working for a team on which everyone poured everything they had into climbing to the top of the world.
When Brett took over as president, NRG had just lost their LoL team, leaving them with four teams: Overwatch, Counter-Strike, Smite, and Rocket League, as well as an individual playing Super Smash Bros. (later Smash Ultimate). Over the next two years, Brett would acquire teams or individual players in six more games: Fortnite, Clash Royale, Hearthstone, For Honor, Dragon Ball FighterZ, and Apex Legends. He saw opportunity in all those leagues, and so he chased it, but he admitted that if he weren’t so passionate about gaming, he wouldn’t be able to keep up with it. “I have a couple friends at Goldman that tell me they’re interested in getting into esports,” he said, “because they like playing video games. I tell them, unless you’re willing to give your heart and soul, plus your life and your sleep to this, don’t do it. It’s banking hours, but there’s way less money in it.”
The day after Brett verbally agreed to give his heart, soul, life, and sleep to Andy, he headed to Blizzard’s headquarters in Irvine, California, for the big meeting he’d arranged among Blizzard, his WME bosses, and potential OWL sponsor T-Mobile. Walking Blizzard’s campus, where three gleaming white, two-story buildings surround a central courtyard in the center of which is a huge statue of an orc riding a wolf, would have been like walking back in time through the history of esports. Inside the lobby, Brett passed a nine-foot statue of Grommash Hellscream, one of the heroes from Warcraft II and III. Grommash and other Warcraft heroes were so compelling to gamers that they created an entire new game using Blizzard’s world-editing tools to strip out the core gameplay elements of resource management and unit production in favor of five-on-five brawls between the game’s heroes. These “modded” (from modified) versions of Warcraft III were the inspiration for multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) games, such as League of Legends and Dota, which would dominate esports for the next decade. Though Blizzard’s intellectual property had enabled and inspired these wildly popular and profitable MOBA games, Blizzard hadn’t collected a dime.
In MOBA games like LoL and Dota, the player controls a hero with a unique name, outfit, and abilities, usually a new made-up species. Each hero can be selected by only one player, so a five-on-five match will have ten unique heroes. The different abilities of the heroes, like the demands of positions on a sports team, were the missing piece that made MOBA games compelling to watch. With so many abilities at their disposal, the composition of each team and the ways in which they work together were just as important as the skill of the players, and so the heroes’ differing abilities lay the groundwork for more sophisticated strategy. Instead of being a game close to pure reflex like an FPS, there are now lineup questions and important tactical decisions for the team to make (and coordinate) within each game. This opens the game up to armchair fans, who can question the team’s choices in player signings, team dynamics, and strategies. Older esports titles were typically one-player, reflex-driven affairs, where the opportunities for fans to weigh in were more limited: “He should have clicked faster!”
After listening to the pitch that Nate made to T-Mobile, Brett could see that OWL was going to be huge. He was ahead of the curve relative to most of the world, though he was still way behind Jack Etienne, who had by then already been running an Overwatch team for six months. Jack had known he wanted to be in OWL “before it was announced.” Like Brett, Jack appreciated how the inviting fantasy aesthetic of the game (i.e., the violence looks cartoony) would allow sponsors to really get behind it, and he had noted that the pro players on Cloud9’s various teams in other games were all playing it in their time off.
When teams started forming, Jack was running one of the first large traditional esports companies to get into the game. Jack signed a team called Google Me in March 2016, two months before the game was even released and eight months before he would hear Bobby Kotick’s pitch about OWL along with the billionaires at BlizzCon 2016. While Brett had been scrapping at WME, Jack had been scouting and signing players based on their performance in the closed beta of Overwatch.
It didn’t take long for Jack to regret his signing, though. The team he’d almost signed, which he described as “six dudes playing Overwatch,” had been picked up by rival organization EnVyUs and had won the first OGN Overwatch tournament. By far the best esports production network on the planet, OGN was the Korean equivalent of ESPN. OGN had launched what they called the Apex Series for Overwatch, which featured the highest level of pro play the game would see until the advent of OWL. The Apex Series would run for only four seasons before Blizzard informed OGN that they’d chosen a different broadcaster for the Overwatch League, shutting it down. Many future OWL stars and even entire OWL teams cut their teeth in the Apex Series (for instance, EnVyUs eventually became the Dallas Fuel in OWL).
