If you let the criticism latch on, it will break you. Svenskeren has been one of the most heavily criticized players in the West, and now he sits down with his brother to talk about how he coped with it to eventually move on to his new team, Cloud9.
Nicolai Johnsen rocks back and forth in his chair, staring blankly at the screen as TSM is eliminated from the 2016 World Championship. He’s like a deer that is first caught in headlights and then struck. But the faint murmurs around him suggest the world hasn’t stopped. The cheers go on. The analysts begin diving into the outcome. He is thousands of miles away in Jordrup, Denmark -- a small town less populated than the arena where his brother, then TSM’s jungler Dennis “Svenskeren” Johnsen, had just been eliminated. And it will be some more time before he accepts this result.
It’s something I’ve experienced, too -- an out-of-body feeling as if I’ve momentarily forgotten why I even exist. I’ve watched my own brother be eliminated time and again. On the brink of elimination, for a moment there is nothing else in the world you want but for your team to survive. And when they don’t -- when the Nexus finally shatters -- you have to slowly come to terms with it just being done. That’s it. Yes, the world moves on, but the team does not.
That’s sports. Anyone who has become a devout follower of a team has experienced this. The matches are your sermon. You sit in the little pews of this fandom and you pray. And with losses -- always, there is a moment of paralysis before you finally come to terms with it.
“I didn’t know what to do,” says Nicolai. “Because sometimes I see his success as my success -- sometimes when your life doesn’t work out as well or you fuck up and you see him winning, it still validates you kind of. It doesn’t fix stuff in my life, but it makes it better. It helps that he’s winning [lately].
“I don’t tell him how much it affects me,” he continues. “We’re kind of best friends. In 2016, they had the potential to win it all. But it was not to be.”
Support from fans can be suffocating. From family, sometimes even more. But the symbiotic relationship drives the players, too. They become akin to little gods for us. Finding snippets to keep them grounded can be the difference between summoning back onto the Rift again or winding up the keyboard for good.
For Svenskeren, this grounding force lives in Jordrup -- sometimes rocking back and forth during his matches.
IT’S SUNSHINE AND MORE SUNSHINE on a February afternoon in Los Angeles as I wait for Svenskeren and his brother to arrive at a local burger joint near the Santa Monica pier. Cloud9 is fresh off another 2-0 weekend in the NA LCS that brings their record to 7-1 as the league approaches its halfway mark. When the two arrive, Nicolai is wearing a Cloud9 jersey and Svenskeren is wearing a sweater. At a glance, the two are easily mistaken for one another.
It’s Nicolai’s first time flying, let alone traveling overseas to America. He marvels at the diversity of trees (from tall palms to short palms to fat palms) and laments about the Danish winter. Lately, the two brothers have only seen each other during Christmas, but now it’s Svenskeren who gets to show his little brother his daily life.
Nicolai pulls on the collar of the jersey and asks, “Why is it so tight?”
“It’s a choker,” quips Svenskeren. “It’s popular these days.” We spend some time arguing back and forth about the merits of a choker (I like them, they don’t). We do come to an agreement, though, that Nicolai can just blame any mistakes Svenskeren makes on the choker. Nicolai is 19, and Svenskeren is 22, but the two of them still knuckle at each other constantly like children.
Nicolai is fascinated by little things in American culture. He asks why our glasses are filled to the brim with ice instead of cola, and he doesn’t understand why our burgers are topped with so many different things. I recommend one with eggs and bacon and he raises his eyebrows as if to say it’s not breakfast time anymore. He is very lively during the first part of our conversation -- he’s excited about staying in the C9 Counter-Strike house (he’s Global Elite in it and C9’s team was coming off their victory at the Boston Major). But once we start talking about Svenskeren’s new team, he leans back. He just wants to listen.
