Rarely does a Melee player come along and beat multiple Gods in a single year. SFAT did it in 2016, though, taking several sets off of Hungrybox and Mango, most recently at Shine (Mango & Hungrybox) and The Big House 6 (Hungrybox). We sat down with the most promising American Fox in ages to discuss life, the universe, and everything in between. (Also, Melee. A lot of questions about Melee.) As always, thanks to r/smashbros for submitting questions that formed the basis of the community-fueled interview below.
This interview has been lightly edited for readability.
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Justin: How is your day? How’s it going?
SFAT: My day’s good, it’s been kind of a chill day.
Awesome! What did you do today?
Let’s see… woke up, played a lot of CS:GO with friends, and watched some other Smash streamers for a little while, read a little bit, practiced some tech skill… been pretty chill.
That’s great!
How about you? How’s your day?
Ha! I guess all I did was, I did some work, some writing…
(For some reason we talk about me for a while, my job, life in glamorous Atlanta, etc., until I remember that this is an SFAT interview, not a Justin interview.)
So do you play a lot of Counter-Strike? Are you a CS:GO esports person?
I’m totally a Counter-Strike esports fan—I’m really good friends with a lot of the CLG teams, Blue and Red, and I’m trying to go pro, that would be the dream, right? But it’s very hard.
That’s cool! So you want to go pro in multiple games? Or is that a bit of a joke?
No, no, I’m trying to go Global—by next August I want to be Global, it’s like the top rank in Counter-Strike.
That’s crazy, there’s never really been a player that’s been world-class in multiple games in different genres… If you had to pick just one, which one would you be world-class in?
Hm… shoot, I dunno. I love Melee, but Counter-Strike is hoppin’ in terms of just, like—yeah there’s a lot of money in Counter-Strike, and it’s a lot bigger than Smash.
Would you say you currently play more Counter-Strike than Smash, on the whole?
Um… nah, I think I still play more Smash, because on the weekends, I’ll probably play up to, like, 30 hours… well, yeah, at tournaments, because I’m always playing at tournaments. Then at home I’ll probably play anywhere between, like, 5 to 10 hours per week, and then I watch a shitton of Melee to just study and stuff.
I hear that a lot from players out of the areas that don’t have a lot of Smash going on—that they study a lot. Is that as important as practicing?
Yeah, definitely, because…. Well, one, there’s just a lot of players that are getting better and better, so you have to keep up on their habits and their options and also scout out, like, who’s on the come-up, but also it’s training your eye to continuously be able to see, you know, just the quick frames.
Oh, I didn’t think about that, but yeah, the game is so unbelievably fast… is eye speed part of what separates top-tier players from regular ones?
It’s like being able to recognize a situation and have multiple responses for that situation, or the correct response. And that’s all video games, right? It’s like, you recognize a situation and you respond to it, and button smash—it’s just so fast and quick, and like, it’s very easy to miss it or not know the correct responses for it.
And you think that’s something you can train, as opposed to a natural, innate ability to recognize these things.
Well, it’s a little bit of both. You have to have the ability to recognize these situations, but other than that, as far as being able to process it in a really fast speed, that’s something I think you can train.
Let’s launch into the main questions here… Can you tell me about where you started, where “SFAT” came from, how you landed on Smash as your focus?
Well, I started playing Smash in 2006… I guess I started playing in 2005, but I was just picking up the game with friends and whatnot, and I didn’t end up going to my first tournament until late ‘06, and at this time I was in 6th grade… so I knew Kevin Toy, PewPewU, and he was also a 6th grader, in a couple of my classes. And often, on the weekends, or on Fridays, a bunch of us would go to someone’s house, and we would just play Melee. And because there were six of us, we’d play teams a lot of the time too, but we played almost every week. And as the years went on, more of our friends would stop playing Melee, and Kevin and I would continue, and we’d play twice a week, three times a week. That was pretty much my middle school experience. And most of high school too, I just played a lot of Melee. And then when I graduated high school, I was kind of conflicted, like—do I go to college and pursue something that I really like? Because Melee was starting to pick up, and League of Legends was also starting to become a thing, you know, with Riot pushing LCS and whatnot, so it’s like—around this time esports was really starting to boom, and I was kind of conflicted. I was going to college and I was doing Smash at the same time, for a long time, but it was tough—it was really hard. (Laughs) Because they both kind of took each other’s attention.
