This article was translated from Lolesports Brazil — original Portuguese version is here.

It was 11:05am when I checked my watch while waiting for Kim “kkOma” Jung-gyun. On the Wednesday prior to the Mid-Season Invitational 2017 Semifinals I was going to interview SK Telecom T1’s coach, known by many as the best of all time in the history of League of Legends.

“He’ll be coming shortly,” said HJ Kwon, the interpreter assigned to help me translate the answers from Korean to English. “No problem,” I answered, apprehensive about the thirty minutes of interview that I had.

kkOma isn’t much into interviews, he rather stay in the backstage while his team takes the spotlight, defeating opponents from Korea or any other region and adding trophies to an already huge collection.

For his longevity in the position and, among other achievements, being a three time World Champion, Kkoma is a living legend. He is also the sharp eye responsible for spotting and creating stars like Faker, Wolf, Bang and many others, often considered the best players in their roles.

Even seen by distance, when he is leading the team’s Picks and Bans, Kkoma is imposing. He seems to shine through everything he knows: the ideas he wants to apply on the game, the strategies that drive analysts speechless and the crowd wild. He is someone who imposes and demands respect – confident when winning, strict when losing.

A ruthless machine.

“You have this ‘pressure aura’, but seems to deal well with it,” I say in the beginning of the interview. He shrugs and smiles back, his experience makes this almost as a natural state for the coach of the best team in the world. “Do you think that it is something that you bring from the time you were a pro player?”

“Maybe. Being a pro surely helped my coaching a lot because I can remember things I experienced as a player, things that would have been great if my coach had thought like I do now,” he says. “Personally I think that if you haven’t played professionally, it’s very hard to become an excellent coach. Since I became a player when I was already old (27), sometimes I also feel it too.”

“Would you rather be playing or coaching?” I ask, and he laughs, adding “I don’t want to do neither!”

When he joined SK Telecom T1 on December 2012, kkOma had just stopped playing as a Jungler. Since then, he has always shown a strong grip and has created his players to be the best in the world. He has been training Faker for 4 years, and Bang and Wolf for 3. The other players joined SKT more recently, but the rookies respect kkOma the same way the more experienced ones do.

“I think the foremost important thing is have trust between players and coach,” he says. “It is an easy thing to say, but it’s something that is really hard to achieve. Now I know them pretty well and they believe in me, but in the beginning I actually played alongside them to earn their trust and to show them that I was doing more and working harder, to make sure that they would feel comfortable and accept suggestions and tactics. I showed them respect by doing that, so they felt comfortable to trust me.”

When he mentions that, I instantly remember a video showing Peanut, right after a night out, streaming at 5am. Moments after the Jungler is “rescued” by kkOma, who ran from his house to the gaming house just to convince the player to stop playing and rest a little. “Do you think you only managed to do that because it’s your job, or is it because you have his trust?” I ask.

“It’s both, actually. Peanut trusts me and vice-versa, but more than that, I am a SK Telecom coach who has to manage the team, and it’s out of my responsibility to eagerly do things to prevent damaging the team and players image,” says kkOma.

SKT has three people on its technical committee: cCarter, head coach, responsible for dealing with the front office and actual operation of the team. kkOma and RapidStar are the coaches, dealing with in-game stuff. kkOma decides how the team style will go and RapidStar gives different advices and perspectives.

“What defines a good coach?” I ask. Firstly, kkOma seems to find the question funny, but he stops and thinks for a while. “I don’t think there is a right or one answer to this question.”

“What I believe as the most important thing to be a coach is, first of all, that you have to prove that you can win championships with your team, so the results are very important. The second is that while chasing titles, that the players actually hear and follow the coach, and that’s one of the things I’m proudest in SKT. Over the past years the team has managed to win a lot of trophies, but also the players have a great relationship with me. I’m very grateful and proud of this.”

kkOma leaves no doubt about how much the players and SK Telecom T1 mean to him. The constant discrete smile and the excitement on his voice make everything sound symbolic. It’s the proud father talking about his sons. kkOma seems tired, but the passion on his speech makes him the liveliest person in the room.

“It’s very hard to deal with the pressure over SKT, so that’s why we have to win,” he answers after a deep breath. “SKT is a great, victorious team, so any expectation below actually winning the title is unreal, and every mistake is considered a failure.”

It makes sense, but could this pressure make the coach lose interest in the game?

“The pressure is part of being in a pro sport, and I would like to accept it as it is and actually work to prove them wrong or right whenever this thing happens. Also, it is something that comes with it when you are sitting on the throne, when you are the winner and is still expected to win. I tend to pull all the pressure to myself, so even if the fans and media weren’t pressing SKT, I would have been doing it to myself and wouldn’t be so different than what happens currently.”

kkOma seems to be interested on my questions, but clearly shows discomfort when talking about what goes inside his head. Starring at the table in front of us, motionless, he goes on.

“You could say that I’m addicted to pressure, but overcoming and getting rid of it is something that you never get used to, and because I’ve been doing it for so long, that sometimes it just eats me up. In the last World Championship (2016), even though we won, after the tournament ended was actually the hardest part for me, because all the pressure that built up during Worlds didn’t go away after we won it, for no reason in particular. I was mentally drained.”

Tiredness, emotional exhaustion and a huge burden seems to be the price to pays for being the most successful coach of all times.

