Los Angeles - Rick Fox woke up one morning in January and went to the gym. It’s a standard destination for Fox, who won three championships playing basketball for the Los Angeles Lakers in the early 2000s. But he wasn’t planning on exercising.
Instead, he walked into a building in Santa Monica, California, and greeted a bashful-looking group of about a half-dozen men whom he pays to play video games.
Fox, along with three business partners, runs Echo Fox, a company that employs dozens of people dedicated to competing in professional video game leagues.
The men he was meeting on this particular day play League of Legends, a fantasy-themed game developed by Riot Games, a subsidiary of Chinese gaming giant Tencent Holdings, in which two teams control characters seeking to destroy their enemy’s base while defending their own. It’s one of the biggest titles on the pro gaming circuit.
Fox had called his employees to the gym for training: in a few days the North American League of Legends Championship Series, one of the most prominent video game leagues in the world, would begin its season.
Fox likes to compare pro video game competitions, also known as esports, to pro basketball. But there are some unavoidable differences. Basketball involves jumping and sprinting, while esports consists of sitting in padded chairs and clicking buttons.
Read also: Pro gamers have their sights set on R1m prize
Still, Fox hopes the gym will help his LCS team improve from its dismal performance last season, when it had the worst record in the league.
“When we stretch the minds and we stretch their bodies - we stretch it to a place where they’re challenged - they’ll start to see the benefits,” he says.
For several hours, trainers put the gamers through a series of physical and mental tests. Some of them had no obvious connection to video games, like those that measured vertical leap and body fat percentage.
Another test, which utilises a special machine to determine how many times each player could click a button in 10 seconds, made more immediate sense. There were also classes in yoga, meditation, and spinning - which, one trainer helpfully explained, involved riding on an exercise bike and not actually spinning around in circles.
Everything was tailored to the novice. At a team meeting the night before, Jake Fyfe, the team’s general manager, reminded the players that it was customary to wear sweatpants or shorts to a gym, not jeans.
The formula for Echo Fox’s broader success also remains elusive. Fox says he wants the company to be the Lakers of esports, but its business model is fundamentally different.
Echo Fox fields multiple teams across different leagues, as well as making original comedy programmes related to video games. Fox and others in the company declined to discuss its financial performance. But most of the upside isn’t expected for several years.
Jace Hall, Echo Fox’s chief executive officer, is the former head of Warner Brothers’ gaming studio and a well-known game developer.
He says that part of Echo Fox’s job is to create the conceptual framework for an esports team. While high-stakes video game competitions have existed for decades, the business models for companies that run teams are in their infancy.
“As far as I’m concerned, we are the ones who are setting the model for esports. We have to be. There’s nothing at the moment.”
Because he’s famous, Fox is an intriguing figure, both to people already working in esports and people from other industries tempted to jump in.
He says he has spent the last year talking to a wide range of people from professional sports interested in investing. For insiders, Fox represents the excitement over the opportunities of going mainstream but also anxieties.
Some worry that this new professionalism will end up marginalising those who started esports, says Bryce Blum, the head of esports at Catalyst Sports and Media, a sports business consultancy.
Over the last year or so, investment from the professional sports world has poured into esports, with the owners of the Philadelphia 76ers, the Miami Heat, and stars like Shaquille O’Neal and Alex Rodriguez making investments.
Fox is working to encourage this trend by explaining esports to the outside world even as its basic structure is in flux.
“It feels like I’m teaching them a language that I’m still learning.”
Esports will become a billion-dollar industry in 2017, with most of the money coming from advertising, according to projections from the market research firm SuperData.
The firm estimates 213 million people now watch competitive video games online worldwide.
League of Legends championship matches take place at venues like the Staples Center in Los Angeles, where the final two teams battle it out amid smoke machines in front of crowds of over 10000.
Publishers have seen the competitions as a good marketing opportunity and, more recently, as a potential profit centre.
Amazon validated the concept of video games as a spectator sport in 2014 when it paid nearly $1 billion to buy Twitch, the leading live-streaming service for gamers.
The NBA recently said it was starting its own esports league, where NBA teams will field digital teams of gamers to compete in NBA 2K, a basketball video game.
All of this activity is predicated on the idea that esports are a way to connect with a young audience that is less inclined to watch regular sports or consume traditional media. The appeal for esports is already global. Many pro sports teams know they’re catering to an ageing audience and suspect the fattest days of TV money are behind them. Esports look like a logical hedge.