A sharp-eyed Coug spotted it on a live stream: the iconic Washington State University flag waving in the crowd of thousands attending an esports tournament in Las Vegas in August.
“I see you, you absolute legend,” the person wrote on Reddit.
The legend? Tim Lamb (’21 Comm.).
For the past five years Lamb has taken the flag-waving tradition—inspired by Ol’ Crimson ® that’s part of every College GameDay on ESPN—to Evo, a major competitive video game tournament. Evo draws more than 10,000 contestants who play each other in hand-to-hand combat video games like Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, and Tekken.
Lamb lines up with the flag at 5:30 a.m. to make sure he can get a seat front and center when gameplay starts nearly five hours later. This year was his fifth time attending Evo, taking the WSU flag with him each time.
WSU and esports hold equal places in Lamb’s heart, he says. He grew up in a Coug family in Spokane, attended football games in Pullman, and knew WSU was where he wanted to go to college. But things got tough when his mom died his first semester there.
“I was dealing with a lot, but I knew I needed to get out of my dorm room,” he says. A lifelong video game player, he looked around for people who shared his interest in esports.
“People have an innate need for community,” Lamb says. “At my lowest point, these games and the people I’ve met through playing them were the things I fell back on when I needed help.”
He got involved with a couple of esports clubs at WSU and found that community. Eventually Lamb was organizing esports events and tournaments large and small on the Palouse.
Evo and the WSU flag have helped connect him to other fighting-game enthusiasts from around the world, he says.
“The fighting-game community is such a special thing to so many people,” he says. “The flag shows how my interest developed out of Washington State University. It takes two things that are a massive part of my life and puts them together.”