OpTic CEO Hector ‘Call of Duty and revealed what it took to get the 3-time Champion back to the Greenwall.
Though Karma touched on how previous letdowns in his pro career made him feel like he “needed a break,” a major concern lied in teammate Seth ‘Scump’ Abner’s distance from the team at the time.
“I eventually came back and was like ‘Listen, I will not play if Seth still lives where he does, like I won’t,’” Karma said.
It seems like Karma knew how ambitious the lineup was, and needed some form of assurance that the star-studded roster would be able to practice and perform at the level they could on paper.
“Unless you guarantee [that Scump would live closer], then I’m not joining,” Karma recalled. “… And I still wasn’t 100%, but that’s like the first thing that has to happen. He’s playing on one bar [of Internet connection] everyday like I’m not playing.”
H3CZ did eventually guarantee it, but the process to get Scump down to Texas wasn’t as straightforward as the CEO might have hoped for.
“Bro, you don’t even know how tough it was to get him the fuck away from California,” H3CZ said. “[Scump] was willing to move, but it was all these external factors that was fucking keeping him there to the very last moment.”
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(Timestamp at 1:37:35 for mobile viewers)
It got so bad that Scump suggested if he could just play out of California, but that didn’t work for the CEO, saying: “Seth, if you’re not on a fucking plane tonight, I’ve made promises that I’m going to keep. Just fucking know that.”
Karma recalled putting in his two cents to motivate Scump to fly out with the team as he recalled saying: “Listen [Scump], if you don’t move, I’m not joining [OpTic]. I’m doing something else.”
Even though it all worked out in the end, the lead up to getting Karma on the team had an incredible amount of external factors weighing on the process that eventually formed one of the deepest rosters in the Call of Duty scene.
Disclaimer: Hector ‘H3CZ’ Rodriguez is a minority shareholder in Dexerto Ltd.