Yeah, it’s like having two jobs.
Yeah, but then, just about a year ago, I put the college thing on hold. I’m pretty much ready to transfer—I could go to any university that I want to, but, I’m kind of just riding the esports wave right now and seeing how far I can take Smash and streaming.
So how bizarre is it that two of the top NorCal players went to the same middle school? That’s a little bit… do you think it’s a coincidence?
I mean, it doesn’t feel like a coincidence because I’ve known him my whole life, but I think it just kinda happened, where we both liked playing the game and we kept playing and we kept playing until we got better and better and better, so, you know, now we’re here.
Okay, so there are a few directions I want to go. One’s the origin of your name, because I’ve heard a few theories about it.
It’s kind of a lame story….
I mean, Axe named himself after deodorant, so…
I dunno, I think he’s got one up on me. I played Jigglypuff at the time, and a lot of my practice partners—yeah, I was in middle school, and a lot of my practice partners were high school students, because they were the only people who played competitively. But I played Jigglypuff, and we would joke around that Jigglypuff was so fat, and I just started wearing the SFAT tag, and the first tournament that I went to, I was like, what do I enter as, I’ll just enter as SFAT, what the hell, and that’s pretty much it. After a few tournaments, I was like, oh, do I change my name, do I keep it, and I was kind of determined to make it a name that people would know regardless.
So you’re attached to it now. If you went pro in CS:GO, would you change to a different name?
No, no way! Because I would want them to know that I’m SFAT, the Super Smash Bros. pro.
Are you better than Mango at CS:GO?
No.
Oh, no?
No, I’m much below Mango—he’s played since, like, 1.6, but I’ve only played for a few months.
So kind of a new thing. It’d be interesting to see a team of Melee players compete in CS:GO tourneys on a fairly high level.
There’s quite a few people from Melee that I actually play with, like Lovage and S2J, and PewPewU plays a lot too.
It’s always cool to see that cross-esports love. Alright, though, back to Melee. You’ve improved ridiculously fast over the past year, right? How do you explain that?
I guess for me, it’s just been a lot of practice of the game, of course, but besides that, there’s a-whole-nother level of mental training you need to go through, and a lot of people struggle with the mental game in esports and competitive sports too. So what I think the biggest thing for me was, was being able to handle my nerves under pressure—that was a big thing I worked on.
Also, really… okay, what it came down to was, at the beginning of the year I housed Armada for Genesis 3, and he was over for maybe a week and a half, playing, and I was talking to him and I was saying how, you know, when I play people much better than me I get really nervous. And I’m not really sure how to deal with it. And he leaned over to me and he was like—Zac, there is no one way better than you at this game. And I was like, oh, shit, like… damn.
And he said it in his excellent Swedish accent, too, which I imagine amplified the effect—
Yeah, and that kind of gave me confidence, and it made me realize how good I actually was, and maybe that I was kind of doubting myself or being complacent with where I was at. So the next few tournaments, I really focused on—when I was playing someone, it was just another person. It wasn’t, you know, it wasn’t Armada, or it wasn’t Mango, or Hungrybox. Whatever character they were playing, it was just the character. But I also realized that these certain characters have certain habits as opposed to other, you know, like Hungrybox likes to do certain rolls in certain situations, but I would never think, like, oh, this is Hungrybox, I would think, ‘this Jigglypuff likes to roll.’
Interesting. Is PewPewU also in your situation, playing full-time?
He’s in school. He’s on his last year of school.
Do you think that’s why your individual results are consistently better than his?
