What drives a world-class eSports competitor?

"What good was winning without flair? Annihilating an opponent without any concern for the beauty of the game was not the way forward."

My father has always been a great support to me, which is probably due to his own past. He practiced Kendo as a young man—a martial art popular with the ancient Samurai—at a very high level. He dreamed of a career in Kendo, but my grandfather had other ideas and made him go for a more conventional career. Of course, my grandfather was only repeating the pattern imposed on him decades before by his own father, who shattered his dreams of playing the Japanese chess game, Shogi, competitively. One by one, they were forced to sacrifice their passion for the sake of convention. I think that by allowing me to continue, my father wanted to break the cycle. It was not an easy choice at the time, as there were no professional Japanese gamers in the early 1990s.