Dignitas’ offseason signing Joshua ‘Dardoch’ Hartnett says that he was never compensated by former team TSM after the organisation’s president, Leena Xu, was overheard on a livestream discussing private information regarding transfer offers for the jungler.
In an interview with Inven Global, Dardoch also reveals that Xu never personally apologised to him directly for the slip up in which she was heard saying that “no one wants to pick up” the player. While Xu did release a public statement and apology over the Dardoch situation, he says that only TSM’s CEO Andy ‘Reignald’ Dinh offered him a personal admission that mistakes had been made.
“I wasn’t compensated or anything,” Dardoch tells Inven Global. “I got an apology, that’s pretty much all. Not even from the person who did it, but from Regi. The whole situation… I still don’t feel great about [it], but I don’t see much purpose in speaking about it any more from my perspective. Because I did get a new team, so I’m more so just focused on what’s next for me, rather than how I was disrespected in however many ways from this org.”
Dardoch says that although he knew TSM were looking to offload him after the 2020 Spring Split, he felt “pretty fucked up” after discovering private transfer conversations had been leaked by Xu.
“My initial response was like, obviously this is pretty fucked up, so I wasn’t exactly happy with what was going on. But behind the scenes, I already knew the situation was as far as teams’ interests and stuff like that. TSM had told me they were going to off-load me a week or so after Playoffs were done, so I had known that I was going to be looking for a new team already. So her essentially putting out my situation to the public didn’t feel great for sure.”
If he is picked as the main roster’s jungler, Dardoch could potentially be facing his old team in the first round of LCS fixtures this weekend, with Dignitas taking on TSM on Sunday, June 14.
