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Finding Søren
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**Call time was at 8:30 a.m.** The call sheet itself was emailed several times with minor changes, a few names shuffled here and there, but the start time remained a constant.
*Be at Riot Games' League of Legends Championship Series Studio on West Olympic Boulevard at 8:30 a.m. for a preliminary COVID-19 test prior to the shoot.*
I took the train from Palms Station to Expo/Bundy at 8:00 a.m. like I would on a Sunday for a 9:00 a.m. LCS series broadcast call time. It was chilly by Los Angeles standards, although the morning fog that often creeps across the Westside at night was already beginning to burn off in the sun. When I arrived at the studio, the LED video screen greeted me with its looping video, "Made By Many."
I thought about how the video would have to be updated for the upcoming 2022 LCS season.
I wondered approximately when a change like that would happen as the dust continued to settle from myriad roster announcements and rumors that had inundated my social media feeds the evening before on the opening day of League of Legends free agency period.
A dozen or so people milled around underneath this sign, in front of the double doors that lead to the employee entrance of the studio. Two folding tables had been taken out and nurses waited behind them, ready to test the twenty or so total people who would be involved in that day's video shoot.
LCS content filming can stretch on for an entire day, or days, or take only a few hours, with team talent shuttled in and out, coordinated so that once one team is done, the next is waiting behind them. They film, have pictures taken, do press interviews, and then leave.
Yet this particular day was both LCS content and team content given the calibre of its subject.
We were all here for one man: Bjergsen
**In September 2013**, Ninjas In Pyjamas mid laner Søren "Bjergsen" Bjerg attended the 2013 League of Legends World Championship as a spectator, not a participant. There he also unintentionally found his next destination, the organization with which his name would become synonymous: Team SoloMid, now TSM.
Bjergsen had just turned 17 years-old that year mid-season, and had unintentionally placed his first European LCS team, Copenhagen Wolves in the awkward — but common in League of Legends esports — position of playing with an age-appropriate substitute (in this case, Viktor "cowTard" Stymne) for the first part of that Spring Split. The Wolves started 0-9 before Bjergsen turned 17, was allowed to play in the EU LCS, and helped lead the team to a fifth-place finish and later, a spot in the Summer Split as Ninjas in Pyjamas with a sponsorship change.
That Summer, despite some strong performances, NiP faltered at the finish and failed to qualify for Worlds.
"I wasn't really scouted at Worlds because I didn't play at Worlds," Bjergsen said with a short laugh. "I went to watch Worlds in person and I hung out with [TSM] and we never really talked about me joining the team, it was just that they became more aware of me. And then I think after worlds or after I left, Andy started watching my games."
November 2, 2013 marked an odd end of an era, as "eras" go in a scene like League of Legends esports, where they're defined in mere years and not decades and everything moves simultaneously too quickly and somehow impossibly slow. Andy "Reginald" Dinh, founder and mid laner of TSM stepped down from his starting position and Bjergsen was picked up to fill it.
"I had crazy imposter syndrome when I first joined TSM because I was not successful in my last split in EU LCS and," he paused and laughed again. "I was just like, 'are these guys trolling? Why are they picking me up?' But it went okay."
**I don't remember Bjergsen's** first live stream as a member of TSM, but I do remember his streams during that offseason. Nearly everyone who followed North American competitive League of Legends regardless of favorite team or player, tuned in to see what the hype was about. For at least one of them, he wore a Burger King paper crown, a pun on the rising nickname Bjergerking.
All eyes were on him.
"I don't think…" he pauses and then starts again, tilting his head slightly to the side. "It's not very good for a growing person's mind to be so judged publicly both on your performance but also just on everything, how you look, how you talk, people judge every single aspect and part of you and that was really hard on me," he admitted, emphasizing that his first few years in particular were very difficult for him to navigate due to his social anxiety.
"Specifically growing up and finding and becoming yourself in that spotlight is a hard experience."
Bjergsen has always been forthcoming about his own personal struggles, which created a backdrop for a stunning and successful career as TSM's starting mid laner.
For his first few months in North America, Bjergsen slept on then-top laner Marcus "Dyrus" Hill's floor. He had never lived in a gaming house before. For his EU LCS games, he had stayed in a hotel, traveled to the studio to play, and then returned to the hotel. The TSM house was his first lived experience outside of his childhood home.
"I was eating like garbage," he said with a sheepish smile. "I was eating fast food and drinking soda all day, it was a pretty stereotypical unhealthy gamer lifestyle. But it was really fun. I was just streaming 10-12 hours a day. I would wake up, shower, stream all day, sleep, and just repeat. They were simple times back then."
That Spring, Bjergsen and TSM finished 22-6, two games behind first-place Cloud9. They met in the finals and lost 0-3.
That Summer, TSM finished third in the regular season, but narrowly beat C9 3-2 in the finals to reclaim their throne.
