I went to my first ever E-Sports event recently in Atlanta. My son Hayden has just finished a two year program post degree at St. Clair College – E-Sports and Entrepreneurship.

I won’t explain the sport to you in detail because the lesson of this week is “don’t drone on about things unnecessarily- it is annoying.”

The event was for the game Counter- Strike 2. It was called Intel Extreme Masters.

I attended the Final of this 6 day event. Several thousand of us watched two teams (of 5 players) battle it out in a best of 5 contest in this $300,000 event held at the Georgia World Congress Center.

These events are run very professionally with excellent production (Hayden’s focus) announcers and analysts.

Some of Hayden’s many friends in the industry were present, allowing him to network.

The included his pal Casey who resides in Georgia and is part of a series called Fragadelphia to which Hayden is connected. Casey wears this crazy get-up when not working at an event and has become quite well known.

The second ranked team in the world Natus Vincere (“Born To Win”) aka NAVI (from Ukraine 🇺🇦) beat GamerLegion (Germany 🇩🇪) 3-0 and took home $125,000.

I enjoyed the experience.

Now for a song- a new connection is in keeping with this theme. Here are newbies (formed in 2023) from Manchester 🇬🇧 named WESTSIDE COWBOY with “Kick Stones (The Boys)”. I think you will get the connections. I think they are part of a lineage running from Velvet Underground through The Feelies, but I could be wrong…

Their debut LP is out on August 21.

https://m.youtube.com/results?sp=mAEA&search_query=Westside+cowboy+kick+stones&ra=m

SPOTIFY-

(SONG 1663)

Play Loud Or Perish

5/29/2026