David Matz was tucked into the corner of his living room in front of an old Mac, frantically clicking his mouse. I asked him what was going on. He took a long pause before answering. David was too focused on the game he was playing: League of Legends.
“The Tank Man,” as he is known in the game, is not a casual player. He is one of the best in North America at this game, which is closely tied to the latest wave of eSports, otherwise known as electronic sports or professional video games. Out of a worldwide count of more than 60 million monthly players, David once peaked at position 32 in North America.
When I came to see him in action, he warned me that he had not played in weeks.
“Weeks?” I asked.
“Maybe just a week. It might as well have been a year,” he replied.
Once he got a game started, I observed as he quickly panned around the map and started clicking at the rate of what seemed like two clicks a second. Although my comprehension was lagging, all this was evidently second nature to him.
As he was playing, I also noticed that the cover of the book he used for a mousepad was torn in various places, a sign of intensive use. This prompted me to ask how much he played. David would not give me a quantitative answer, but he did say, “probably a good amount that people would say, ‘Oh my god!’ ”
However, David is not a top ranked player simply because he plays a lot. At the end of the game, he took the time to look at some charts and he pointed to me where his mistakes were and how that had affected the game. He blamed himself for his team’s loss. In fact, he had intermittently injected “Oh my God,” “Why did I not?” or “The decision was bad. The execution was terrible.”
Ultimately however, I could tell from our conversations that David did not play just to be at the top of world rankings. For example, he insisted that his peak ranking was mostly due to luck than anything else, and he did not care about his loss even though it would affect his rank. I could tell that David was excelling at this game because he sincerely enjoyed it.
David is a world-class player in the latest e-sport craze, but he is also a deeply pensive and funny person. When I asked him about the hours he spent on League of Legends, he told me they were “at least 50 times as many as on CAS” (CAS being an International Baccalaureate program).
During another encounter with him, he deviated from the subject of the game to tell me about a cool Graph Theory problem — and don’t worry about not knowing what this is because I don’t either. This was not the first time either we had discussed absurd math problems.
What also amazed me about him was that he was an athlete on and off the screen. At Mason, he played soccer, track and cross country over the course of his high school career.
He had just run in a home track meet the day before I talked to him. He had run in the 800 meter where he was seeking to catch up with his personal record, an impressive 2:13. When asked about the whole meet, he added, “It was nice not have to go on a bus.”
In addition to all that, he rides his bike to and from school everyday; it is a two mile trek between his house and the school
And he has left his mark on the school too. His IB “Creativity, Action, Service” compiled Falls Church’s history onto a map he now shares with everyone.
David Matz is truly an extraordinary part of Mason. Most here would relate to his athleticism, humor and academic accomplishments, but on top of that he is also a world class player in the extremely popular game League of Legends. That, to me, is the true representation of “Mind, Body and Character.”