“Of course that in order to be the most victorious coach you need a lot of winnings, and you do get rewarded for everything, but at the same time I think that there is a lot of pain and sacrifice behind the glories that I’ve conquered, specially mentally speaking. It’s very difficult to maintain myself at this level. A lot of pressure comes of not only performing well, but also from the fact that I have to continue this level of performance for the next year, and is something that I always think about when I’m not focused on anything else, so ‘How am I going to be champion in the next year?’, ‘How well can I lead the team?’, ‘How can I repeat the same success we had this year?’, and it does eats me up. That’s why when you asked me if I rather be a player or a coach I said ‘neither of them’, because I kind of do hate the pressure that I get all the time.”

Kkoma looks at me with a resigned stare, which makes me remember what Wolf said to Yahoo eSports during MSI 2017’s Group Stage, “I’m worried. Kkoma seems to have aged, he’s losing hair.” Climbing to the top seems to be easy if compared to the task of maintaining yourself there.

“Other than the current performances, something that I believe is important to measure a coach’s success is whether he can leave is name in the history of the sport, and it’s something that I would love to achieve.”

“Even when you won the World Championship last year, you still felt the pressure. Don’t you get a rest in your “mental palace?” I ask him.

“It is something that I had to think about and it’s always on me to plan things ahead, not only to see what is coming next, so definitely was something that was on my mind and one of the things that made me feel frustrated even when we won. Right now at this MSI the feeling is somewhat close, since if we do win I will already start thinking about the next year’s MSI.”

“I think the best way for me to handle this stress is by talking to someone and letting it out, but there is only one person that I’m very close in Korea who actually understands this: Park “Reach” Jung-Suk, CJ Entus’s Head Coach. He is the one that I can talk to, that I trust and truly understands the kind of pressure I feel right now, but in last Worlds I didn’t had anyone to talk to, so as a way of letting it out I actually told everything about how I felt to my mother and she became quite worried about my well-being, so that’s when I actually felt like “Oh man, I can’t do this again, I just made a mistake by telling my mom about my job and how I feel”, because now she is always worried about me. So now I think that it’s just something that I have to handle with since I’m sitting on the throne.”

kkOma rests his head on the chair. At that point, I’d say his coffee would be cold by now, but that’s irrelevant since he was taking it with ice cubes from the start. He closes his eyes and I await him. His speech is more natural than the movement to reopen his eyes, which seems to require a manual effort. “Even players don’t seem to find time to have a day off the game. Is the life of a coach even harder and without rest?” I ask him.

He leans forward quickly to answer me. “Out of the schedule, I also played a lot. Right now I’m in my fifth year of coaching. Until the fourth year, I used to live with the players in the gaming house and practice with them. After the scrims I would give them feedback, and in the end of the day I would play Solo Queue with them. When I was younger I was at the top of the rankings, now that I’m getting older, my Tier drops by one every year,” he laughs. “But still, to be able to give them constructive feedback, I need to have a great understanding of the game itself and that’s why I need to play Solo Queue. It was quite hard for me to actually live that kind of life.”

The sound of his laugh makes me smile and also removes a huge weight of my back, making me feel that the tense part of his story is behind us. “Do you think that stepping out of the gaming house stopped that saturated feeling about the game, giving a sense of refreshment?”

“It’s actually not so different, since I live near the gaming office. That story of Peanut happened because I was at home and just ran to the gaming house, so it’s close to where the players are. And even if I’m at home, I’m still thinking about the players and the team all the time, so it’s not very different,” says kkOma, pausing for a second so the interpreter doesn’t get lost in his words. “I just had to do something about the difficulties I’ve had from last year’s Worlds, that was when I left the gaming house, because if was mentally very difficult to overcome the pressure, and also there are other things that I have to handle in my personal life, as I’m getting older (Kkoma is 32) and I want to get married and take care of some other things. Overall, not much has changed, but it was a move to refresh myself.”

I feel the coach lighter after his words, despite raising a certain apprehension towards his health. Quoting that having psychologists or mental coaches is something common in some teams, Kkoma tells me that SK Telecom T1 does not have anything like that, but his eyes shine when I mention the area in question.

“This is something necessary, and because I’ve been in so much pressure and in need of this, I’m quite interested in doing it when I retire. I haven’t studied much when I was a teen, so I would like to study abroad something like psychology and come back to help people not only inside of the game but also outside.”

His smile opens again.

The conversation had already broken through the schedule, but kkOma did not seem to mind much. I took the hook of his words to address a subject that has been recurrent in the media: his retirement.

“What would make you rethink your position as an esports coach?”

“It’s nothing that would happen to me, I rather decide myself what would make me rethink. While I perform the coach role I will still receive the same pressure and I will strive to overcome it by winning the tournaments repetitively, and for now I will continue to do so. I think it would be more of an outside factor to make me rethink about my position in esports.”

“What would you define as the perfect ending for your career?” I question.

“Leaving when I’m at the highest point of my career, like winning a World Championship and retiring right after would be the best end possible,” he smiles.

“And maybe going out with your Legacy SKT Teemo Skin?” I joke.

“Just perfect,” he laughs.

I stand up, shaking hands and thanking the coach and the translator. With a recording in hand that had almost an hour of talk and a lot of notes on paper and on my mind, I head to the elevators to return to my room when someone touches my back.

“Oh, when you write your story, try to make it clear that I’m a cheerful person, who makes jokes with his players, who likes and has a lot of fun with what he does. I feel all this pressure and I have my problems, but I’m a good guy,” says the best coach in the history of the League of Legends, lighting his face with a smile.

You got it, Kkoma.