Info on the Old School SF Scene?

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5

That was a good read, I’ll give this thread a foreign perspective.

This happened in Taiwan, a situation IMO commonly shared by many Asian countries.

I don’t know what it is about arcade, but it always has a special place in my heart that no console can take away. Even now with the sophistication of DC/PS2/GC/XBOX, there is just something about the arcades that made me drop $$ and play.

Like jcasetnl, going to the arcade was a daily after-school activity for the school gang. My neighborhood has small arcades all over. I remember there was a period in time I have a choice to visit 6 different arcades within 15 minute walking distance. It was just as common as convenient stores.

Anyways, I forgot exactly when I started to actively going to arcades, but it was slightly before SF1 came out. I wasn’t particularly interested in fighting game, I just played whatever is there. What I remember most about SF1 is that I always lost to Adon and fights between 2 human players are pretty much down to shoryken-fest. It’s almost like a joust. 2 players start to approach each other with jab shoryuken and see who get hit. Sometimes it stall because they do it at exactly the same time. But to sum it up, there were not much strategy involved. It didn’t matter to me at the time because I was just a kid mashing the buttons.

Since arcades were extremely popular in Taiwan, I often have to compete against people much older than I am and I usually get my ass handed to me, so I don’t play that often, I was just happy to watch.

When SF2 came out, it didn’t came out with much of fanfare for me. It just came. But within matter of weeks, EVERYBODY was playing it. I remember seeing some people that can finish the game PERFECT after PERFECT with Guile doing JUST air throws. Almost as if they know exactly when the opponent will jump throwing them down when the opponent is still rising. I also remember seeing the FIRST combo, cr. forward into fireball. I didn’t have a clue what combos were. I merely progressed from button smashing to specials spamming state.

Many different styles soon evolved. The invincibles are the ones that are ahead of their time. They study each normal, specials, priorities and stuff, nobody can touch them. And there are the I can do everything but I don’t know what it will do style. They just throw out random moves and such, kinda fun to watch back then because it was still pretty new at the time. There are also the move abusers like me. Spamming one particular specials and just keep doing it.

The arcade that I frequent the most has 6 machines dedicated to SF2. It is small, only has around 15 machines. That pretty much tells you how important SF2 was.

While all this is going on, it went on with a twist… Schools didn’t like students going to arcade after school, so teachers have a system of students reporting classmates who they caught going to the arcade. It’s always the girls tell on the boys. So going to the arcade for my gang and I was like breaking rules together. Probably because of this that we had a special bond between us that makes us trust one another. However, me in particular, has the toughest time of all… my parents strongly oppose me going to arcades. Whenever I am caught, I get punished. 99% of my punishments are because of going to arcade. You can say because of this, arcade means that much more to me.

I also remember buying my very first non-comic book using my own allowance. It’s a street fighter 2 book. It has screenshot of all the moves, how to do them, and pictures, bio and stuff. One thing sticks in my head and that was a huge headline: SHORYUKEN no longer invincible. And it showed successive screen shot of a shoryuken performed and the performer punished on the way down. It’s funny thinking back on this.

A while gone and the rainbow edition came out. I was like WTF? hadouken in air?!? These modified SF2 was fun for a while but it didn’t last. Same with accelerated edition. The next big thing was HF.

6

man that post was fuckin awesome. if there was a best post award id vote for that one u just made.

7

jcasetnl is top tier :slight_smile:

8

I hardly ever post but this thread deserves some ‘respect’. The second thread sums up very well what a lot of old timers (people in their late twenties approaching the big 30) experienced and can appreciate about the arcade scene circa 1983 (about the start of the crash) to 1991 (the ‘Golden Era’ in full swing) and what SF really meant to social aspect of going to an arcade.

I remember for me going to the Scarborough Town Center in 1987 and staying at the mall all day (I was a mall rat) and watching all ‘big’ guys play SF1 (it’s a primarily Asian community where I played) and round after round you saw these players just throwing fireballs and hoping to connect with an uppercut (just to illustrate how strong an uppercut was – 1 uppercut, properly placed against Geki - second guy on Japan after Retsu-- would kill the bastard - I don’t remember ever killing any other player in that game with one uppercut but Geki but I’m sure you could do it).

