The Loneliness of the Junior College Esports Coach

Madison Marquer was actively playing a display in a converted garage in Denver when he met her. It was 2014 and Marquer was a junior at the College of Wyoming, a toddler-confronted Eagle Scout from Cheyenne who’d grow to be a fixture in Laramie’s higher education-city punk scene. That night he was on guitar for a band identified as Medicine Bow, earning his standing as a magnetic performer—a blur of flailing limbs and sweaty, shut-cropped hair as he tore by way of tunes about SpongeBob SquarePants and ecological collapse.

In the group was Katherine Landvogt, a petite and pale-skinned 20-calendar year-old who wore cat-eye eyeglasses. After the established, she went up to Marquer (pronounced “Mar-care”), and they finally bought to speaking about music. Landvogt was a guitarist, too, though she was earning her residing as a household cleaner. She was dying to be a part of a band, but none of the acts in Denver’s macho punk scene would give her a shot simply because she didn’t glimpse the section. Marquer believed she was cute, with her curly black hair and off-kilter wit, and he hated that no 1 was providing her a possibility.

Inside a few months the two were dwelling together in Marquer’s basement apartment. Landvogt was not just a guitarist, it turned out, but a fluent and ferocious a single. Drugs Bow before long slimmed down from a quartet to a electric power duo: Marquer on drums, Landvogt on a Fender Telecaster with a phosphorescent decide guard. 

When they weren’t producing new music, they have been often side by side in entrance of their Laptop, clobbering dragons and druids and amassing hoards of gold in Dota 2, a intricate fantasy-themed video clip video game. The sport had prolonged been a single of Marquer’s grand obsessions—he was amid the top 7 % of gamers in the world—and now he cherished that it was theirs jointly. They missing by themselves for hours on finish, oblivious to the outdoors environment, as empty liquor bottles accrued on the floor and kitchen area counter around them.

In February 2016, as Marquer was ending his final semester at the university, Drugs Bow recorded a cassette that channeled the couple’s passionate hopes. I see an conclude to any sadness, just one of the songs went. Let’s drink some tea and take a look at the nation / The upcoming is additional than it looks.

3 months later on, Marquer and Landvogt acquired married in a very small chapel in the vicinity of Elk Mountain. Quickly right after, the newlyweds packed up their Subaru Impreza with Medicine Bow’s equipment and embarked on a 41-working day live performance tour. They crashed on fans’ sofas, played a demonstrate at a Pastafarian church in Oklahoma, and reveled in the neon-lit chaos of Instances Square. They ended up so blissed out that every surplus and hardship of the highway felt like a delight—all fodder for the amusing stories they’d inform their young children 1 working day.

The giddiness faded just after they got back to Laramie. Marquer, who’d majored in schooling, could not uncover a training career with the area district. So to fork out the couple’s $575-a-month hire, he took a brain-numbing gig sorting mail at the submit business office. Landvogt toyed with the plan of pursuing a diploma in chemical engineering, but she could under no circumstances stick to by means of. Although Marquer experienced mainly reined in his higher education consuming, she experienced started off earning journeys to the liquor store at 1:45 am—she did not want to run out of vodka just after it closed at 2. Her addiction step by step stripped absent her imaginative energies and robbed her of the capacity to handle even schedule jobs. Marquer acquired used to using her to the medical center when points received negative. Then he’d be still left asking yourself how and when every spell of sobriety would access its messy end.

The couple’s key remaining resource of pleasure was Dota 2. They located refuge in the game’s sprawling map, an expanse of dim forests and medieval fortresses. As they performed, Marquer started out to get a notion in his head: What if he sought out a career in the sector that had emerged close to Dota 2? Possibly he could come across perform with a person of the corporations that stage the game’s massive tournaments. (The 2017 edition of Dota 2’s preeminent party, the International, in Seattle, experienced offered nearly $25 million in prize revenue.) If Marquer could make that come about, perhaps he could get Landvogt concerned, way too, and that would give her the structure to make a long lasting recovery.