Two stocks, six minutes on the clock.

The venue is bursting with energy, the commentary couch is cracking jokes and the audience is glued to the screen.

This was the moment when I found something awaken in me. Something that had long been dormant.

THREE!

I grip my controller, one thumb on the stick, one thumb over the buttons.

TWO!

I take a deep breath in, and clear my mind.

ONE!

I loosen my shoulders.

GO!

I am in the zone.

After I quit football in my junior year of high school, I found myself lacking a competitive outlet. I moved to a high school that didn’t have sports, so I could get those sweet college credits everyone talks about. I was gonna make it out of high school with a whole bundle of credits. Moving from a high school that really appreciated sports to a school that didn’t have sports teams was an incredible challenge for me, because I had always staked my identity on being the competitive one, the sports guy.

There was something wrong. I didn’t always understand or articulate it clearly; it was just a general uneasiness at first. There was something about playing sports, something about the feeling I got in the thick of it all, that I couldn’t funnel into other pursuits. There was no placing the excitement of making a big play into a sentence in an essay. I couldn’t transfer the feeling of a hard day of practicing into a math test. It wasn’t the same.

I graduated from high school with enough credits to get an associate’s degree, so clearly something was working for me academically. But that little tear in the fabric kept growing. I was at Florida State University, one of the best sports schools in the country, so I figured I would slot right back in and quench that competitive spirit of mine. This wasn’t really the case. I had made some friends who were against even the concept of sports (a strangely common sentiment in the English programs I’ve been a part of) and despite their concerning dismissal of one of the most important things in my life, I felt like we all really clicked personality-wise. Soon, I was absorbed in other pursuits, like my writing and playing Dungeons and Dragons.

That was when I rediscovered Smash. Everyone and their mom has played at least one Super Smash Brothers game, whether it was Melee or Brawl or 64. All the Nintendo mascots coming together to pound each other into oblivion, to beat out some long-standing grudge or what have you. As the Nintendo brand suggests, it’s one of those games that is simple to play, but hard to master. I remember the first day that all our friends played together, one on one, loser drops out. We all piled onto a tiny blue couch, and began kicking the virtual snot out of each other, laughing the whole time. I couldn’t believe how much fun I was having. It didn’t click at that moment but some months in the future, but I had found something that could fill that empty spot.

Anyway, we made Smash night a regular thing at my friend’s house. Every weekend, we’d come down and practice new strategies, develop a new game plan on how to establish dominance, to show everyone who’s boss. I think a little bit of my competitiveness wore off on them because we would jump up and down, shout at the TV, pound the fists on the table after every stock lost.

That was when we discovered the poster. “Smash Tournament Next Week!” in poorly formatted block letters on a white page.

(Pictured: an approximation)

I was ecstatic. I had been playing the game for weeks, I was going to kick this tournament’s butt.

When we got to the school’s entertainment center, where the tournament was being held, my friends and I were amazed by two things. One, the way the room had been arranged, with lines and lines of televisions all hooked up to systems, and two, the sheer amount of people in the building. There must have been more than a hundred.

So, since I said that I was going to kick the tournament’s butt, of course, I lost my first match against someone who knew the game far better than me. It’s like he was running in circles around me, reading my every move. The tournament was double elimination, so I figured I had one more chance to prove myself. I was promptly eliminated by another player of a similar skill level.

Now, most people would experience this and fall into a bit of a funk, especially after such high expectations, but for some reason, I remember not feeling that way at all. I guess the awe hadn’t quite worn off by the time I was done. It was invigorating knowing that there was a whole new mountain to climb, a whole new pond with a new big fish. I annoyed everyone at that tournament to death with my constant asking for advice, asking where the next tournament was. I had found something new to become the best at.

That said, I’m still not the best Smash player. I wouldn’t rank myself in the top twenty thousand. But I keep practicing, learning new things, pushing myself further. Even after moving away from Tallahassee, I found myself a new scene filled with new players, with new things to learn from each of them. Competitive Smash reawakened that spark in my gut, that urge to be the best that I had so long ago.