And when SF2 came out it was pure madness at times. Huge crowds around the machines and people you didn’t often see coming into the arcade actually coming in (I remember a bunch of big white biker dudes come in kicking ass with Guile and Dhalsim and was pretty amazed at their tricks). Then of course there were the glitches (handcuffs, freezes, magic throws) that people sometimes exploited and these individuals were hated because they locked up the machine then promptly took off (Ugh)

And I still remember a couple of weeks prior to SF:CE coming out there were huge posters outside the arcade and in some parts of the mall with the words Street Fighter: Champion Edition Coming SOON! When the hell was the last time you walked through the mall and saw huge posters advertising the release of a SF game?

Ahhh… the memories.

9

I’ll read all that later…

I just remember HATING SF1 when I finally played it for myself. I didn’t see what the big hoopla was…the control felt like your guy(Ryu) was moving through a tub of cement, and special moves only came out occasionally. The music was really cool though, as were the graphics for the time.:smiley: Even the voices were classic, despite the fact of them being hard to understand:

“Blua bluaaah blua bla bla blah. Derbluaah blah blah bloh.”

SF2–much better. Graphics were fukkin awsome for the time, and on my first time watching people play, I thought “THIS IS THE GREATEST GAME…OF ALL TIME. WITHOUT QUESTION”:lol:
This immediately became my game of choice nearly every weekend at the mall. Saturdays were PACKED…you actually had to stand in line to play, and it was messed up for a short guy like me, since people also crowded around the machine to watch…
*why the hell do tall and/or fat people ALWAYS end up in the damn front?!:mad: dammit.

It got better though, as my arcade eventually put SF2 on a big screen setup when Champion Edition came out. Soon, that was our arcade’s main thing:
**-1 big screen Champion Edition.

  • 1 big screen regular SF2
  • 1 big screen Mortal Kombat!
  • a regular size SF2 in the back of the arcade.
  • and ANOTHER regular sized SF2 at the front
  • there were some SNKs…1 World Heroes, and 1 Fatal Fury, but nobody gave a shit**:lol: (Even when people didn’t feel like waiting in the SF2/MK line…the SNK games STILL got no play…most people would go over to a pinball machine or an action/shooter game to pass the time:p )
10

More old skool lore (Long)

The next day the young man returned but the old man was nowhere to be found. He turned to leave but just as he reached the door heard the old man’s voice:

“So… back for more, eh?” he rasped?

“Well, I… well yes.”

“Fine, fine. Set me up with a drink, boy, and we’ll continue.”

The old man lit a cigarette and stared into his glass for a moment, sipped, took a deep breath.

“Now where was I… oh right… twenty kids crowded round a video game?”

And they were all crowded around a kid named Pele (prounounced like the soccer player), playing on the second stick. A few kids challenged on the first side and he quickly dispatched them. Finally, everyone backed off to let him play the computer. He got to Balrog and was trounced, but no one had ever seen “the final four” before and he instantly became a legend. Watching him play I learned in a few minutes what would have taken me months to learn on my own. He knew exactly what to do against each opponent.

I’ve been hooked on games before, but I’d never been re-hooked. Still, I got my first glimpse of what was possible with this game, or what we old-skoolers like to call “the next level”.

I’d never seen him before but he made me step up my game. And from that day forward at 2 Star Liquors playing the computer was just half the game and competing against LIVE players was the other half. Even though no one had beaten the game at that point, no one gave a flying fuck about the high score table. It didn’t mean shit because if some schmuck could challenge you and toss you off the machine your stupid initials on a high score table didn’t mean jack. And people were playing so much no one ever saw the high score table anyway.

In short, it was the start of a whole new era of videogames.

Two Star Liqours on Fruitvale Ave wasn’t the exception, but the RULE. Street Fighter 2 had taken hold in a massive way. From then on, if you went into any convenience store, arcade, 7-11, or shithole bar there was a crowd gathered around the game. If you wanted a game “against the computer” you had to EARN IT by beating the crap out of every player that stepped up. No longer did you stare helplessly at another guy playing the game hoping he’d mess up so you could play next. Now, all you had to do was beat him.

But as revolutionary as Street Fighter 2 seemed to be with what little we knew, it was merely the beginning.

The old man sat back from his drink, eyes watered over from the alcohol. “Well that’s enough for this night, boy.”

And the young man said, “There’s… more?”

“More!?” the old man said, in angry contempt. “That’s just the start, the beginning! Of course there’s more… much more. But I’m an old, old man now. Long in the tooth, boy, and I need my rest. You come back tommorow and I’ll tell you another tale.”