Yeah, I think it’s definitely-partially that I’m full-time Smash and streaming, and he’s only part-time, but I think it’s also… Kevin kind of gets burnt out on the competitive side a lot, and I think it’s like… I dunno if I should share, but we’ve shared this on stream a lot. Kevin last year was doing consistently better than me, getting 9th place at every tournament, but he could not break into the Top 8, no matter what tournament he went to. And at the beginning half of this year, he went on kind of, like, that slump, where he didn’t want to go and compete because he was kind of afraid of not achieving what he could, and um, for me that thought never came into my mind. I would go out there and focus on the process of winning, and then just do that.
But GOML 2016, you know, I had to kind of drag Kevin out to that tournament, because I really wanted to team with him, and he was kind of in that mental block and I told him that we just need to remember why we play this game. You know, don’t take your placement as a direct result of who you are. And so we played that tournament just to have fun, like, no matter how we played, we would just have fun with it. And we ended up winning the Doubles event, which was awesome, and it kind of shook him out, pulled him out of that slump, and ever since then we’ve been really focused on having a very positive mentality, and also trying not to put expectations on ourselves.
And definitely the doubles, the PewFat thing is an important part of this interview. So where do you think doubles are headed? Why aren’t doubles the default mode?
Well, I think they’re headed in a good direction right now, with the pickup from Alliance, so now we have Team Alliance and Team CLG, and hopefully we will have other stable teams in the future. But the reason doubles isn’t as popular as singles is because there’s just a lot of chaos going on. It’s hard to watch teams and know what’s going on and know the really big decisions that are being made. And already Smash is so fast that singles is hard to see if you aren’t familiar with it, and then you throw in two more people it’s just really tough. But now I think with the consistent teammates, it’ll definitely grow the doubles scene and I hope to see more new players pick up.
Do you think the doubles metagame has been pretty much figured out, or is there a huge amount more to uncover?
Yeah, there’s a lot of untapped potential in doubles and it’s not even close to being optimized yet. Even the top teams are very sloppy at executing doubles strategies, and most people don’t even know the little nuances of doubles. So I definitely think it’s under-optimized right now and I think it’ll only get more and more optimized as we get better.
Where do you think the next frontiers are?
So, a lot of people don’t know that, at low percents, if you throw into your partner—below 40% they won’t knock you down. But once that character that’s being thrown gets higher than like 50%, he starts knocking down your opponent. So it’s a good way to rack up a lot of damage. There are little things like that that a lot of people don’t know—they don’t even know that, let’s see… a lot of people tunnel vision too hard on one person, like they fight singles in teams, and they don’t effectively get kills as a team.
So, it seems from my uninformed and nooby vantage point that doubles has a higher skill ceiling. Would you agree?
I would say they’re different skills, because in doubles it’s more about recognizing situations and then being able to do one big move on that, whereas in singles it’s more, you know, about winning a single neutral exchange, then doing a rehearsed combo punish game, but in doubles there’s a lot more room for improv. So if someone like jumps in the middle of you guys, there’s a lot of different ways you can go about it.
Do you think you’ll ever live and practice full-time with PewPewU?
We haven’t really talked about it, I mean it’d be awesome… I visit Shroomed a lot, he actually lived in this kind of this Smash house in San Francisco with NMW, Laudandus, and Nhat, all other Smashers, top-level NorCal Smashers, and I would go there a lot and play with them. I mean, it would be awesome if Kevin and I moved in, or even if I moved in with Shroomed, living with a top-level Smasher would definitely be awesome. We’ve talked about moving into the CLG house before, but at this time, it’s kinda like… it’s on hold right now.
Let’s talk about Fox. Since switching from Puff to Fox, have you ever thought playing another character?
Well, actually, I didn’t go Puff to Fox, I went Puff to Marth to Captain Falcon to DK… I played all sorts of characters, I’ve played almost the whole cast at one point. And then at one point I was playing Marth and PewPew was actually playing Fox, and we mained those characters for a long time, and one day we ended up trying the other character, and we ended up liking it a lot more. So now I’m the Fox and he’s the Marth. But in the future, I do like Marth a lot, I still play Marth a lot, and I like Falco too, so those would probably be the characters I would play other than Fox if I were to play them.