Brett, upon reporting for duty at NRG in October 2016, had been immediately shipped to Shanghai for a month, where NRG’s Overwatch team was competing in a tournament called APAC. The team had an interesting origin story. It all started when Shaq was at the Consumer Electronics Show as TNT was broadcasting live from the convention. At the same time there was a Counter-Strike tournament. Thorin, a legendary CS broadcaster known for his strong personality, got into a little verbal sparring with Shaq. It was a lighthearted dueling-broadcast-desk scenario, the desks maybe about fifty feet apart, with Shaq on the Inside the NBA desk with Charles Barkley, Kenny Smith, and Ernie Johnson, while Thorin was on the ELEAGUE desk analyzing the Counter-Strike tournament.
Thorin narrated to the camera something about the Counter-Strike player ShahZam having popped off during a match, adding within earshot of Shaq, “I’m not talking about Kazaam, that terrible movie that Shaq made in the ’90s.”
There were nervous glances at the TNT desk.
“How quickly can you run?” asked Ernie Johnson. “Because Shaq can cover some ground.”
“So you guys think [Counter-Strike] is a sport?” Shaq asked, gesturing to Thorin at the esports desk. “I’ll challenge you to any game you want. I’ll make you eat those words.”
“How about weight loss?” responded Thorin. “Should we do that? Is that a sport?”
“What about muscles?” Shaq was laughing now. “What about boxing, if I come over there and punch you? This is America—the queen can’t help you over here, buddy.” After definitely winning his sparring match with Thorin, Shaq watched some of the Counter-Strike tournament. When he got back home, he called his friend Mark Mastrov, the 24 Hour Fitness founder who had cofounded NRG with Andy.
“I just watched Counter-Strike and this esports thing,” said Shaq. “I watched this team called NRG. It was super fun.”
“Yeah, I know it’s fun!” said Mark. “That’s my team.”
“What do you mean?”
“Andy and I started that team, NRG.”
“Without me?”
This made Mark laugh. “If you want to do it, you’re in.”
Shaq was in. On their first investor call, Shaq asked, “Okay, so what’s the plan?” to which Andy responded that they needed to find an Overwatch team. “Who’s your first choice?” Shaq wanted to know. Andy said they liked a team led by Seagull, because he’s the most popular Overwatch streamer in the world. “Okay, done,” said Shaq, and sent out a tweet: “Hey @A_Seagull and your @playoverwatch boys. Time to step it up to the @NRG.gg family. We would love to have you all on board. Come on ova.” As you can imagine, that got Seagull’s attention. He sent his phone number to Shaq, who called him, and kazaam! Like a terrible ’90s movie, it was quickly done. Seagull and his boys were now on NRG Esports.
The team finished the APAC tournament in Shanghai in the middle of the pack. Two of the players had had a falling-out, and it seemed like moving forward from there would be all uphill. It was Andy’s first experience dealing with players who disliked each other and desperately didn’t want to work together, and he learned about how those with different styles could mesh—or not. From there, the team went to Korea for OGN and got knocked out almost immediately. NRG dissolved the team and went back to the drawing board. Shaq giveth, and Shaq taketh away.
Shaq also attracteth, however, and soon many more famous people would invest in NRG. “I think some people might think we have guys who we gave shares to or paid or something,” Andy said. “None of that happened. We had Jimmy Rollins right away, Ryan Howard right away. Alex Rodriguez called Mark, because they’re friendly as well. Mark knows everybody. Alex asked to put in a lot of money, which he did. He asked for a board seat, so he’s on the board.” He subsequently brought his future wife, Jennifer Lopez, on board.
From the ashes of the first team’s failures, NRG assembled a new team, a much more popular team, pursuing streamers with fan bases and big personalities. They kept Seagull, who fit that profile, and the team started doing really well at scrimmages. But between streaming, tournaments, and practice, Seagull began to burn out. Based on the previous year’s performance, NRG had an invitation to OGN Season 2, which was hotly contested. This new iteration of the NRG team hadn’t competed in any official tournaments, so fans and rival esports organizations were asking whether NRG really deserved to go to OGN. Seagull decided he wanted to take a break from competitive play until Overwatch League and go back to streaming, which made a lot of sense. If you’re burned to a core right before Overwatch League starts, you have little chance of surviving the relentless schedule of a full season. NRG released Seagull and declined to attend OGN’s Apex Series Season 2 tournament. Would you believe it, the team that got their spot was Jack Etienne’s Cloud9, who would be immortalized in the Overwatch League for their performance there, and not in a good way. One common objective in Overwatch matches, called Control, requires a team hold a point for a set amount of time—players must defend the position nervously as a clock ticks up to 100 percent, the clock starts ticking for the opposing team if they recapture it. On three different occasions, Cloud9’s opponent, Afreeca Freecs Blue, had ticked their percentage up into the 90s, only for Cloud9 to win a team fight but lose, because none of their players moved onto the requisite point, and the clock just kept ticking to 100. This particular kind of embarrassment would become known as a C9—a failure to secure the objective because you’re focused on fighting.