“The first thing I saw on C9,” says Svenskeren, “Was Sneaky and Jensen playing WoW arena the whole day. I was [thinking], ‘Are we supposed to like… I mean I didn’t really want to say anything, but we’re going to play League of Legends, right?’ They were raiding together -- Sneaky, Jensen, and Reapered too. Reapered mentioned it later that we have to be more professional. But I just remember that they were all arenaing together. It was kind of funny.”
Svenskeren joined Cloud9 after parting with TSM following another disappointing Worlds performance last fall. He’d spent two years with the organization, where they won three NA LCS Championships in a row. Their domestic dominance was undisputed and he was routinely regarded as one of the league’s top junglers within that domain. But it’s the team’s failures on the international stage that fans remember the most.
There aren’t many players who shouldered as much blame as Svenskeren did over the last couple of years. Whether it was right or wrong, I do think it may have been disproportionately placed on him. There are few fandoms quite as maniacal in all of sports as that of TSM’s. The team knows it, too. The chants follow them into every country. It’s a soundtrack of expectation that has still yet to be met, but it rings louder every year.
Nicolai’s opinion of TSM fans is more colorful than I’ll let on here, but the gist of it is he doesn’t like them. Him and his family are “Dennis fans” first and foremost, but these days he says he enjoys watching TSM lose. It’s exactly the kind of petty thing you’d expect from family. He browses Reddit regularly, where he’ll screenshot the comments he finds most ridiculous and sends them to Svenskeren.
“[Dennis] always ignores me when I write to him about Reddit comments,” says Nicolai. Svenskeren just laughs -- he doesn’t let that kind of thing get to him anymore. I think it probably helps to have someone contextualize for you just how insane some fan comments are.
The high expectations from TSM fans were difficult for Svenskeren from the get-go, though. He told me earlier in the split, “Joining TSM was super hard for me because the fans already had no respect for the jungler position. It was pretty tough. Even the players at the time, I guess their previous teams didn’t have good junglers so they had to do a lot of the jungler stuff by themselves.”
This improved over time and he eventually became a lot closer with the team, but the culture was still one of high stress and long work hours. TSM has at times become notorious for their intense practice regimens. Svenskeren felt like TSM fostered a super stressful environment in terms of freedom. I ask him what the shift is like going from TSM to a team whose entire brand is built off of memes.
It’s been a super positive experience for him -- especially the fact that he hasn’t seen anyone claim he should get replaced or that he doesn’t deserve to be a pro anymore. I remember the game Licorice picked Lucian into Huni this split and then proceeded to go 0-6 in lane like he was in a blooper reel from an 80s action movie. The prevailing comment from C9 fans wasn't really negative. It was more like, “Unlucky.”
C9 doesn’t have many rules outside of their designated work hours, where the team is expected to be professional. Trying to implement more separation between work and personal time is something I think every team is slowly gravitating towards. The difference in approach comes from leadership. “It’s Jack, Sneaky, and Jensen that encourage having a set amount of free time,” he says. We’re all privy to Sneaky’s antics, but that tone he sets trickles down to the entire team (well, maybe not the cosplaying bit).
In contrast, Svenskeren said Regi and Bjergsen were much more driven on improving seven days a week. I don’t think one approach is necessarily right or wrong. I’ve read stories on training regimens taken on by the likes of Michael Phelps, and you hear all these stories of the Korean teams' work ethics, but I think it’s dangerous to assume that a type of routine will work for everyone. That difference, ultimately, is a large part of what it means to be a culture fit on any team or at any workplace.
“I was super surprised when I joined C9 because on TSM it was kind of frowned upon to play any other games,” admits Svenskeren. Even still he doesn’t really play any other games. He makes it clear that he doesn’t think TSM’s approach is necessarily wrong -- he’s still on friendly terms with a lot of the players. Bjergsen, for example, was among the first to reach out to Svenskeren after Worlds to make sure he was okay. The two took a lot of blame (and Svenskeren says he never understood the vitriol pointed towards Bjergsen), so perhaps there was some extra kinship in that time.