Do you think Fox needs a secondary?
Nah, he definitely doesn’t need a secondary, although he can be very tiring and draining, you know, if you play him all weekend long—sometimes you don’t wanna play Fox anymore, you wanna play someone who has a different pace.
And it’s hard on your hands. Is that something you’ve had trouble with?
Yeah, definitely, my tendons get very sore, and if I don’t stretch properly before and after I play, my hands get really sore, I think something that’s helped me though is working my arms out, or working out in general, when I build that muscle around my tendons and my wrist it definitely hurts way less—it’s definitely sore at first because it’s building the muscle, but afterwards it’s like, great cushion, and a lot of people who I’ve talked to who have worked out their arms don’t usually experience hand pain.
So let’s talk about when you practice Fox—what is the most important thing for Fox mains to practice? How is learning Fox is different from other characters?
I think the most important thing for Fox mains to learn right now is trying to shine out of shield, and the perfect shine on the ground, because it’s one of the best defensive options—it’s the best defensive option in the game, no one else has it except Falco, but yeah… shine out of shield right now is really good.
Do you subscribe to the 20XX idea, that Fox played well is unbeatable by any other character?
Okay, this is how I always interpret the 20XX meme or whatever, right? It’s not so much that Fox is the best character in the game and one day everyone will play Fox—although I think Fox is the best character in the game. I interpret it more as optimizing whatever character you play and optimizing that to the fullest—because I don’t think any character has been optimized to the fullest, except Peach is probably the most optimized character because of Armada, but every other character is way behind.
So let’s talk about your matchup versus Hbox at Big House 6. After seeing that set I had a hard time imagining Hbox ever beating a competent Fox again. Do you feel like you figured out the matchup to the point where it’s unwinnable for Puff?
That’s definitely how I felt when I was playing him, but I don’t want to say that he’ll never beat a Fox again, or that he’ll never beat me again, because we’ve seen him evolve many times, first vs Leffen then Armada, but I do feel like I’ve found a strategy that makes it really, really really hard for Puff, but I’m not gonna say he’ll never beat an optimized Fox.
Where did that breakthrough come from?
It was a lot of studying with Duck, actually. Before my Shine set with Hbox, him and I just broke down every situation that Puff was in relative to where I was on the stage—anywhere where I was uncomfortable, we broke that situation down, anywhere where I didn’t have a response to, like, oh here’s right here, he’s where he likes to come in, where’s where he can go, you know, if he goes here then I can go there, and there was just a lot of that breakdown. And it worked, it helped me a lot at my Shine set, where I beat him for the first time. And then this time around I did just the exact same thing, but I was able to clean it up around the edge, give him less free kills, pretty much.
Do you think Fox’s abilities – agility, lasers, and whatnot – are at the core of what helped you win, or just understanding how he plays?
Both? I want to say it’s both, but I think…
Because obviously if it’s because you understand his style specifically, then there’s more potential for him to change the outcome, but if it’s the character matchup itself…
I dunno, it’s hard to say. I definitely felt that whole set that I was completely in control at every point of the game, and I dunno, it’s hard to say because I don’t want to put the label on it that he cannot come back from this current meta of Puff vs Fox, but at the same time it felt way easier than in the past, that’s for sure.
It sounds like you don’t want to write it off… can you think of a way he can get around it?
No, definitely not.
So if you’ve been beating Hungrybox, the wall you seem to be hitting is Mew2King. Can you talk about that matchup? Can you have a similar breakthrough there?
Yeah, man, I really thought that Big House 6 was going to be the time to finally break that wall, but the big thing that I forgot was, game five… in game five, you need to come out explosive. If you don’t come out explosive, the other player will, and if he gets that early lead, that’s just huge. And Mango did the same thing to me at Super SmashCon, he came out game 4 just like. Super clean, super well, just ran at me and got the first combo, led to the kill… I felt really confident, I beat him on FD this time around too, and that was really great, so I’m feeling better versus Mew2King, but there’s one little thing that I’m missing, and I’m not sure what it is, so we’ll see I guess.