It was at this chaotic period in NRG’s Overwatch history that Blizzard began sending out signals of an official league on the horizon. Bobby Kotick had begun dropping the bomb on potential owners that teams would cost $20 million. “By the time we got our meeting,” Brett says, “it was agonizing. We’d heard other teams had their meeting, and we hadn’t been invited to have a meeting yet. Andy and I were pestering Nate to obscene levels.”
Finally, Andy and Brett got the nod to come in and have the bomb dropped on them. After the meeting in the Activision-Blizzard boardroom, and now knowing the price, Andy had a lot of questions. How was OWL going to slow the game down to allow people who don’t play the game, or more casual fans, to fall in love with Overwatch? What was the plan behind the local market? What were the league’s revenue projections? Most importantly, why did a team cost so goddamn much?
After deliberating in a coffee shop across the street from Activision’s offices about whether this $20 million bet was worth everything they’d invested in NRG and more, Brett and Andy decided they were on board. They could imagine how local markets were going to change the esports game. Suddenly, they would have tickets, apparel, broadcasting revenue, and sponsorships to draw revenue from, in addition to the usual tournament prizes.
Jack Etienne, however nervous he may have been about the large cost, was similarly sold. He first sought commitments from his investors, raising $25 million and securing high-profile investors including World Wrestling Entertainment, the San Francisco Giants outfielder Hunter Pence, the co-owner of the Washington Capitals and Wizards, the cofounder of the talent agency Creative Artists Agency, and the Beverly Hills Sports Council, a baseball agency.
He negotiated with Blizzard and became the owner of the London team. It would be the only OWL team in the UK, and Jack felt good about the attention that could bring. “I basically have an entire country,” Jack said. “They’ve got great infrastructure for transit, so we could have games in London, games in Manchester. There’s all sorts of places we could go and massive crowds could come, too, relatively easily.” All that motivated him to have a world-class team. Recognizing that he didn’t have that, Jack started over. He was unsure where to get players, wanting to try to build a team in Korea but also wanting to keep an open mind. He had open tryouts in Korea as well as coaches scouting for talent in North America and Europe. Ultimately, Jack and Brett would arrive at the same conclusion about the first player they should sign: Sinatraa.
In the summer of 2017, when Sinatraa was playing for Selfless, he had been chosen to represent the United States in the Overwatch World Cup. “It was a tryout, and I think they picked thirty players,” Sinatraa said of making the team. He did well in the tryout. “I never got subbed out, I played Tracer and a little bit of Zarya.” The US World Cup coach, Kyle Souder, better known as KyKy, had played for Jack’s Cloud9 team for nine months in 2016, later becoming the coach of EnVyUs. Because of that team’s success, KyKy got the nod for the World Cup coaching gig. In addition to Sinatraa, KyKy chose a player named Adam he’d played with on Jack’s Cloud9 team, two players named Rawkus and FCTFCTN from FaZe Clan (a team that eleven-year-old Sinatraa once tried to get signed to on the basis of 720 no-scope headshots), Jake Lyon, gamertag JAKE, and Matt Iorio, better known as Coolmatt. Being chosen for the US World Cup team in 2017 was fortuitous. Four of the players would be signed by the Houston OWL franchise: JAKE, Rawkus, Coolmatt, and FCTFCTN. The fifth starter, Adam, was already signed to Cloud9. That left Sinatraa.
“The World Cup was in a hangar with a big crowd for group stage,” Sinatraa told me. The hangar in question, the Barker Hangar at the Santa Monica Airport, was also used in the Championship Gaming Series debacle. It’s 35,000 square feet, vaulting forty-three feet at the center.
From August 11 to 13, the US team dominated their group stage, beating New Zealand 4–0, Brazil 4–0, Taiwan 3–1, and Germany 3–0.
In the meantime, Brett had discovered Brad, but he didn’t yet hire him to be coach. Brett once explained his approach to building a team by saying, “We knew we had some months before we thought Bobby and Nate were going to start talking to teams formally, and we thought, ‘Let’s go learn everything we can, and make every mistake humanly possible in Overwatch. So we can learn all of our lessons before we get into Overwatch League.’” Presumably, that is how they made their first two mistakes: the Shaq team and the popular streamer team.
