Richard Lewis pays tribute to Shayan Taleb on the one year anniversary of his death - Gone but not forgotten.

Whenever I sit down to write a column about e-sports I never know what’s going to come out. I’ve learned I should never sit down at my desk with a head full of bad voodoo and despair because it ends up committed to the virtual page, permeating every sentence with stark, brutal language no-one feels comfortable reading. There are some days I can feign enthusiasm, some where I can genuinely fool myself into looking forward to the next assignment. Today isn’t one of them.

It’s been a year to the day I lost my good friend Shayan Taleb and it’s made me realise just how few there are in these parts. At the time I managed to collect myself and write the truth about the man, often misunderstood in e-sports circles, all passion and occasional without reason, fiercely loyal to the point where he would attack perceived foes of friends without them ever truly grasping why… I made a vow to try and push towards something positive in his name, to use his ethos and work ethic to try and push e-sports into some brave new world. In that regard I’ve failed utterly. I’ve failed because he’s not around to push me to do it.

I’d never thought about it before, which is odd all things considered but it struck me of late just how hard it is to keep doing what you do without encouragement. There are super-humans like Shayan who could get out of bed every morning and pack every minute of every day chasing a dream without even so much as a nudge. I’m not one of them. My natural inclination is to be lazy, my default demeanour morose. At the same time I like to believe I let criticism bounce off me, that it doesn’t make a dent. But it does; I’m human and ultimately I’m tired of hearing it every day. More so now without having someone I can sound off about it to who knew what to say.

What Shayan did, so effortlessly that you never even really noticed, was give you the push in the right direction every time. He could fill you full of confidence with a short phrase. He was so full of conviction that his voice could make you believe things that perhaps he didn’t. He’d have made one hell of a politician but he was fundamentally too good a person for that rotten racket. Hell, he was too good a person for this one.

It was him who came to me and got me back into team management and indirectly he gave me the greatest moment I’ve ever experienced in e-sports with 4kings. I was jaded even back then, especially with management, a thankless task at the best of times. He convinced me that he couldn’t do it without me, that the 4kings relaunch would fail unless my steady hand was applied to it. It was complete hogwash but thanks to the constant pep talks I eventually came round to his way of thinking – that I could make a contribution worthwhile and that together we could build something special.

It was sad to see it all come crumbling down when it did but that was neither of our faults and in true Taleb fashion, right up until the end, he was there trying to slow down the organisation’s inevitable implosion. Polishing brass on The Titanic and he still found the time to do it, despite a burgeoning football career, despite personal relationships demanding his attention, simply because it was the right thing to do.

I wish e-sports had more men like him instead of the daily festival of shame it has become. This year I’d hoped to be writing about positive change. Instead my written work seems to revolve around a bunch of charlatans, liars, thieves and corporate thugs, treating e-sports as little more than a tax write-off. In the midst of that are people slogging away, mostly mocked for their efforts, for being suckers or too old to care about building a pursuit for younger people. I wonder how he did it, how he gave so much to so many, how he coped with our collective drag factor and how, in a business where there are so few genuine human beings, that we could forge such a close friendship.

Grief does strange things to the mind. I recall only recently I saw “him” log on to Skype, the notification pinging up in the right hand corner of my monitor like a jarring bolt of nostalgia straight to the memory centres. It couldn’t have been him. Maybe a relative finally going through his effects, an accidental automatic log-in when an unused PC had been switched on for the first time. As ridiculous as it sounds I wanted to type something but I didn’t. It wasn’t him because he was dead.

That fact still seems so unreal to me, an affront to any sense of cosmic justice we are told will prevail. Every event I attend I expect to see him there. Every time I sit down at my desk to do work there’s this empty silence instead of the space where we’d scheme and goof off in equal measure. I wonder what he’d make of everything that had happened this last year, what his take on it would be, what guidance he would give me for the new problems that working in e-sports brings.

This year it isn’t much of a tribute. It hurts more than it did when it happened. It should get easier but all those moments of absence become more and more acutely felt as you try to move past them, to fill that void with something. I said all the good things about him before now and they remain true, perhaps truer than ever as the daily grind makes them all the more apparent. I guess this is just to show that some of us haven’t forgotten his contribution to e-sports but, more importantly than any of that, to their lives.

Shayan Taleb was a great friend, a tireless worker, an honest man in a world where it was far easier to be dishonest. Despite being younger than me he was still something of a mentor, more experienced at all of this when I met and wiser in that regard despite his comparatively tender years. Most of you won’t know him. That’s the curse of being the guy that actually makes things happen, rather than the one that passes comment on those events. E-sports misses him. I miss him more.