So it’s a knowledge thing, not a skill thing? You think you have the skill but you have yet to deploy it?
Oh, for sure, for sure, honestly I think the top 20 are pretty much all the same skill, right? And it’s more about having the right knowledge and using it at the right time that keeps the top on top.
Leffen is back from his hiatus—the perception seems to be that you have a beef with him. Do you agree?
I guess so, yeah. I don’t really like the guy, but I don’t really hold anything against him either.
What do you think of him as a player?
Exceptionally good.
I think I read that his goal was to become better than all the Gods—does he have that in him?
Yeah, I definitely think he has that in him. And I think most of the top fifteen, twenty have it in them as well.
So you’re saying they’re all the same skill level. What would allow one person to really open that gap? What’s the last layer?
I definitely think there are more layers, like, even within the top, there are more layers. But for me, I had this recent talk with Ice, and it was actually at Clash City, and we were talking about the Melee script, and pretty much the same topic—why are the top 5 or top 6 always winning? Why is it always the same top 6 at top, and why is it always the same 3 people in the middle, and then the other 12 falling behind them?
We kind of just threw this idea out that maybe him and I and the players around this skill level are complacent and just falling to their role, like, maybe they don’t want to break out, maybe they’re okay with where they are, you know. They’re always the underdog, most of the time rooted for, but maybe we are, ourselves, I can’t even visualize beating the other person. So at CCC, Ice gave me this really good mantra to say, while he plays this is what he says and I sort of used it—No ego, we go. It was a good reminder that no matter what we did in the game, whether we get a super cool combo or we get super rekt one stock, never give into the notion that your brain was trying to give you, right? That way we are always able to stay calm and collected and just make good decisions.
It’s cool that you mention Ice, that was someone else I was going to ask about. Are you good friends? Or was just that a one-off conversation?
I would say we’re pretty good friends. I don’t talk very often, but when we’re at tournaments we tend to talk.
Because someone brought up this question: “After your set against Ice at Big House 6, Ice did what was considered a disrespectful hand gesture. What are your thoughts on that?”
Oh, um yes, someone else was talking about that to me, they said they thought he was doing, like, a choke thing, as if like, referencing that I was choking, as if like, oh, like… he choked, don’t take it so seriously. Honestly, I was just kind of like in my own world after I lost and I didn’t even see him do the gesture, nor have I watched the vods yet, so I don’t really have any opinion on it.
Can you tell me what you mean by that, ‘you were in your own world?’ Does that always happen when you lose?
Yeah, it definitely does, it just sucks to lose, no one wants to lose… well, I should say, none of the top Melee players or competitive players in general want to lose, that’s why we’re here, we’re here to win, and when you lose, it’s… distressing, and I dunno, since Melee’s also so fast, it can happen in an instant. So our set, I think it took less than 10 minutes, like 8 minutes or something, I was just like, woah, what happened—I just had three stocks, like, what happened? How did I lose that so badly? But I didn’t even hear… even when I play, I don’t listen to the crowd, I’m completely locked into the game, in the television, and when I take the headset off, I’m still kind of in that zone of like, replaying the whole game in my head, trying to find what went wrong.
What do you think did happen with the Ice series in particular?
It’s definitely a mixture of him playing super on point and me… not. I was doing a lot of buffered get-up attacks off of his shine instead of tech-rolling them, or just getting up, and it would happen because I would, like, be pressing a button while he shined me and so it would buffer the get-up attack and so a lot of that happened, and then he would get a free hit. And it happened once, twice, three times, and I was like, shit, this is just not good… and it just kind of spiraled—lost a lot of my momentum, and he maintained a lot of his momentum, and again it was because he was just playing so on point, I think he made, like, three mistakes that whole set.
The casters describe him as an extremely technical player, do you think there is a big gap there or is it just kind of a buzzword that gets tossed around? Is he more technical than the average Fox? How much does that play a role?
