Gandofini: Lord Of The Rigs
A tribute to one of the greatest characters I ever got to work with, the wild man John "Gandofini" Johnstone.
Well, only a few days into the new year and I’ve had enough of looking forward. People in these parts don’t have the stomach for it. Best not to talk about the future until it has snuck up on you and punched you in the face… Then you can pretend you were friends with it all along to simply avoid a brutal mauling at the hands of that which you criticised. I find the chirpy optimist almost as repulsive as the doom merchant… Both have an agenda and as such neither can be trusted. So the perfect antidote to all that has to be some shameless nostalgia, even if it is mine rather than yours.
Now, while I’d like to believe that many of you would remember the team Auxilia, increasingly I know that this is unlikely to be the case since as collectively we don’t really treat gaming history with any respect or reverence. If you were to speak to the average CS:S player these days they could tell you the precise details of which mixvent shitter played badly in what gather, on what date and time, and they probably even took a screenshot for posterity – possibly to be used when i-series seedings roll around – just to verify the event. If you were to ask them who had won the events that they too were looking to attend the likelihood is they would draw a blank. This is a key problem facing us – how can we talk about something having a future if we can’t even be bothered to remember the past?
I remember first talking about writing a tribute to my good friend John “Gandofini” Johnston when we were sat together drinking some whiskey in my hotel room. He knew his entire career was effectively going to boil down as being the guy “who slapped fataL at CGS” and everything else was just a build-up to that moment. We sat there going through all the other moments of his playing career, how Auxilia were one round from changing the whole landscape of the UK scene, but it all went hideously wrong. It would have been an interesting story to tell, but ultimately I played my own little part in making the nightmare future John had envisioned – the one where he became known as “clubberfini” – come to hideous life by telling the full story in an article that then went on to be nominated for the ESL e-sports Article of the Year award.
Two years after that event, now that he’s moved on and has been travelling around Vietnam and Thailand, it’s probably time to set the record straight and talk about him as he realistically was, because there was a lot more to him than just some crazy Scottish guy who happened to play CS:S. But don’t get me wrong – he was also crazy, which is ultimately why we hit it off in the way we did at CGS. I remember him being late for an official game, making it just within the requisite fifteen minute time allocation, because he’d been out on the piss, got lost in the middle of the most rural parts of Scotland and then – faced with a choice of freezing to death or finding shelter – broke into a car, hotwired it to get the heating going and then grabbed some precious sleep before catching the first train away from the scene of the crime.
But equally, while he had that streak of drunken lunacy within him, he was well liked and respected by everyone in the scene. The whole of Auxilia were really… There was this clear divide in the UK at the time. You could be like Zboard, arrogant, cocky, drunkards who believed that they were always going to win no matter what – and if you go back far enough, usually did – or you could be like Auxilia… The same kind of drunks, but down to Earth guys who had no pretensions surrounding their ability at the game. They were good, some of them were great, but you’d never know it or think it to talk to them. As such they had a great cult following despite the fact that they didn’t make it to many LANs because most of them worked full time. They were the people’s champions, without even ever having to be champions.
The biggest stumbling block to any sort of prolonged success was John’s line of work. He was a “roughneck” on the oil rigs, one of the most dangerous lines of work there is outside of the military, and many would tell you including. I remember being sat in the working men’s clubs of the North East watching the newly created amputees go out for their first pints and have to endure the taunts of their friends calling them “Captain Hook” and mocking them as they try to open a bag of pork scratchings. They were oil-rig workers and it was something that John was away doing, in between spells of playing CS:S, for months at a time. The jokes would often circulate about him having lost a hand and having to retire from gaming, but it was a lot closer to being true than any of us wanted to think about.
“At the time I was landing helicopters, maintaining and using the fire fighting equipment and doing exercises to prepare for emergancies like people being overcome by gas, the oil rig catching fire, evacuating the rig by helicopter or vessel, major first aid… Injuries were a regular occurrence. A good friend lost a finger in front of me when a container hit it after being nudged by a moving crane and our engine room went on fire… Luckily the co2 put it out fairly fast. People had their arms torn off… There’s loads of horror stories I could tell you.”