C9 is just different. Sneaky’s demeanor has been one of the most positive and surprising things about C9 for him. He never really had a chance to talk to Sneaky beforehand, but he didn’t have much respect for him. He says, “The culture on TSM was really focused on the game first, but I saw him streaming like every single day. So [I thought] he must not be that focused on the game. But actually seeing his work ethic -- it’s actually really surprising. He’s the mature guy on the team. If comms get cluttered and everyone is panicking, he’s the one who says, ‘Okay guys, we need to stop panicking and just focus on the game.’ If the game gets stressful, he resets it. He’s not the one that talks the most, but his voice is probably the most important one.”
"Sneaky’s not the one that talks the most, but his voice is probably the most important one."
Coupled with the fan base being more tempered, the atmosphere has been decidedly easier for him. I ask Nicolai if he’s now a C9 fan, and he reiterates that he just wants to see Svenskeren do well. His fondest memories of Svenskeren’s career are the games where Svenskeren pops off -- he mentions old Lee Sin games with SK Gaming, for example.
The two of them don’t actually talk that much about League of Legends -- I gathered this was the first time Nicolai really heard Svenskeren speak in person for so long about some of the grittier details of being on a team. Otherwise it’s just the odd text message here or there.
Svenskeren says, “Sometimes I see [a message from him] saying, ‘Why did you do that?’ and I’ll be like… ‘I’ll respond later. I’m not going to respond to your bullshit right now.’” The two of them laugh. Their parents also send a lot of messages, but they mainly repeat the narratives the casters highlight or they just offer words of encouragement. It’s really only Nicolai who understands the scene well.
Nicolai is a Diamond level player, and the two of them grew up together on League of Legends where they climbed to the top of the EUW Twisted Treeline ladder. Like many players, there was plenty of resistance from their family from the get-go. Svenskeren actually spent half a year in a Christian, vegetarian boarding school as a sort of rehab for his excessive video game habits.
And like most players, through a bit of nudging from his brothers and from his first paychecks, their parents bought into the idea of esports. Svenskeren was given a gap year to pursue his dream, and once he qualified for the EU LCS, his journey took off. The recognition he accrued was a slow and steady process -- there wasn’t really a singular moment where it hit for Nicolai that his brother was a public figure.
After lunch, we walk around the pier for a while, and two fans kind of stalk us (yeah, I saw you) for a hot-minute before saying, “I didn’t know you joined Cloud9, Svenskeren!” They ask him for a picture, and then they’re off. I ask Nicolai if that’s strange at all and he nods. Maybe this could be the moment he remembers as a sign of his brother’s fame.
With that publicity, of course, comes a lot of negativity. Some it was self-incurred through Svenskeren’s own toxicity, or even his poor play at times, but it was clear he became one of the most divisive personalities in all of League of Legends. I ask Nicolai if he ever felt the urge to defend his brother, but he just said that he was accustomed to it. Unlike their parents who did everything they could to try to cheer Svenskeren up after Worlds last year, Nicolai just took it in stride.
“He didn’t really show anything. He was normal,” he says.
“Mom was saying I looked depressed at least,” Svenskeren says, laughing.
“Not around me.”
ONE OF THE MEMES for Cloud9 this split is that Coach Reapered goes up to his players before the game and grips the top of their heads to conduct a "brain-check." When I ask Svenskeren about this, he just laughs. “Reapered mostly brain-checks me and Jensen because he calls us the Danishes. [Says] we can’t speak English, so no brain. He did it to Jensen a lot [at first] because he would always die [randomly] in scrims. So he would be like, “Jensen, you have brain today? I can feel your brain. It is very small.” Then I started dying, and he was like, ‘These fucking Danishes with no brain.’”
Svenskeren speaks very highly of the environment Reapered has fostered on C9 -- he feels like the team is more flexible and willing to adapt on the fly, which gives the players a lot of agency. I think you can see it when you watch the team, too -- the little bytes we get into their dynamic shows a relaxed team environment. At times, this has likely bit them in the ass this season, which is why they ultimately lost their grip on the first-round bye. The team plays with swagger, but that’s a fine line away from sloppiness.
