Gaming
esports
From Uncle Smith's Arcade to Tokido's Nightmare
In the arcades of Alexandra, Jabhi "JabhiM" Mabuza learnt that you don't get to pick your fights. Someone has to let you in. Then he stopped waiting for permission.
Jabhi Mabuza was six when his dad came home from work and took him down to Uncle Smith's arcade in Alexandra. There were two machines. On the left, Snow Bros, a co-op game father and son played side by side. On the right, Street Fighter.
"As I'm playing, I always look on my right," Jabhi remembers. "I was curious about that game."
Within a week he wanted to go back alone. By the end of the school holidays he was good. Which is when he ran into a rule nobody had written down but everybody in the arcades lived by.
"In townships, you're not allowed to challenge people if they don't want to," he explains. Anyone could step up and take on the kid with the quick hands, and plenty did, because that's how you learn. It just didn't work the other way. "They can challenge me. I wasn't allowed to challenge them."
So he went looking. Arcade to arcade, hunting for whoever would say yes. "And the hunger just grew."
It's a small detail from a childhood in Alex, but it's the whole story of JabhiM, and why he sits at the heart of the Underdogs episode of What We Know. Talent was never the problem. The problem, over and over, was who would let him through the door.
The first real door was a Red Bull Street Fighter qualifier he spotted on Facebook in his college years, with a console as the prize. He'd come up on Street Fighter II and III. The game on the screens was Street Fighter V. "I'm like, yo, what kind of Street Fighter is this?" Old fundamentals carried him until he met players who owned the game and he "got destroyed". He qualified anyway.
Someone told him to type "esports" into YouTube. He saw arenas packed for fighting games and decided on the spot this was what had been missing from his life. With no console, he downloaded tournament footage on the college's limited Wi-Fi, studied it in morning sessions on his laptop, then tested what he'd seen on the tournament consoles on the day. He made the top 16. A local organiser heard how he trained and gave him the run of his own setup. Then came a job. First pay cheque, the game. Second, a TV that could run it. Third, the PlayStation. In April 2018 he gave himself until December to beat the best in the country. By October, he was there.
Red Bull Hit the Streets 2019 was in Cape Town, his first trip out of Johannesburg and his first time on a plane. At one point, close to losing, he remembers staring up at the sky. "I'm not giving this moment to anybody." He won, and the prize was Japan. His gran, already amazed by the flight to Cape Town, could hardly believe it.
But the doors keep closing on the far side for a player from here. "What makes me an underdog is where I'm from," he says. South Africa isn't known for high-level players, the servers sit in Europe, and in Alex there was no fibre, only LTE. "The guys would complain that I'm lagging." He didn't complain back. "It's not me, it's where I am."
The arcade rule followed him all the way to Red Bull Kumite 2023 in Johannesburg, the first time the event came to South Africa, and a match against Tokido, one of the Japanese greats. This time the gatekeepers were in the Twitch chat, and some were his own countrymen. Please don't embarrass us, they typed. Get one game, then lose. At 2-2, one told him he'd done enough and could lose now.
He didn't. "In my mind, I was like, please die, please die. I just need you to die. I need this win," he says of the super that caught Tokido in the air. He threw his controller and shouted something he still can't recall, then looked out at a crowd nearly breaking its chairs. "I got this one for you." South African flags started filling the chat. The guy who'd warned him not to embarrass anyone came back to admit he'd been proven wrong.
At the Capcom Cup in Japan, the draw put him in Tokido's group again. The chat said they'd see now whether it was a fluke. He beat him again. Now they were calling him Tokido's demon. In one Twitch prediction he remembers, about ten people backed him against roughly 3,000 for the other side. "It was satisfactory," he says "to see the chat change."
For the walkout, players chose a nickname. Jabhi picked The Stone the Builder Refused.
Asked whether he'd move to Japan and play full-time, where Street Fighter pays the bills even for players who don't win, he said no. "When I'm in Japan, this thing comes easy. I might not work as hard."
So he stays home, an IT technician by day, making every evening session count. "When I play Street Fighter, I know that there must be something I must be learning every match."
The kid who waited at the arcade for someone to let him play doesn't need anyone's permission now. He's simply chosen to stay where nothing is handed over.
Watch Jabhi's story in Episode 3 of What We Know: Underdogs.