Yet despite this stressful line of work and long periods in and out the game, somehow John managed to be at the top of the UK, and in the eyes of some, even Europe. For those that are in doubt I’d draw your attention to an article published some time ago on this site where top players picked their dream five: http://www.cadred.org/News/Article/17234/. John made it onto two of the lists. If someone with the ability of Robin "Fifflaren" Johansson is describing you as “always insane” then you’re probably doing something right. I would learn later on that the claim about having fanboys in Sweden, and indeed all over Europe, were true as well.
But it has just occurred to me that this is a story without a beginning and it’d be remiss of me to miss out my first memories of Gandofini. I wasn’t a huge Auxilia fan at the time, if brutal truth be told. They hadn’t made it to many LANs and everyone else seemed to like them, so I was quite pleased to swim against the current. For me, you had to prove what you were worth at LAN… And of course, there was this increasingly popular term being bandied about that seemed appropriate – “onliner”. Only a few ever really said that about Auxilia though and I often wondered why they were afforded more leeway than other teams in this regard. Some people however couldn’t get their head around the random style they would play with – Gandofini and James “Jam0r” Morris in particular would do the most random pushes and they usually seemed to be timed right. The Europeans didn’t mind so much putting it down to good play, but there was something building in the UK where some notable players were starting to insinuate that something was amiss.
I got talking to them when they used one of my friends in their squad… One of their players had to drop and they picked up David “spl@tio” Stocker – formerly of the 2005 UK WCG representatives Reason Gaming for CS:S – as a stand-in. We got talking briefly after the game and Gandofini, who seemed drunk at the time, said that they would be going to i30 to compete. They had their eyes on the ebuyer tournament, which was one of the biggest to hit the UK and CS:S. The prize was a complete sponsorship for UK and some European LANs, five top of the range PCs and hardware support, as well as mainstream media appearances. For many it was seen as the big prize at the event, more so than the I-series title itself, and what I hadn’t realised was Auxilia – for all their standing in the UK – weren’t sponsored up the arse like Zboard were. They often had to put their hands in their own pockets, but they’d never made a big deal about it, never even made any noise about moving anywhere else.
When i30 came rolling around I followed the ebuyer tournament with interest and had visions of a Zboard versus Auxilia final. It wasn’t to be though, Zboard being beaten by the former TMG – called nTm at this event – and then knocked out altogether by Planet6. Instead Auxilia had to take on the former TMG team in a final that many couldn’t call. No-one had expected nTm to do this well and going into the final they were certainly the form team. Auxilia however were the team in people’s hearts and they had a lot of support when the final came around. I stood in the crowd scribbling notes into my note pad and watched the final unfold.
The difference in attitude between the two teams was clear to see. nTm were quiet and focused, Auxilia were laughing, bantering back and forth, turning around to interact with the crowd. Yet the turning point in the game was clear. Auxilia had a 1v5 situation and John was behind the remaining man who was on eco. He bunnyhopped down and tried to get a knife, only to be killed. That remaining player, Sam "fraz" Winnington, went on to clutch the round in what is, for me at least, one of the most memorable clutches I’d ever seen in CS:S. The momentum shifted, Auxilia deflated, nTm went on a roll and won the match 16 – 7. I’m not saying it would have been different had John made the easy kill instead of going for the knife, but the change in Auxilia’s body language after that was apparent. John remembers the situation like it was yesterday:
“I’d knifed one of their players in the previous round and found it amusing. We were in a 5v1 situation, I had my whole team left alive with full weapons and armour and Fraz – the swine - had a glock. I thought “fuck it” and did a wee bunny hop down t steps. I came up short by inches then my team got eco’d. If I’d shot him we would have won the round but what the fuck were jamor, death, malds and stan up to? Being honest though that was the facepalm of my gaming career. Every one enjoyed it though so rave on… Also I was drunk. Well intoxicated, not drunk… why are you making me remember this? I felt a bit stupid but I always go for good fun in the game, no matter the situation.”
The triumph for nTm was one that was well deserved. They’d had a line-up playing together for over eighteen months, something almost unthinkable of in this day and age. Even though I went down the bar with the Auxilia guys to drown their sorrows afterwards and everyone said it didn’t make much of a difference anyway, it was clear that Gandofini missing that knife would probably haunt him for a fair bit, even if it the hilarity of the moment was overshadowed slightly by the brilliance of the clutch.