Regardless, Svenskeren has definitely been re-energized by the new environment. I think shifting teams is actually healthy for players because it opens them up to new perspectives they may have been blind to on old teams. I think a lot of the questions surrounding the Svenskeren pickup at the beginning of the season dealt with him taking up an import slot, but I don’t think you’d find many C9 fans who aren’t optimistic about their future right now. Even if they slumped to end the year.
From the animated way he talks about all of his teammates, it’s clear he’s moved on from the crushing disappointment he experienced to end last season. For example, he’s particularly excited about Jensen. He says, “I have a lot of respect of Jensen because he’s always trying to win his lane. I thought of him very differently [before] because I used to play with him on EUW super long ago, and both of us were known to be kind of toxic back then. So we kind of flamed each other back and forth so I had a very different view of him before joining C9. I thought he would always be whining for ganks, but I guess he grew up since then and I have as well. He really matured as a person and he knows the jungle role pretty well so he knows what I’m able to do.
“So he doesn’t ask for stuff I just can’t do. Where a lot of other teams the laners have never actually played a game of jungle, so they don’t really know what a jungler is able to do. They’re just like, ‘The enemy jungler ganked me, so you should be able to gank, too. You should be able to come here right now, right?’ But Jensen actually plays a lot of jungle himself, so he encourages me. He knows what I’m able to do. He doesn’t ask for dumb stuff.”
And from a mechanical standpoint, it’s been a blessing for Svenskeren to be able to play with Jensen. He says, “Whenever we played C9 [when I was on TSM] -- we would always be like, don’t even bother shooting [skill shots] at Jensen. He’s gonna dodge it. He’s scripting. You can’t hit skill shots against that guy. It’s impossible. His mechanics are super sick. Whenever he shoots his skill shots, I guess he remembers what pattern they juke in as well. I’ve been a pro for so long, but I don’t even think about that.”
The two don’t really converse in Danish because Nicolai mentioned how Americanized Svenskeren had become -- including his proficiency with Danish. But Svenskeren is pretty well known these days for being a big gym-goer -- he’s got a bunch of pics of him literally flexing. It made me wonder if he ever takes Jensen -- a decidedly smaller guy -- to the gym, and he says, “Jensen says he’s swole as fuck so he doesn’t need to go to the gym.”
For Svenskeren right now, this split is a journey to prove his self-worth to not just the community, but himself, too. It’s easy to get lost in the quagmire of criticism. He’s proven he belongs in the league, but he can really cement his legacy by ending C9’s four year championship drought. Still, this split has been one in which he has rebounded remarkably and started to forge a new identity for himself. It helps that he has so much support -- both newly from C9 and the continued love from his family.
Back before the split started, I asked what helped him cope with the Worlds disappointment, and he said, “My little brother -- I think a lot of people really want to talk about the issue, but it didn’t really matter or exist [to him]. That’s really helpful, too. No pressure on coming home and having to talk about why and why and why and why all these things happen.”
And true to form, the two didn’t talk very much about the games even while Nicolai was here. It helped that C9 won all of their games that weekend, but what’s there to really say? I know I don’t really talk to my brother much about his games either. But that’s not to say I don’t watch it or follow it. I watch everything and read everything.
Nicolai is the same way. He hasn’t missed a single game. It’s a little deeper when it’s your brother playing because you were part of the path he treaded to get to that stage. It’s as if you’ve been conquered and your brother carries on where you could not or did not. Like watching a distorted reality of yourself. Nicolai tries to play it cool the whole trip. I get it -- at the end of the day, to him, Svenskeren is far more brother than pro player. With all the goofy history and the nostalgia.
But I also got it when Nicolai, despite saying he wasn’t going to do it, smiles as he stands among the fans by the stage to give Svenskeren a high five after Cloud9 wins their first game that weekend.
And I know Nicolai will be tuned in as Cloud9 takes on Team Liquid this Saturday at 2:00 pm PDT.
