“A kid from nowhere”: Monsoon on homelessness, escapism, and becoming a world champion

“There were many times where we would have to just throw everything away, like literally everything,” recalls Bowen “Monsoon” Fuller, his voice unwavering. The 28-year-old Apex Legends World Champion has come a long way from where he was, but there’s humility behind every word he utters.  

“We’d go to a flea market for the last three days, and we’d sell everything we had. We would put a price tag on everything that I grew up with, everything that I used every day,” he tells me. Once his family had made enough money, they’d use it to buy a hotel room, so that they could return to the flea market the day after to continue flogging everything they owned.

When they were set to leave, the boom of “a dollar anybody, 50 cents a piece” would echo, with speakers, DVDs, toys, playing cards, and anything else being sold, before moving on to where Bowen vaguely describes as “where we needed to go.”

Pretty much every material possession had a price – except one thing. “The one thing that I did manage to keep throughout it all was this little fucked up computer with no top. The power supply was soldered with aluminum foil, and it had the side sticking out and shit,” he tells me. “It was small enough to fit in my backpack, and that’s why I was able to keep it. We were in this little 5-person Honda hatchback, and I sat in the trunk. We were six people deep all the time.”

The computer, with a soldered power supply and bits hanging off the edge, epitomizes Monsoon’s life growing up. He watched longingly as an ordinary childhood passed him by. I can feel the ache as he describes vividly how he’d often slip away from a friend’s garage to sleep in the car, where he’d just cry all night.

“The thought of all the people that I was growing up with, friends with during school. They were still going to school. They still did their thing. They were still growing and learning, and being with each other,” he says.

“The thought of me as this young, impressionable kid, who just wanted to have friends, kind of getting left behind – that kind of sucked a lot, actually. That was pretty difficult,” he admits, the pain still evident behind the words.

Wherever the five-seat hatchback took his family, the battered, backpack-sized computer went too, and with it his fervor for gaming. All that was required was some power.

“Anytime that I could, whether it was fast food restaurants, or hotels, or gaming cafes and PC bangs, I would just do anything I could to boot up any of the games that I could play,” he says, his face lighting up as he recalls his early gaming. The lack of internet didn’t stop him either: “If the ping or the internet were too bad, I’d just play single player shit.”

Watching him talk about PC bangs and fast-food Wi-Fi, it’s hard not to smile. Our circumstances growing up were very different, but I find my mind wandering back to my childhood, when every day at about 6.30 pm, after my mum finished using the landline, I’d be allowed to use the dial-up and get stuck into Bubble Trouble or StickRPG. 

For me, that hour each day was a treat. A chance to forget the (comparatively trivial) hardships of life and immerse myself in a different world – and often, the best world. When I ask him if gaming let him ignore what was happening around him, there’s little hesitation. Of course it did, and there’s a smile as he tells me, “Escapism was, like, the entirety of my life. From when I was young, I don’t know, 13 or 14 through to 25, basically.” For that decade, video games weren’t so much a distraction from his life, but they were where his life happened. They provided stability; refuge from a capricious world. 

Long before his rise to the top of Apex, Monsoon was already competing, just in the world of esports that offered little to anyone outside of the biggest games. In esports 15 years ago, only the top professionals in League of Legends, Counter-Strike, or Dota were making any money.

Everyone else, by Monsoon’s own admission, was “just scraping by, trying to figure it out, working with random teams, random orgs for a jersey.” He rattles off a list of titles – Overwatch, PUBG, CS, League of Legends, Paladins, and Realm Royale – a few of which may have you scrambling for the search bar.

He played all of those “at a decently high level,” for, in his own words, “a 14-year-old homeless kid.”

It wasn’t love at first sight for Monsoon and Apex, the game he didn’t yet know would make him a world champion. “I tried it and hated it the first day,” he chuckles, “but I kept playing it, and started to really like it. It was escapism at first.”

At the time, he was living in Utah, month-to-month in an Airbnb after a falling-out with his family. To pay his bills, he spent long hours working the line in a diner. His sense of humor comes to the fore again as he reminisces that “Mormons fucking love their diners on a Sunday, because nothing else is open.”

After a long day on the flat-top, slinging eggs to hungry Mormons, Apex was always there waiting. “I’m a very competitive gamer at the core,” he says, “so having something that was first-person shooter, which I love, battle royale, which I mostly love, and the nuance of abilities – it was more so, like, I knew if the game took off, then maybe I’d have a chance. But otherwise, I’m just having fun right now.”