In addition to trying out multiple team-building strategies, NRG would cycle through multiple Overwatch coaches, first hiring Seamoose in May 2017. “Seamoose was a good coach early on,” Brett said. “He came off recommendations of some of our players. It was working well, and then during this time of bringing in new players, it felt like (1) it was dragging, and (2) it wasn’t the most thought out. We were one of the first teams out there looking at talent. We felt like if we had that advantage, we needed to execute on it. It felt like we were letting it slip through our fingers. We started to think maybe he’s not the guy.” In July 2017, Brett started looking around for new coaching options and began the conversation with Brad. Brad’s Selfless Gaming had caught his eye with a major run of championships at the lower tiers of Overwatch in the United States, winning with players he paid $1,500 per month, while Cloud9, EnVyUs, and NRG were paying $4,000 per month.
At first, Brett brought Brad to the team to supplement Seamoose on a two-week trial. Those two weeks went exceedingly well. “I really appreciated Brad’s sentiment about how he looked at pro players in the game, and his scouting,” Brett said. “That’s always a hard thing in esports. We don’t have farm leagues traditionally, and things like that. You get in this habit of recruiting from the known quantities and not recruiting from the unknown quantities. Brad was like, ‘look, there’s known quantities, there’s semi-known quantities, and there’s total unknowns. Total unknowns you see on the leaderboards but nobody really talks to.’ Brad was like, ‘I don’t want to just go with known quantities. I want to be able to recruit and look at guys that other people might have doubts about, that other people might not think are up to the task, maybe they’re hard to work with, etc.’” Brett bought into that recruiting method, and along with Andy, he decided Brad was a better option as head coach. They hired him. Next, they had to build a winning team from the ground up.
Deciding to name the team San Francisco Shock, Brett and Brad quickly turned to the recruitment stage, seeking to fill every position on the new team. The only player from the popular streaming team who would remain on the roster was Iddqd, whom management had wanted to keep in order to provide a sense of continuity, even though Brad wasn’t sure he was good enough to start on the team. The first player Brad went after was Dhak, the world-class Lucio, who was essential to a competitive Overwatch team. Next Brad wanted Sinatraa. Sinatraa was more than just a damage god. “If you ever watch Sinatraa try hard in a scrim or practice,” Brad said, “sometimes he just takes over leading the team. He’ll start shot-calling, he’ll start calling comp changes, he has this ability in him, when he wants to turn it up, to go from being this quiet little kid to being this commanding presence on the team.” Still, he was a long-term prospect. With OWL’s eighteen-and-over requirement, Sinatraa would miss the first eighteen matches of the forty-match season. Still, Sinatraa was someone that Brad believed he could build a franchise around for years, not needing to worry about the reflexes of his Tracer until at least 2024. As Sinatraa grew up, if he became that commanding presence on top of his innate talent and work ethic, Brad reasoned his team would never be out of contention. It didn’t hurt that Sinatraa had a popular stream and would bring a fair number of fans with him.
At the same time that Brad had again set his sights on Sinatraa, this time for an OWL spot, so had Jack Etienne. The bidding war that resulted is a hypersensitive subject for all parties involved. Brett would say of it only that it was the worst week of his professional life. He said that he and Jack had since “buried the hatchet.” But who was wielding the hatchet? The first time I asked Jack about the Sinatraa bidding war, he froze in place and provided no comment. Later, when we sat for a formal interview, he still wouldn’t divulge the details.
On September 3, 2017, Jacob Wolf of ESPN posted the headline “NRG Signs 17-Year-Old Overwatch Pro Sinatraa for $150K.” As Jacob wrote, “The high salary comes after a dispute between NRG Esports and Cloud9, which both attempted to complete agreements with the player, sources said. Through a competitive bidding war that raised the salary by nearly $50,000, Sinatraa and his mother—who is required to sign the agreement because he is a minor—ultimately signed with NRG.”
A rumor with unidentifiable origins circulated among the press that Jack offered $175,000, to which Sinatraa’s agent told him that he was going to sign with Shock for $150,000. Whatever the ultimate cost, the competition over Sinatraa had been hot for a reason. He was the top US player for a competitive team on a crucial hero, a hero with such a high skill requirement that only a handful of players in the world could pilot her at the top level of play. In the end, Sinatraa’s decision to join NRG’s Shock would decide the fates not only of individual players vying for the same spot but of three different teams in the Overwatch League. One of those three teams would win the championship.