“But! Tell me just a bit more.”

The old man sighed. “Okay, just a bit more then.”

So with a swig of his drink he continued.

Everyday after school we had one thing on our mind. Two classes before school let out my mind was already thinking about it and my hands were doing fireball or uppercut motions on my notebook and sweating with the anticipation. The moment the bell rang I was down to Phil’s car in a flash and as often as not he’d be there before me if his last class was in a building closer to the parking lot.

We quickly established ourselves as good players at the local places. 7-11 was no longer the hangout of choice for us because it cost 50 cents to play, whereas 2 Star only cost a quarter. All the history, literally, the 3 years I spent at 7-11, were cast aside. And 2 Star fostered the game, not like those jerk 7-11 counter jockies who would sometimes unplug the games because there were too many kids crammed in there.

The Fireball - Uppercut trap was beatable but only by good players. It required fakes, mind games and consistent execution if you wanted to use it and win. Even against the computer you at least needed good positioning. And for those of us that made that pattern our business we got respect. Other players feared playing us. Never before was “fear” part of videogames. As I watched a good player beat opponent after opponent, watched my quarter slowly march to the right, the adrenaline started to rise and my pulse would start to quicken. I can beat this guy. I can BEAT this guy.

One day I walked in and there was a murmur in the crowd about this thing called a “triple-uppercut”. Of course, the uppercut only hit twice so I tried to imagine how it could possibly hit three times. Maybe if you were under the player? It didn’t make sense. But true to form Pele stepped up against me and after getting me dazed he positioned himself right next to me.

Now when you dazed a guy the thing we always did was throw him. It did good damage and well… we couldn’t think of anything better to do. But Pele did jab into uppercut. He basically mashed the jab button and whirled the stick in a tight circle. Three hits. And I got dazed again! It was the first time I’d ever seen a double-dizzy, but much more importantly, it was the first combo.

I was re-hooked again.

On and on we played. Phil was two years older than me and graduated that year. Eventually we lost touch and he stopped playing anyway, to concentrate on his studies at Cal Poly.

At some point the potential of Guile was realized but I still clung to Ryu. No one ever thought Guile could compete. Sure, he had that insane reach with his normal moves but you had to charge his specials, so he was insanely predictable. But as the strategy evolved and progressed, those three seconds to charge his moves basically disapeared. And his sonic boom had no delay. His flash kick had insane reach as well. Put it all together and Guile was a corner-trapping God.

I was good, but I wasn’t that good. As much as I tried I was never as inventive or creative as many of my opponents. I was a “pattern” player. But that was enough to be the best player at the local liquor store.

By this time it was also known that if you got close to your opponent after a knockdown and did ducking short (which they were forced to block), you could throw them before they recovered from block delay. It was reversible, but extremely difficult to reverse. So players dubbed it a cheater’s tactic and it became known as “cheap”. Even the computer fell for it, and players with absolutely no skill could now beat the game. “Honorable” or “skilled” players never used this tactic. How many arguments, debates, shoving matches and outright fist-fights did I see over this one aspect of the game? I can’t even recall, but there were a lot.

I got back in touch with a friend named Tony. In the six or so months since I last spoke with him he had been playing and had all sorts of stories to tell about legendary players and massive arcades where the best of the best went. Tony had a car and had been all over - Oaktree, the Underground, Bayfair, and Regency just to name a few.

I played Tony a few games and he absolutely thrashed me with Ryu and Guile. He was a great trash talker too. When he played it looked like some intricate dance. He seemed to read my mind and know what I would do way before I did it. He could triple with ease, and landed fierce-forward-fireball combos on me one after another. Over eight months of street fighter experience and I was still being soundly trashed whereas before it had taken me anywhere from two days to a month to master any game before that.

Then he switched to Guile. At the time he was by no means an expert Guile player but being exposed to the far more advanced strategies of the arcades I didn’t have a prayer. Over and over he absolutely destroyed me. I had no answer to anything he threw at me. Finally he said, “Dude, if you ever want to succeed at this ware, you need to take that fool Ryu and dispose of him. He can’t compete. You have a plan, but Guile has PLANS, fool. You want to defeat Guile, you have to defeat all his PLANS.”

I told him he was the best player I’d ever seen and that he could dominate anyone in the place.