He didn’t have to wait too long to find out. Just six months after the launch of Apex, Monsoon signed his first professional contract with FlyQuest in August 2019.

Nine days after signing, he was live on stream when Michael “shroud” Grzesiek, one of the most-watched FPS players ever, got obliterated by a single shot from a Kraber. “Well, hot damn. Okay, shit son,” exclaimed Shroud before noticing Monsoon’s 12 frags. “Oh, he’s cheating,” he snapped, before the ever-reliable Twitch chat told him otherwise. “That’s the best player in Apex Legends,” he said.

None of it paid particularly well, but it certainly went beyond his previous experience of a bedroom organization, jersey, and everyone’s favorite type of payment in esports: sweet, sweet exposure.  

“I ended up quitting the restaurant as soon as I got an $800 a month salary from an org, and I moved from Utah to Las Vegas to make it work,” he says.

I’m immediately taken aback by how little that is, to live in Vegas of all places, and he nods, “I was eating ramen out of a Crock-Pot, and actually another Apex player bought me a fucking microwave. And that was the start.”

A five-and-a-half-year stint at CompLexity, punctuated by a sixth-place 2025 Apex Legends Global Series Championship finish, came to an end that year. From there, Monsoon, FunFPS, and Blinkzr, under an organization called Oblivion, came through the Last Chance Qualifiers in 2026 to become unlikely Apex World Champions and scoop $600,000 in prize money.

It’s apparent to me that reaching the top in a game he loves has given him the room to reflect and appreciate his remarkable journey. “Being here now, playing Apex Legends, and traveling, seeing perspectives, experiences, and meeting people gave me that opportunity to figure out who I was,” he explains candidly. “What life is.”

When I ask if he feels a responsibility to show what’s possible, he doesn’t hesitate. “There’s always that inherent responsibility to prove, to validate,” he says – that a kid with nothing but a dream could really make it – “because I was just a fucking kid from nowhere, homeless as shit, got no one going for him, and manages to make it through.”

He pauses, “That kind of vindicated my entire wants and drive.”  

The word vindicated sticks out to me; it’s the thread running through his entire story. No one, perhaps even Monsoon himself, expected him to achieve what he has, and the trophy is less a prize and instead proof that he was right to try it anyway. His own words are punctuated with faith and humility: “If you follow the things that you love, and who you are as a person, no matter what, it’s going to work out.”

So, what of that young kid, crying through the night in his parents’ Honda hatchback? What would he tell that young kid, if he could see him now?

“To fucking live. To live man.” The words cut through with the steely determination that’s carried him this far. “Like, just do it. No matter what. Just do what you want. Do what you need for yourself, because you want it.”

He’s not finished. “Just fucking keep going. Feel the pain, feel the glory. Feel the fucking hate, and everything you can – because ultimately all that shit leads to somewhere that you wanted to be your entire fucking life.”

I can feel the raw passion in his words. But again, I come back to humility. The willingness to learn and grow, and after rummaging through his past, the sheer gratitude he has for where he is today. So I ask him, has he made it? What’s next in the life of Bowen “Monsoon” Fuller?

“Made it really is just being content and satisfied with the foundation of your life,” he expresses in almost zen-like fashion. “My dream growing up was always to have a bed to sleep in, and always to have food to eat, and to have power and internet and video games.”

“I have made it so, so, fucking good,” he grins. “And I’m so thankful for it – to the point where I can take a day off and go and hang out with my perfect fiancée or stay inside and watch movies. That’s it.”

As I sit in the crowd at the ALGS 2026 Split 1 Playoffs in Paris and see Sentinels fall agonizingly short of a back-to-back title, it’s hard to imagine the confident young man in front of me as a child with just a backpack and a little computer held together with foil.

Yet there’s not one iota of bitterness in him about any of it—no sense of self-pity for the years spent sleeping in cars and selling everything he owned. If anything, it’s the opposite. He talks about his childhood with great acceptance: it happened, it was hard, and he learned something from it. I get the feeling that regret is a word not in his dictionary.

What he does possess is infectious gratitude. Whether that’s for a bed, for a day off, for microwave ramen, or the two teammates who stood by his side when he lifted that trophy. He spent years trying to escape – these days, he doesn’t have to – he just “fucking lives.”