A teacher of mine loved the story of ‘The Freedom Writers.’ A group of low-performing students were able to turn around their young lives thanks to the help of an incredible teacher – Erin Gruwell. It is an incredible story to never give up and to never judge a book by its cover. You don’t know what someone is going through and everyone has the ability to learn and make use of their lives — even when it seems all hope is lost.
Its inspirational. It also makes me a sucker.
Sometimes, I feel like I’m apart of a teenage movie where I look at the potential of the “problematic” person. Thinking every person can be saved is an admirable trait but also one that can lead to frustration.
Joshua “Dardoch” Hartnett remains one of the most polarizing figures in LCS history. A prospect that took the league by storm has had a hurricane of a career. Moments of silence and bliss are contrasted with explosive failures and collapses. Yet for a player with such talent, shouldn’t there be a way around it?
Following his departure from Dignitas, Dardoch has made his seventh organization change. A journeyman in every season, wandering to find a home, it is fascinating to look at why he has left each organization:
He is benched from the team in dramatic fashion, captured in the documentary Breaking Point. To this day, it is still a surprise Team Liquid thought it would be a good idea to release behind-the-scenes footage of their organizations’ chaos that would reveal the tumultuous side of Dardoch and would also reveal the dysfunction with their front office. Despite it appearing that attempts to reconcile the relationship were happening, it was impossible to do so post-documentary.
He is dropped from the team due to toxic behavior. He is once again caught on film flaming his teammates for their poor performance. Seriously, it was pretty crazy how much film there is on Dardoch’s problematic behavior along with coaches and players struggling to address it.
Another team, another benching. While the team would be performing incredibly well, Dardoch’s personality wouldn’t mesh with a Counter Logic Gaming team that just moved on from their franchise marksman who wouldn’t have the best behavior in a team environment. This was the ‘sunshine and rainbows’ era of Counter Logic Gaming that would invest heavily into Zaqueri “aphromoo” Black only for him to leave. This was peak Counter Logic Gaming front office decision-making.
Remember when that happened? Nothing good happened during his return but still, it happened. It was that split where they have three different junglers, three different mid-laners appear throughout it.
Was this the first time his attitude issues didn’t result in him being removed from the team?
Similar deal. It wasn’t the best individual performance. An organization that seemingly only looked good with William “Meteos” Hartman as their jungler would move on from Dardoch after one uneventful year.
Back to the regular schedule programing for his career narrative.
TSM President Leena Xu would have a private phone call about Dardoch’s trade value released, an inexcusable event as she would be having the conversation in front of marksman and boyfriend Yiliang “Peter” “Doublelift” Peng. It is still insane that no punishment regarding this error was ever delivered. It was an overall embarrassing split for TSM – given their move from Kasper “Kobbe” Kobberup. While everything would work out for the all parties involved, it is still a period of time that shouldn’t be forgotten.
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