Chapter 24. When Li Xiaofeng Became Sky

A chapter from ONE MORE WAY: The History Behind Chinese Esports, by BBKinG (Liu Yang). Translated from the Chinese original: 二十四 当李晓峰成为SKY

Written by BBKinG before WCG 2005. First published in the author's Zhihu column on December 15, 2013: https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/19637811

This is a working translation awaiting review. If you spot a mistranslation, a wrong name, or a factual error, please open an issue or send a pull request.

Twenty years into his life, there were two things Li Xiaofeng had never seen coming. One was finding out that he not only had a brother four years younger than him, but also a sister two years younger who had been sent to live with relatives so the family could dodge the fines for breaking the one child policy. The other was that in May 2005 he climbed onto the winner's podium of Acon5, the world esports games, and his tag WE.Sky became a symbol familiar to esports fans all over the world.

A grey childhood

Sky was born on the 27th day of the third lunar month, 1985, in a small county town in Henan province called Ruzhou. His father was a doctor at the Ruzhou First People's Hospital. His mother had worked at a distillery until she was laid off in 1998, during the restructuring of China's state owned enterprises. Both of Sky's aunts had married men from other places and moved away, so his grandparents needed someone new to look after them, and with three children in the house growing bigger every year, the weight of a family of seven fell entirely on his father's thin salary. That kind of pressure gave a middle aged man a short temper, and Sky, only a teenager and not yet sensible enough to stay out of the way, became the one who got hit.

The children in the neighborhood where Sky grew up were always fighting and causing trouble. He had lived there for as long as he could remember, and little by little he became one of them. He stole his grandmother's Yuan Datou silver dollars, the old coins stamped with Yuan Shikai's head, and traded them for cash. He skipped class to play arcade games. His grades were nothing special. His father, who wanted so badly for his son to amount to something, was frantic, and the beatings and the shouting only increased. That was why Sky ran away from home several times while he was still in middle school. The longest stretch lasted six days, the small boy wandering around the small county town with nowhere to go, cadging meals at friends' houses when he got too hungry, and at night gathering up newspapers and sleeping in unfinished buildings on construction sites. When he got to this part, he looked up and smiled, a little embarrassed.

Games lit up his eyes, and a first long trip to a tournament

In middle school Sky saved his breakfast money every day to buy two arcade tokens so he could play Sangokushi. "You know, the one where you shake the joystick to eat the buns," he said, delighted, as he explained it. In 1998 his cousin introduced him to a PC game he was playing, StarCraft, and Sky was quickly hooked on that classic of world gaming history. In that same moment his own fate was tied to esports.

The first time Sky travelled alone to another province for a tournament was in early 2001. An internet cafe near Huangfuzhuang in Xi'an was holding a competition, and although the prize money was only 500 yuan, a lot of strong StarCraft players were going to show up. Sky already had a bit of a name on the battle net in Shangqiu, Henan, and he was one of the core players of Home, a well known national team at the time. The moment he heard about the tournament he decided he was going, without even stopping to consider how much the trip to Xi'an would cost or whether it might be dangerous. He bought a train ticket and went.

Before the tournament Sky was confident, and plenty of spectators saw him as a favorite. Instead he lost twice, in the first round and again in the third, both times to lion_jin, a fairly well known player back then, and those two defeats left him outside the top 32. Sky was crushed. On the train home, when the conductor came through checking tickets, he could not find his. The conductor would not listen to any explanation, so he had to buy another one, and after paying he had 50 cents left to his name. When he reached Luoyang railway station at four in the morning he had no money for the ride back to school, so he walked for three hours in the cold wind to get back to his dormitory. Looking back on that trip now, Sky says it frightens him a little. He had prepared nothing and thought about nothing before going to Xi'an. What if something had happened?

Losing meant giving up the dream and going home, and Sky once thought about killing himself

At the WCG Xi'an qualifier in 2002, Sky was knocked out in the first round. He was close to despair. Walking out of the venue, he looked at a window ledge three storeys up and genuinely wanted to shut his eyes and jump. Before that he had won just about every trophy there was to win in Zhengzhou, big tournaments and small, and he had started dreaming of becoming a professional esports player, which was exactly why the conflict with his family had reached boiling point. In the end he told his father that if he could not get a good result at that year's WCG he would quit games for good, go home and settle down as an intern doctor at his father's hospital. So being eliminated in the first round meant his dream had been ground into dust, cleanly and completely.

The turn in his fortunes came in that same moment. The regional qualifiers of WCG 2002 were held on different dates and there was no restriction on entering more than one, which gave Sky a second chance at a regional event. To protect his dream, to prove himself to his family, and to keep his fate in his own hands, he made up his mind to go to the WCG Wuhan qualifier. After the train ticket and the entry fee he had a little over ten yuan left, not even enough to get home. Of all times, that was when the change of water and climate got to him and he came down with a high fever and needed to buy anti inflammatory medicine. Luckily a friend helped him through it. When the tournament ended he had taken third place, and he had failed, because only the top two from each region qualified for the WCG China national finals in Beijing.

After that failure, Sky kept his promise to his father, went home and started his internship at the hospital.

The hospital year

In 2002, after coming home, Sky interned at his father's hospital for half a year. During that time he dispensed medicine in the pharmacy, passed forceps in the operating room and did night rounds with the doctors. Sometimes, after a surgeon had finished operating on a patient, he was even allowed to put in the last few stitches. During one operation Sky saw a patient hemorrhage for the first time. The longer he looked the tenser he got, until he forgot to breathe and passed out, and his father had to help him out of the room. Later, though, he saw enough of it that he gradually got used to that world of blades and blood.