And he said, “Yeah, but there’s this Asian fool at the Underground that whoops my ass on a daily basis. That fool has ludicrous skills. He’s on the next level. I beat him a couple times at first, but then he factored my gameplan, divided by Pi, multiplied by the common denominator and filed me away in the database. He whoops me every time now.”

“Who’s that?”

“Thomas.”

11

jcasetnl,

Great story man! So when you met Thomas, how well could he play? What made him different? What kinda fighting style did he have? Did he rush, or wait for the opponent to make a mistake. I bet he waited…

ps- did you ever see Thomas get whipped by anyone?

12

bump, this is really a great read :smiley:

13

I remember all those early SF games were in grocery stores and gas stations and all that. All day people would be huddled around the machines playing them, trading rumors about “handcuffs, bracelet throwing, etc…” Damn I remember when CE came out, that was insane. Everyone freaking out over the new colors, backgrounds, moves, and being able to play the bosses. Man those were the days, I got so many fun memories of SF II and the like.

14

Best Thread EVER!

15

I know. This should definitely get a SRK Fourms Award.:frowning:

16

Man, i really wished i was old enough to vividly remember this stuff. I can remember huge arcade crowds, but it was always like that, so i thought that’s just the way it was, and always would be. :frowning: Jcasetnl, finish the story…PLEASE!!!

17

hahaha, this thread rules. I remember the first time i played SF2WW. I was 7 years old. My mom forced me to go shopping in some stupid town i hated. We got there and instead of being shopping cart caddie, i booked it to the mall to see what they had to offer. I had 2 bucks to kill, and then I saw my oais. ARCADE!!! It was like a tuesday at 11:30 or something, and there was NOBODY in the arcade. I didnt get to go into arcades very much in those days, never had money. But i knew what games i liked. I was in front of RAMPAGE in no time. One dollar down, i just walked around a bit. This place was pretty seedy, really dark lighting, brown carpet (which was sticky for reasons i cant explain), and then I saw SF2. i was just hypnotised. I saw blood sport like 2 days before and i remembered thinking how cool a game based on bloodsport would be (I WAS 7 OK !!!). I just launched my money into the machine. First charactor i picked was blanka. First match was against Dhalsim. I just got my ass handed to me. Last 50 cents, i chose guile. Never looked back. After my money raqn out i just stayed there and watched the demo, over and over and over…then some older kids showed up and began playing. There was like 6 of them and they were doing all the moves and just being plain badass. I just stood among them and watched. My mom had to come find me and she was mad i was hanging out in such a dump. I came home and tried to tell my friends about it and they called me a liar because they remembered how i was talking about a bloodsport game, and just thought i made the whole thing up. When they did see the game i just stomped there ass with GUile. rest is history. Theres my best SF2 memory, well, actually the best was when i was 12 and i beat 3 16 year olds in front of their girlfriends, but that another story…humahahahahaha…

yes, i am lame

18

That right there was some shit.

Brings back a lot of memories. I never played against anyone like Thomas or anything… I got my ass handed to me by much easier opponents.
But since the first time I played SF, I wanted to be a pro…
Someone who was above 99% of other players, to be able to compete with the best.
I didnt need to win, just compete.
I just wanted to be on that other level.

19

nice stories on this thread:)
I remember seeing SF2 in a local arcade when I was young. i wanted to play it because of the chun li so my mother gave me some money and told me that she would be right back.
I got my ass handed to me by some real good guys and they laughed at me cause I was a female.
I didn’t think anything of it.
So I decieded one saturday morning to go and play against the computer. I had my sister bring me and again I got my ass handed to me. I kept putting money in and kept playing.

When it came out for SNES my mother bought it for me cause she knew I liked it. I went through the little booklet, wondering how to do the moves. I played and played with chun li, ken and ryu until I finally got the hang of it. Then I put the game on the hardest level (I think it was 8 or something like that) and I played. My goal was not to lose a match and I didn’t.

Months after this my brother, sister and a couple of friends went to the mall. We passed by the arcade and there was SF2 HF. No one was there so I went to play. A couple of teens came up to play me and I beat them with chun li. I was surprised that I had beat them all. They left then returned with a kid younger than me and he choose chun li. He beat me the first round, I beat him the second and then the third round was close but he won. I had no hard feelings and he told me that he didn’t know of any female who played. I thought nothing of it. it was normal for me.

fighting games come and go and even though I don’t play street fighter as much as I play tekken now I am a street fighter fan at heart.:slight_smile:

20

no WAY!!! When i was young(er), I remember seeing Bloodsport and remember comparing it to SF. Of course this was after i’d played it, but it seems to have all the characters represented, iirc. This thread needs to be stickied.

