Sunday In Jacksonville

On Aug. 26, David Katz competed in a Madden tournament in the game room of a Florida pizza parlor. After he lost, he left the grounds, only to return armed with two guns. This is the story of what happened next.

- Jacob Wolf

DAVID KATZ HAD a blank, chilling countenance, a vacant stare his own father once described in court as “looking right through you.” To his fellow competitors, it seemed out of place in Jacksonville, Florida, on the weekend of Aug. 25-26, during the first Madden NFL 19 esports tournament of the season. The latest version of the iconic game had been out only a few weeks when the small, tight-knit group of elite pro Madden players—a “brotherhood,” they called themselves—reunited at the Jacksonville Landing open-air mall downtown. Inside a small, noisy game room in the back of Chicago Pizza and Sports Grille, they laughed, drank, talked trash and battled for $5,000 and a coveted spot at the Madden Classic in Las Vegas this fall. But when a fellow gamer tried to engage Katz in small talk on the first day, Saturday, by asking what upcoming Madden events he was looking forward to, Katz cut him off. “Don’t worry about it,” he snapped, turning away.

During the past few years, playing as “Bread,” Katz, 24, had started to make a name for himself in Madden circles, both for his game play and his odd behavior. After driving 11 hours from Baltimore with little more than the clothes on his back and—unbeknownst to his competitors—a small cache of handguns, Katz appeared at the tournament wearing mirrored sunglasses, a purple Ravens backpack and a blue and gray plaid shirt. He would wear the same thing on the tourney’s second day.

Madden might be an iconic brand, with 130 million games sold, but the setting in Jacksonville summed up its minor league status in the otherwise burgeoning billion dollar esports industry. At a recent Dota 2 competition, for example, the winning team pocketed more than $11 million in a single week. In Jacksonville, at the pizza joint hosting the tournament, there weren’t even enough gamer chairs to go around.