In early 2003 Sky's father left Ruzhou for advanced training at a hospital in Zhengzhou. Since the training came without pay, his mother threw herself into a small business to keep the family going, and gradually she had no attention left for him. This was when Sky became obsessed with the online game MU, known in English as MU Online. He would even get up in the middle of the night to check whether he had picked up any good items. From April to August he spent whole days on the computer at home. He stopped playing StarCraft, and he stopped going to his hospital internship as well. Those months of obsession meant that in 2003 he won only a regional GOC title and the GOC online StarCraft tournament, and took nothing at all at that year's WCG. After a few months on MU, Sky realized that no matter how hard he ground levels, he could not keep up with the professional level boosters and the people using cheats, and he slowly lost interest in online games.

Struggling for the dream, back onto the professional path

In September 2003, an internet cafe in Zhengzhou called Deep Blue wanted to develop a few esports players for a tournament run by the telecom company for internet cafes, so it brought in Sky and several other reasonably well known players and gave them free machines and a place to train. Sky, who had only just got familiar with Warcraft III, started grinding his level on Blizzard's BN platform alongside several Home team members, and in three months he pushed himself to number one in China.

None of them had any income back then. They ate one meal a day. The cafe was open for business during the day, so they could only train at night, and they slept in a small storeroom behind it. The entrance to the storeroom was only a meter high, and inside there was a bunk bed on which only the top bunk was usable. Every night Sky squeezed onto that one bunk with a very large friend. That life went on for three months.

At Chinese New Year in 2004, Sky's father came home from his training program and was furious to learn that Sky had not continued at the hospital and that his mother had failed to keep him in line. For a while the atmosphere at home was extremely tense.

Right at that point Sky heard that the Hunter club in Beijing was recruiting professional esports players, a thousand yuan a month with food and lodging included, and he wanted to try. His father hated to see him go, but agreed reluctantly, thinking a bit of hardship would do him good. And so Sky left Henan for Beijing to make his way.

Before joining Hunter, Sky had hoped his StarCraft results would get him in as a StarCraft player. But Hunter's StarCraft roster was already full, with PJ and others on it, while the team was badly short of Warcraft III players. The people running Hunter noticed that in 2003 Sky had reached the top five on the Warcraft III BN ladder and had been invited to Blizzard's global elite invitational because of it, so they put him on the Warcraft III roster and signed him to a three month contract. That was how Sky, more or less by accident, became a Warcraft III player.

Sky treasured the opportunity. Ready to suffer and eager to learn, he practiced on BN for more than fourteen hours a day, and the work paid off. During that period he won the Acon4 Beijing regional title.

From YolinY to WE, step by step toward the world title

In the middle of 2004, having failed to finish in the top two of the CEG Beijing region, Sky's Hunter contract ended and he went home. Later he was called up by KinG, one of the legendary figures of the Chinese esports scene, and joined YolinY, a professional esports club that had been founded only a month earlier. Good conditions and high level team practice pushed his form and his skill steadily upward. In June of the same year, at the Acon4 global esports China finals in Beijing, Sky finished second. The winner was his YolinY teammate, the man they called the one whose left hand can dance, Suho.

In May 2005 the former YolinY club won sponsorship from the American company IGE and renamed itself World Elite, WE for short. IGE also brought top Korean players into WE, putting together a genuine world class esports dream team.

Sky covered everything after that in barely a sentence. In 2004 he was invited to Korea by WEG, the world esports games there, for a month of exhibition matches and competition. In 2005 he went to France for ESWC, the world esports tournament, and finished fourth. Then in 2005 he took part in Acon5, the world esports games held in Xi'an, and took the throne as world Warcraft III champion. Sky only said that he had never imagined he could achieve any of it. Standing on the podium he thought of his family, and of the friends who had helped him over the years. Sky feels he has been lucky.

Sky and his friends

In 2002 the pressure on Sky's family was enormous, and to keep training he spent 50 cents a day on food, buying five pan fried buns at ten cents each and drinking the free soup that came with them. It was Xiaoyao Feizai who, at Sky's lowest point, helped him arrange training time at an internet cafe and kept paying for his meals. Sky's prize money now comes to nearly 200,000 yuan a year, of which he pays nearly 50,000 in tax, and yet when he mentions Xiaoyao Feizai the gratitude spills out of him.

On KinG, the manager of the WE club, Sky says KinG is a born leader who arranges everything thoughtfully, right down to details, so that everyone around him feels comfortable. That KinG has held so much talent together for so many years through sheer force of personality is something Sky deeply admires.

On his WE teammates, Sky says Suho is a hardworking and disciplined player with enormous natural talent for the game. In 2004 Sky wanted to beat Suho in every single match, and yet Suho always made him feel he was facing someone unfathomably strong. Every teammate at WE, WE.Anas, WE.DuCui, WE.TiGer and WE.WYW, is a champion in his own right. Sky says he is not a naturally gifted player and can only make up for it with more work.

In the middle of November 2005, WE.Sky and his teammate WE.Suho will represent China at the WCG world finals in Singapore in Warcraft III. Sky says that although his form has been a little low recently, he will train hard and try to play at his best level at the WCG world finals in Singapore, so as not to let down everyone who is rooting for him.

The interview over, Sky went straight back to his seat and threw himself into practice. Looking at the serious, focused expression on his face, and thinking back on the naughty, headstrong childhood he had just described, you get the feeling he has grown up.