It was the beginning of TSM Bjergsen's legacy that would span seven competitive seasons as a pro player and one as a coach. He was TSM.
Now, in the upcoming 2022 LCS season, Bjergsen will start for another North American LCS team, Team Liquid.
**When South Korean esports pros retire**, they sometimes forcibly separate their gamer tag and their name in their retirement announcement. They say, "Thank you for supporting me as [gamer tag] please continue to support me as [family name, given name]." These statements aren't always consistent, and not every player says it like this, but the natural tendency to separate player and self in the process of transitioning from being a player to a coach or a player to a person outside of the esports space has always fascinated me since the first time I read one of these types of announcements.
I asked Bjergsen how he had dealt with being Bjergsen at such a young age and he said, "Not well" with another short laugh.
I asked him what he had done to help mitigate his social anxiety while he had grown up in the spotlight.
"A lot of it was just putting myself out there in very uncomfortable social situations. And trying to surround myself with as many people as I could who didn't know Bjergsen or didn't care about Bjergsen, and got to know me as a person, they wanted to get to know me for me. I think it gives you a lot more confidence in yourself when you know those people that value you for you and not because you're someone known or someone famous."
I asked him when he was able to be Søren rather than Bjergsen.
He laughed.
"The offseason maybe?"
"Coaching is just as much work as playing and I didn't expect it to be any less," Bjergsen said. "It didn't feel like I was tapping out and I was like, 'I'm gone from esports' It did feel like I was trying to accomplish the same goal from a different angle. It definitely did not feel like a retirement at all."
There's an added layer of separation for Team Liquid Bjergsen that wasn't there when he stepped down from professional play to become a coach. It's another step in his career that seems like more of a new beginning than before. While Bjergsen stood on the LCS Arena stage, posed in a Team Liquid jersey for promotional photos, surrounded by all of the stage LED screens projecting the Team Liquid name and logo, one of the other journalists in attendance leaned over and said, "It still doesn't look right."
Bjergsen without TSM doesn't yet compute in our brains that have watched TSM Bjergsen since 2014.
Come January 2022, it will have to.
**Bjergsen joined an all-star on-paper lineup** with Team Liquid. TL retained jungler Lucas "Santorin" Larssen (who Bjergsen played with on TSM in 2015), and support Yongin "CoreJJ" Jo. They'll be joined by former Fnatic top laner and jungler, Gabriël "Bwipo" Rau and former Rogue bot laner Steven "Hans sama" Liv.
"It feels like a fresh start," Bjergsen said. "It doesn't feel like I'm just going through the motions or this is my whatever year of playing. It really feels like I hit a reset."
Asking Bjergsen about navigating free agency for the first time elicited a similar response to his initial reaction of disbelief that TSM wanted to sign him in 2013. There was an echo of that same shocked response that his level of play would be good enough to warrant teams' interest.
"I didn't know what to expect," he said. "I didn't know if any teams would want me to play or even to coach because I felt like our performance was just okay. I don't think it was too much below expectations but it definitely wasn't above expectations. I guess the way people see coaching is that you look at the roster, if they do better than you expect, it must be the coach, you know? And we kind of just did alright. It was a bit terrifying."
Hours after this all-day shoot for his Team Liquid arrival, Bjergsen headed to LAX and flew to South Korea. He will spend the next month or so there, trying to get back to an LCS level of play.
"It's just going to be a very undistracting environment," Bjergsen said. "I'm there to play. I'm probably going to need to eat food and see the sun once in a while but other than that I'm just going to be playing a ton. I don't want to be delusional and be like, 'Oh I'm just going to come back and be as good as I was.' That's not true. I have to put the work in. I have some catching up to do, and I told my teammates that too. 'You guys should trust that I'm going to work to where I was and then become better.' I'm not at a point where I think it's going to be easy. It's going to take a lot of work from me."
**Seated in the LCS analyst studio**, surrounded by the graphics and setup for the ongoing Wild Rift Horizon Cup, Bjergsen looked completely at home and comfortable. I was his third interview on top of an entire day of shooting his promotion video for signing with Team Liquid.
One question I enjoy asking players that they likely hate, is what advice you would give your former self. I asked Bjergsen if he could go back, and talk to 2013-14 offseason Bjergsen before he had ever stepped foot on the LCS stage in a TSM jersey, what he would say to him.
His advice was simple.
"If you keep drinking this much soda, you're going to get a lot of acne. It's going to make you really unhappy and anxious," he said jokingly. "And then, what else would I tell him? I don't know if I'd tell him too many different things. It's really cliché but you don't really know how you would end up. And I think it was a fun journey for me. And I wouldn't really want to change it."
After a mere half hour interview, I felt both closer and further than ever before of knowing who Søren Bjerg is.
But I do know that as a player or a coach, the LCS is fortunate to have him and Bjergsen, regardless of team.