21

Heh, I was wondering how a WMAC Masters game would look like.
Me and my cousin used to take our genesis controllers, and acted like we were controlling the people…man…the days…

22

That story was inspiring I give it 2 thumbs up.:smiley:

23

old skool lore (LONG)

The next day the young man returned again and found the old man at the back of the bar with a cue stick in his hand, engrossed in a game of pool against some of the regulars and leaning against a Golden Tee game in the corner waiting for his shot.

“You see, boy? You see this piece of shit behind me? The only thing sadder than this waste of a perfectly good cabinet and trackball is that people actually put quarters into it. But it wasn’t always like that. We used to have good games, games worth playing and mastering. Now they make 'em so any drunk-off-his-ass college kid can feel like a hero by smacking a track ball. Ah, but where was I?”

Tony advised I switch to Guile and that’s what I did. It quickly became clear to me why Guile was so dominant. Within a week I was a far more powerful player than I ever was with Ryu, and even when the gap between the two was closed with Champion, Hyper and Super, I never played Ryu again with the kind of conviction I did with Guile.

But getting back to the World Warrior present of 1991, by this time I was actually afraid to step into a real arcade. Between the ass kickings Tony handed me regularly and the stories he told I was afraid to face reality - that I was nothing. Sure, I could now easily defeat any of the asian kids in the neighborhood, even Pele was no longer any match for me, but I still felt I needed more practice. But that was the thing about Tony. Like it or not, he dragged me kicking and screaming.

The first lesson in humility I got was at Regency Game Palace in Concord, CA. The whole drive out there (about 40 minutes for us) Tony hyped it up and I squirmed in the passenger’s seat.

Tony: “Dude, are you prepared?”

Me: “I’m ready for some Throw Down.”

Tony: “Nah, dude, I mean are you PREPARED?”

Me: “ha ha, sure dude. It’s all good.”

Tony: “Nah, dude, nothing can prepare you. I hope you’re in shape, dude, I hope you ate a full meal and got a good night’s sleep. You’re gonna be making a lot of trips to the token machine. I don’t want you to pass out from exaustion.”

Regency gave an unprecedented 11 tokens for a dollar. There was a cluster of four World Warrior machines in the center of the arcade with about 40 people playing. And they weren’t kids. They weren’t the 10-year olds I was used to at the liquor store or 7-11. In fact, no one looked younger than I was and several looked well into their 20’s. We pushed our way forward into the crowd.

I watched what I didn’t think was possible by that point. Some guy was playing Ryu against Guile. And winning. The guy playing Guile was good, in fact, at the time he was one of the best Guile players I’d seen. Better than Tony. But this Ryu player was extroardinary. He had incredible timing and put pressure on the other guy in a way I’d never seen Ryu played before. In some cases he traded hits to stay out of the corner or keep the pressure on. He didn’t seem to play by any set of rules, he had no pattern I could discern. Even though Guile was the better character he still pulled off the win.

Me: “Damn, did you see that? That fool is–”

Tony: “…on the next level. Hell yeah, he is. His name is Jay.”

Jay was probably the most dominant player at Regency. I counted the tokens till I was up - there were at least 10. But Jay gave his game to Tony and after Tony beat another Ryu player he gave me second round.

I froze up. The guy wasn’t even that good but I’d never seen people play like this. It’s like when some little kid with absolutely no skill just bangs on the buttons and seems to beat you. I was expecting a mano-a-mano test of who could work the fireball-uppercut pattern better than the other but this guy just waited for openings and tore me apart.

My thinking was just so wrong about this game. I was so used to throwing a fireball and waiting for my opponent to react so that I could answer with something. This guy examined my pattern and went from there.

Tony: "You got schooled. Step aside."
Me: “I… uh… damn…”

Tony finished the guy off. The next round I was ready. Something clicked and I was no longer a pattern player. They say competition breeds excellence and they’re right. Watching those few rounds in that dimly lit arcade with at least 10 people staring over my shoulder I immediately changed my style and focused as I never had before. It wasn’t enough, not yet anyway.

Tony: “You suck dude. That fool read you like a Dr. Seuss book.”

