A recent Smash Ultimate DreamHack tournament has become mired in controversy after one professional player has complained about the competitive environment. Gavin “Tweek” Dempsey recently participated in this tournament and was doing pretty well, but he eventually found himself fighting for a lower placement after some tough losses. It was then that he claims his opponent was coached and “massaged” during the match and that the crowd was heckling him.
“The set begins and I’m being heckled and what not,” Tweek said about the Smash DreamHack tournament in a Twitlonger post. “I’ve been playing for a long time and I’ve made quite a name for myself so that’s no surprise to me, them being inches away from me was definitely the roughest part but hey I’m no stranger to that either, it unfortunately happens. It definitely affected my focus since they were so close, that’s just a fact but it isn’t the key issue here.”
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Being heckled by the crowd is the reality of any kind of professional competitive event, whether you’re playing peewee soccer or you’re sinking three-pointers in the NBA. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the Smash DreamHack tournament wasn’t any different, but Tweek points out that the crowd was unusually close to the competitors in the lower-ranked matches he was participating in.
Heckling aside, Tweek believes there was a much bigger problem: he accuses his opponent Carrington “Wrath” Osborne of having been coached during the match.
“Wrath was being coached the entire time,” Tweek continued. “Verbally and physically. They would say when things would take my stocks, say when I was recovering, the usual stuff you’ve probably heard of for midset coaching along with heckling. Complaining about stuff like this is kind of shaky because what can we really do about that y’know? But he was also being f***ing massaged and s*** midset LMAO.”
Tweek went on to say that he’s was amazed no officials at the Smash DreamHack intervened in the situation and that he’s going to be more assertive about calling officials over to judge on what seems like a bad situation. Some might think this all sounds a bit ridiculous, but at least the part about the crowd was echoed in a submission on the /r/smashbros subreddit.
“[I] wasn’t there and it wasn’t streamed so [I] can’t speak to what actually happened between [Tweek] & [Wrath], but the set between [Leon] and [Muteace] was on-stream and off the main stage and [I] did think it was inappropriate that people were coming up to physically hype [Leon] up mid-game (not even mid-set, in the middle of an active game between stocks lmao),” read one comment. “Definitely strikes me as distracting and unfair to the opponent and there should probably be rules in place about keeping some distance between the crowd and the players.”
His opponent Wrath, for his part, countered Tweek’s claims on his personal Twitter account.
“Bro f*** off there was no verbal coaching don’t even pretend like that even happened,” the tweet stated. “There’s a whole video of the set and you KNOW you’re bulls***ting when you say that. No one was saying when things would kill and the ‘massage’ was my [girlfriend] just telling me I can do this. The hell?”
Wrath then followed up by posting a video he says is of the match in question:
— Key The Dedede (@KeyDedede) November 17, 2019
Since you wanna complain about coaching you can hear the crowd cheering here. Not a damn thing that is coaching https://t.co/7p9Ol0aI4L
— Wrath (@WrathFGC) November 17, 2019
And, of course, Tweek countered with own point about the video.
“I have not watched the video,” Tweek said in a tweet. “I don’t have to. But I do know that the video is not even half of the set. And there’s proof of coaching in it. I can give every example in the world of what happened to me but people will still twist things and cherry pick.”
For now, at least a portion of the match is visible, so you can watch the above video and decide for yourself whether or not the conduct in there is appropriate. One way or another, this is probably going to a remain a he-said, she-said kind of situation unless a full video of the entire match arises.