When I asked Brett why he thought Sinatraa had signed with Shock for less money, he talked about the effectiveness of their pitch. He didn’t mention Brad and Dhak. Jack, who had suspicions that NRG used something secret outside of his contract to lure Sinatraa in, didn’t mention Brad and Dhak either. When I asked Sinatraa, he also didn’t mention the two guys he’d spent the past year with as a reason to join Shock. But, ignoring the fact that Sinatraa had spent his first eight months away from home, at the age of sixteen, with Brad and Dhak strikes me as odd. It’s easy to believe that Sinatraa took less money to play for Shock because he wanted to stick with Brad and Dhak. And there’s nothing wrong with that.
Losing Sinatraa didn’t by any means sink Jack. Though at one point Sinatraa was his greatest heart’s desire, he’d actually been only the second among four of Jack’s heart’s desires. In contrast to NRG, which drew primarily from North America, Cloud9 was global. Jack had coaches recruiting not just in America and Europe but in Korea as well.
“During our tryouts in Korea we identified two players who we definitely wanted,” Jack said, referring to NUS and Fury. They were free agents, and they formed the backbone of a decent Korean team that won some scrimmages but couldn’t win at the top tier. Somewhere along that process, another Korean team, called KongDoo, which had performed well in the Apex Series but hadn’t won a spot in OWL, reached out to Jack and offered to sell him their players. They were easily Top 4 in the world at that time, and many people thought they could be #1. After an extensive negotiation, they finally reached an agreement that worked for everyone, and Jack added KongDoo’s best four players to his roster—Birdring, Bdosin, Fissure, and Rascal.
When the new team tried to play together, they got blasted by a Korean team called GC Busan in the early rounds of the final Apex tournament. Jack wanted a piece of the talent that beat him, and he set his sights on buying GC Busan—adding its best players to his team. After checking with his players and making sure they were on board with his plans for a large roster, Jack signed the entire GC Busan team as they were on their way to winning the Apex finals.
Sinatraa’s acquisition by Shock had caused Jack to pivot to Korea, signing first KongDoo, then GC Busan. The third team affected by Sinatraa’s choice to go to Shock was the Houston Outlaws, which, despite signing four of the six Team USA players, not only failed to sign Sinatraa but failed to sign any Tracer at all. This would come to haunt them.
Houston were, despite their ambitions, the team that it seemed couldn’t do anything right. At the end of the first season, one analyst would comment to me, “The Outlaws could’ve done better, the tragic story line there was their ability to always choke at the end. Always lose that king of the hill map.… And their insisting on not needing a Tracer: I think that was what made it almost comical at the end. They were flexing every damage they had onto Tracer, claiming that we don’t need a main Tracer. It was as if they had their hearts so set on Sinatraa that after he’d been scooped up they couldn’t bear to even look at another Tracer.”
Not every would-be esports mogul who got a one-on-one meeting with Bobby and Nate came away excited about OWL. One of those less enthused was Andy Dinh, founder and CEO of Team SoloMid. He’d hired a player named Blam to put together a new OWL team. The team would never materialize, and on May 5, Blam posted on TwitLonger, “After learning more information about the OWL ($$$), TSM decided that it’d be better for the organization to stay out of the competitive scene, at least for now.” TSM’s decision to decline to join OWL made news. After all, Andy Dinh was well respected in esports, having started as a pro League of Legends player himself, winning third at the first-ever LoL World Championship in 2011.
To some, even legitimate fans of esports, the $20 million number for an OWL team seemed insane, far more than was ever offered for something considered such a gamble. Uber’s Series A round of fundraising, for instance, was $11 million; Facebook’s Series A round was $13 million; and Google’s Series A was $25 million. How on earth was a marginally profitable esports organization supposed to raise that kind of money? And, given the rumors that Blizzard would be keeping the bulk of the league’s profits for themselves and claiming first rights to sponsors, would the league ever even be profitable enough to justify a $20 million investment?
It helped that the $20 million price tag would be spread over a number of years, meaning the initial payment would be something more like $5 million. But with the player salaries, health care, housing, insurance, utilities, gaming equipment, and so on added on top of that, it was a serious commitment of capital to esports, a hitherto losing bet. Wealthy tycoons including the Lacobs, the owners of the Golden State Warriors, couldn’t get comfortable with the investment.
Still, OWL found enough investors to build the league they wanted. For the first season, there would be twelve teams, their preseason rankings largely determined by their performance in OGN’s now-terminated Apex Series. Seoul were considered the favorite going into the season, with Spitfire ranked second by ESPN’s preseason power rankings and the New York Excelsior (NYXL) ranked third. These Top 3 teams were made up of all Korean players. After them, there wasn’t much consensus in the rankings. Anyone could emerge.