Yeah, I lost, but I learned more in one night than the whole year before. I saw how this game is meant to be played.

We played until the arcade closed at midnight. I managed to win a few games over the course of the evening but even the crappy players were a challenge for a me. We made for Dennys up the street and that became our Friday night tradition. Warez till midnight, then off to Dennys. Our own little tradition of shit-talking and post game analysis.

In the old skool days, news travelled via word-of-mouth. The internet technically existed but neither I nor the vast majority of players had any idea what it was. If you heard about a player it was in the arcades, chatting it up with other respected players. You even learned of an arcade’s very existence this way.

If you talked trash you had to have some nuts to do it because whatever you said was to a player’s face. And this was in the Bay Area. In Oakland, you better be careful who you talk trash to. Spend a day there and you’ll see what I mean.

And when it came to legendary players, well, they just didn’t get the props they rightfully deserved. We didn’t have easily accessible ranking tables that could tell you with a few mouse clicks and URLs who the best players in the country were. Even the tournaments were poorly advertised, ussually just a flyer taped to the side of the game that got ripped off within a day of it being put up. How did we know who won the tournament the day before? Either we were in it or we asked someone else who was.

We played on through the summer and I got better with Guile. We went everywhere we could find and when we weren’t in the arcades we filled the gaps at the convenience store.

Finally, I had a run-in with the famous Thomas Osaki.

A few times we went to the Underground at UCB. In the World Warrior days we actually avoided the place because truth be told, there weren’t too many good players there and a lot of the players were “cheap”. On top of that the games were usually in lousy condition. But Telegraph Ave had always been a hangout for us, all the way back to the early La Val’s days and $2 Sunday at Silverball.

There was a good crowd that day and Tony pointed out Thomas to me.

Me: "You think he can beat Jay?"
Tony: "I don’t know, dude. My guess is he probably could. I haven’t played Thomas in awhile, though. He doesn’t seem to come here much any more.

My guess is Thomas was probably going to SVGL at this point, but I don’t know for sure.

At any rate, Thomas was methodically beating player after player. There were so many guys gathered around the machine that I could only catch a little of what he was doing. It was such a hassle to get a glimpse I finally resigned to playing on another machine.

Tony: "Oh my God, did you see that?"
Me (in the middle of a game): "See what?"
Tony: "He just did Fierce-Standing-Fierce to flash kick."
Me: “Wha…?”

Okay, this sounds sort of pathetic by today’s standards, but in old-skool combo theory this was a very big deal.

Since this was World Warrior I had to pick Ryu. I knew I couldn’t win. Against any good Guile player my Ryu just didn’t stack up. But supposedly this guy was an expert Guile player.

Thomas beat me soundly in a no-nonsense sort of way. No flash, just all business. No slack in his game. No faking a sonic boom with jab. No mistakes. He never once looked at me, not when I stepped up, not when I put my quarter in, not after he beat me. I was just another duck in the shooting gallery I guess.

If I could relive those few hours knowing what I know now I would have put another quarter up and played him as much as I could. But after that one game I played the rest of the day on the other machine. Like I said before, we didn’t know who the best of the best was. We went to the arcades and just played whoever was there. We knew who the local good players were but we didn’t have any idea just how good they really were. I mean, we were comparing this guy to Jay, and I can say with certainty that Thomas would have owned Jay in a heartbeat.

But that’s how it was in those days. The world was a smaller place before the internet. The level of competition that existed in the Bay Area was extremely high, but we didn’t see it that way. We figured what was going on in the Bay Area was happening everywhere, that guys like Thomas were just a 10 minute drive away at the next arcade. And sure, the Fighting scene was a hundred times bigger throughout the world in those days, but the Bay Area was one of the true hotspots. Go anywhere from Sausalito to San Jose and there was competition. Even after I won ten straight at the arcade the night before, I’d walk into a 7-11 during my break at work for a quick game and some random guy would give me a wake up call. Almost a year of playing Street Fighter fanatically and I was still just another player. That’s how good players were back then.

How many times have you been given a wake up call playing Golden-fucking-Tee?

That was the one and only time I played Thomas. We never saw him again at the Underground. Sorry if my experience is a bit of a let-down, but that’s how it happened. We never considered the possibility that one day this fabulous era of competition would end. We didn’t really know what we had until years later when we realized it was gone…

  • j
24

Great story. You truly described the old days:)