I would say we’re pretty much at the same technical abilities, same with Silentwolf, same with Lucky—all the Foxes in the top, Armada, Leffen, we all pretty much have the same tech skill, there’s no big jump to anyone. But there’s def a difference between technical knowledge and execution versus tournament execution. And that’s what a lot of Foxes don’t have, is tournament execution. But I don’t think—I think this happened to be his game, and he turned it up. Usually he’s not able to execute this well, and this time he just pulled it off.
Who is your favorite player to watch?
Besides myself? I mean, I love watching myself.
Okay, so let’s say you’re at a tournament watching live then. Who is your favorite to watch live?
I might be a little biased but I love watching Kevin play.
You guys have just a ridiculous bromance going.
It’s just really cool to see people fall for the tricks that I fall for all the time, and them getting fucked up by the stuff I get fucked up for, it’s like, sweet, I took that combo six months ago for this moment right here.
What lesser-known player do you think will have their breakout soon?
It’s really hard to say, because it always comes down to the will, like who has the will to break through? Who’s gonna sacrifice what needs to be sacrificed in order to jump to that next level? And I dunno, it’s hard to say, there’s so many people and they can be dragged in all sorts of different directions. I think Zain from MDVA has jumped a lot this year.
Yeah, he played sick at Big House.
He made a few upsets, I think. But a lot of times what happens is, the players make a breakout, and then they’re not able to maintain it the next tournament, and they kinda question, well, what happened so well last time and why can’t I do it next time? I think a lot of it comes down to—once they break through, they don’t continue to do what they did in the past. They kinda like go easy on themselves or they ease up on the training or they don’t watch as many videos, they kinda get complacent, right? They always make that first leap and then they kinda just plateau for a little while until they feel ready to make that next leap, you know, get that will.
You mentioned reading earlier, so what kind of stuff do you like to read?
Mostly neuroscience books or books about the brain or mind, psychology, so right now I’m reading On Intelligence—that book is really great. I’m also reading Algorithms to Live By. I don’t really read fiction or anything. That’s what I was gonna study in school, was cognitive science, so it kinda helps me feel like I’m keeping up with my studies if I read these books.
Would you want to be a doctor?
I think I’d rather be more of a researcher, you know conduct various research, maybe how videogames affect certain structures of the brain, or what structures are being used inside the brain when you play videogames or something.
It’d be really cool to see some top tier Melee players hooked up to one of those things.
Yeah, the MRIs.
The “You’re Watching SFAT” series seems to perplex people. Where did the idea come from?
It just came from my friends and I, it just happened. My friends would be hanging out and they’d kind of rag on me, kinda tease me a little bit on my various habits or various things that seemed to happen to me, and then they were like, oh well, why don’t we like, film this, film little short sketches of all those little things like, Zac likes to sleep everywhere, or falls asleep super-easily.
Oh, that’s the point of the bench one!
Yeah, or how Kevin, because he plays Marth, usually gets a lot more attention than I do, or at least he did for a long time, because Marth is just super-cool to watch…
Where do you think Marth is on the tier list? Is he a Top 3 character?
Second, yeah, he’s right behind Fox.
Because, correct me if I’m wrong, but there are more Top 20 Falcons than there are Marths.
(Counting) S2J, Wizzrobe… I would say there’s about the same?
What about None?
Oh, yeah. Him too.
So why is that? Why the shortage of Marths?
He’s very… he’s like, he’s very easy to pick up and just play for a few games and be, like, pretty good with him, but he’s very hard to be super good, like, you have to know your spacing very well and you have to know how to do out of certain combos to be a top level winner. Whereas Falcon—Falcon’s the same but he’s also very fast and his combos come out a lot easier than Marth.
Which Falcon do you think is the best?
It’s tough to say, like—because I believe that just about everyone in the top 20, maybe top 30 are very relative in skill level. It’s hard to say who’s the best, right, because I think it constantly changes.
