One Losing Interview Somehow Became Korea's Favorite Motivational Phrase
In October 2022, a professional gamer named Kim Hyeok-gyu, known by his stage name Deft, had just lost the first round of the League of Legends World Championship group stage. A reporter asked him how he felt. He said something simple: if we just don't fall apart on our own, we can still win this. The article about that interview ran with a headline built from one line he said afterward, that the important thing is a heart that does not break. Nobody expected four words from that headline to end up printed on flags, chanted by soccer fans, and typed into group chats by teenagers a full year later.
The Phrase Itself
Jung kkeok ma (중꺾마) is short for jung-yo-han geon kkeok-i-ji an-neun ma-eum (중요한 건 꺾이지 않는 마음), which means something close to what matters is a heart that does not break. Kkeok-i-da (꺾이다) literally means to bend or snap, the same word used for a branch breaking under weight. Applied to a heart or a spirit, it captures a very specific feeling, not winning without effort, but refusing to fall apart when things go wrong. That distinction turned out to matter a lot.
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| Four syllables that started in an esports interview and never really left. |
From a Losing Interview to a Winning Team
Here is the part that made the phrase spread instead of disappearing after one news cycle. Deft's team, DRX, had been ranked as one of the weakest teams entering that tournament. Nobody expected them to make it past the group stage, let alone the finals. Yet DRX kept winning close, dramatic matches, one after another, right up through the championship, and every time a headline recapped their run, that same phrase came back with it. By the time DRX actually won the entire tournament, jung kkeok ma had stopped being a quote about one match and started being the explanation for the whole underdog story.
Esports fans picked it up first, the way gaming communities tend to turn a good line into a running joke or a genuine rallying cry within days. It showed up in stream chats, in memes about losing a match and refusing to rage quit, in captions under highlight clips. For a while it stayed inside that world, a phrase gamers understood without needing it explained.
The Moment It Left Gaming Entirely
Two months later, during the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, Korea's national soccer team was fighting to survive the group stage against Portugal, a match they were expected to lose. Somewhere in the stands, a fan had written jung kkeok ma across a Korean flag. When Korea pulled off the win and advanced to the round of sixteen, cameras caught players holding that exact flag on live television in front of the entire country. Players later mentioned the phrase directly in post-match interviews, saying it had genuinely stayed with them during the tournament.
That single broadcast moment is what pushed jung kkeok ma out of gaming circles and into everyday conversation nationwide. People who had never touched League of Legends in their life suddenly knew the phrase, because they had watched their own national team hold it up on a flag during one of the most emotional wins of the tournament.
Why a Gaming Quote Became a Mental Health Phrase
What kept jung kkeok ma alive long after both the tournament and the World Cup ended is where it landed next: Korea's younger generation, already dealing with a stretch of pessimistic slang around economic pressure and shrinking opportunity, picked up a phrase that finally sounded hopeful instead of resigned. Where earlier trending phrases described giving up on things, jung kkeok ma described staying in the fight even when the outcome wasn't guaranteed.
That is why the phrase shows up today less as sports commentary and more as something people say to themselves before a job interview, before a hard exam result, before stepping back onto a dating app after a rough breakup. It carries the same shape every time, an acknowledgment that things did not go well, followed by a refusal to let that be the end of the story. Korean dramas have started slipping it into dialogue for exactly that reason, usually right after a character faces a setback, as quiet shorthand the audience immediately recognizes.
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| A phrase born from losing became a note people write to themselves before trying again. |
How People Actually Use It Today
You will most often see jung kkeok ma written rather than spoken out loud, especially online. A short caption under a workout photo after a bad week. A comment left under a friend's post about a failed exam, meant as encouragement rather than pity. Sports commentators still reach for it during comebacks in any sport, not just League of Legends, since the phrase detached from gaming a long time ago.
It also gets used with a light, self-aware humor that is worth knowing about. Saying jung kkeok ma about something genuinely minor, like recovering from spilling coffee on your shirt, works as a small joke precisely because everyone recognizes the phrase's weightier origin. Using a dramatic underdog phrase for something small is itself part of the fun.
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| The phrase now shows up wherever someone needs a reason to keep going. |
A single headline about one gamer's interview turned into a phrase an entire country reached for during a World Cup, and then kept reaching for long after the cameras moved on. Next time something does not go your way, are you going to borrow this one for yourself?
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