Years later when it looked like we were going to recruit John into Zboard I remembered the moment again and I’d be lying if I wasn’t a tad reluctant. I’d seen him drunk and carefree in a final of that magnitude once before – would I really want to have to watch him go for a knife in a potential draft deciding situation? In the end the team took a vote and John won so I had to abide by the decision, but after meeting up with him again and having a few drinks I felt a bit more relaxed. He assured me he would be serious but not “too serious” which put him right at home with the rest of the guys.
What amazed me immediately was the number of European players that would ask me if it was OK to talk to John, or those who were big names all taking the time to come over and shoot the breeze with him. They didn’t seem to interested in the rest of the Zboard team, something that I’m sure the others either chose to ignore and said nothing about. The stand-out moment for me was when prior to one of the GM matches John went up to David 'olander' Olander and gave him a Scotland football shirt. Olander looked like a kid on Christmas day and after a stunned silence jumped up and yelled “FOR SCOTLAND” at the top of his voice, before giving Gando a hug. I think he even wore the shirt in the match he played.
It wasn’t the sort of thing that happened in isolation. A German news writer came over and said he was struggling to cover the event as he knew more about 1.6 than he did Source. He said he’d only heard of a few teams and asked who we were. I told him we were Zboard and he smiled – he’d heard of us – and we started doing an interview. He asked everyone’s names and then came to John and he went crazy. “Oh, you are Gandofini? From Auxilia? Amazing, yes, I have seen you play” and even though he couldn’t understand a single word of John’s drunken Scottish mumble, he talked for some time. The next person to be introduced to was Ben “ben0” Balcombe and I said “well, if you know John, you must know ben0” – the German just looked dumbfounded. “No, I do not know this name” and went back to John. It was the most hilarious snub and even though Ben would laugh about it now, he was pissed off at the time – “How can he have heard of Zboard, but not me?” Ben would ask every five minutes after the interview. John consoled him with a slap on the back from one of his giant hands “I always told you the Euros preferred Auxilia to Zboard, ken?”
It is a shame ultimately that John and Auxilia didn’t get to do more and even though they still play together now, the idea of competition is long dead:
“It’d have been nice to get to more LANs but I was wokring away for 6 months of the year on the oil rigs. Jamor, Death, malds and Stan were in full time employment, no students in the team, so we didn’t have a lot of free time. It’s hard to get 5 guys off work at same time, But still I think we did OK. We got to 2 i-series and 2 bootcamps. I personally, thanks to CGS, got to 3 bootcamps and 4 LANs. You know from the start we were a fun team. We all still play together at L4D, CS:S and CoD. Same team, same players and no great ambitions other than playing games online. People get older and have more important things to do. I think as you get older you can see through the bullshit more about e-sports. I don’t think you can ever make a substantial living from it unless you’re one of a selective few, and you certainly couldn’t back then. It was an amateur pursuit. You have no security if you’re playing games professionally… All these big companies who are supposedly going to change the world, all of them seem to go under. CGS, UKeSA, same shit different acronym. Don’t get me wrong, I think gaming is a great thing competitively, I just hate to see people getting sucked into it more than they should. I bet you know a few players from CGS like that mate…”
So even though his career might be punctuated by two memorable – for the wrong reasons – moments, he still has no regrets about the way things went:
“ I had a great time. I think back sometimes and think “what a ride, wish I could do it again”. I met some really amazing people in gaming made some amazing friends. I think the players from when we started up until now have made a really good bond with each other. I class them as my brothers. We had some good times… I remember when we were at LAN in n.ireland belfast at wilks house and james PC just burst into flames. Smoke was pouring from the side and Gav turns round and shouts “hey jam, yer pc is on fire” I told james to turn it off so the stupid cunt clicks start menu and goes to shut it down that way… While it was on fire.”
John’s a lot like me, loves to tell a good yarn. He wouldn’t let me go without printing this one:
“This is why I got into competitive gaming… I was competing with the yanks before online gaming was even known. My auntie lives in New Jersey and she had a Nintendo, the old NES. I was a kid and just got one for Christmas. We were on the phone to her and my uncle said “I bet you I finish it before you” so, it was on. I was playing the game non-stop for a month and we got this letter through the door. In it was a picture of my uncle standing besides his TV with Mario completed on the screen and giving me a big thumbs up. It was my first real loss and after that I was hooked.”
Last time I spoke to John he told me he was in Vietnam “firing Aks and banging hookers”. Happy New Year and thanks for the memories.