So let’s look at it holistically then—not only their skill, but their ability to deploy it. Like let’s say we had 100 tournaments, who would have the best placing?
I guess it’s Wizzrobe, I guess Wizzy’s the best, but I think Johnny is also very close behind, and None’s even catching up to them. But right now I think Wizzrobe has the crown for being the best Falcon.
Which non-Top 6 player, who is not you, has the best chance of winning a major tournament? Excluding the Gods, you, and Leffen.
Plup. For sure. Although recently he’s been kind of slacking or losing a bit of a competitive edge so—he might not win in the next couple ones, but he has the potential to win.
Do you think he’ll be playing a lot of Fox?
I’m not sure, because he was playing a lot of Sheik at the last weekend. I think it’s going to come down to what he’s feeling on that day.
Just trying to think of who plays both Sheik and Fox, it’s an odd mix.
I used to play Sheik and Fox, or I had a Sheik main phase, where I only played Sheik for a long time, and then I switched to Fox because I got tired of it.
I have a question from TurtlePot here… It says, Bobby Scar has a pretty famous impression of you. Are you aware of it? What do you think of it? And do you have a Scar impression?
(Laughs) I did see it, I saw it on my stream, and I think it’s absolute horseshit. I don’t think it sounds like me at all. But I don’t really have a Scar impression—I’m not very good at impressions at all, I’m sorry.
How about this – which Mario Kart is best?
Oh, Double Dash, hands down.
Okay, because the full question is, which one is best, and why is it Double Dash? But I was curious about your answer. So why is that, dude?
Because Double Dash is like the Melee of Mario Kart—you’ve got tech skills, you’ve got certain techniques that you need to practice to be good at it, and you’ve got maps, and… I dunno, it’s on the GameCube.
Where’s our competitive Double Dash scene!?
I’m trying to start it, man! I’m trying to start it.
Okay, if you guys start it, I’ll cover it. Next question: If you had to marry one of the five Gods, who would it be and why?
Marry? Uh… Fuck, I don’t know, you know, my heart leans towards Mango.
I mean, that’s the organ you’re supposed to use to answer a question like that. Marriage is about the heart!
Yeah, but your heart can be fooled by other extremities… I dunno. I guess Mango. But me and Mango would fight a lot, so…
Who do you think you’d fight with least if you were living with them for the rest of your life?
Probably Armada. Me and Armada get along pretty well. We just have common ways of thinking.
Let’s talk about food real quick. So a lot of the time athletes will have a preferred pre- or post-competition meal. Do you have anything like that?
I love almonds and protein bars before Top 8, but we don’t always get a lot of time before Top 8. Like, this past tournament, we didn’t get a lot of time in between Top 8s. But I love almonds. Almonds are the shit—I’ll eat them all tournament long.
I saw Ice had a little bag of trail mix he was eating between games. Is it kind of hectic being shuttled around station to station at a tournament like that?
Yeah, usually there’s a lot of down time in-between tournaments, though. But it was just, day three was definitely the busiest because, like—eleven o’clock was Top 64, then we play Top 64 down to Top 8, until doubles, which is at four—we only really had, like, half an hour of break for that. And then we were the first doubles set to play, and then the last doubles set to play, because we were in Grands, and then again, we only had a half hour break before we had to start playing Top 8 of singles again. So it was just a very long and busy day. Most tournaments aren’t usually that busy, though, they’ll cut it down a lot more.
Any final words before we wrap this up?
Shoutouts to CLG for all the support they give me, CLG’s amazing, I love them. Also shoutouts to 6-5-0, the area code that I live in, with all my homies. And just shoutout to all the fans for the support, I wouldn’t be here without you.
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Thanks to r/smashbros users toptierkek, majihpo, LucarioSkywalker, MoneyRoy, WumboMD, Weedypanther, EmpireCrusher203, TinyCrewShips, ChillexLovesPringles, baconmosh, RedEko, CoffeeHamster, Xatres17, turtlepot, GoombaX, De1Fuego, CTL17, and others for submitting the questions that formed the basis of the interview above.
