He goes by many names. The God. The Alpha. Pink. Whatever you call him, Victor "Punk" Woodley is now synonymous with Street Fighter. He became North America's face of the franchise with stunning speed. Despite attending his first major tournaments within the past decade, Punk has accumulated a resume few Street Fighter players could replicate given an entire lifetime.

Punk started attending tournaments in 2016 and almost instantly showed he belonged on stage with the best. On April 9th, Punk won West Coast Warzone 6 in Anaheim, California over a strong roster of American Street Fighter V players. It wasn't his first big win — Punk had won Northeast Championships over MenaRD at the tail end of 2016 — but it kicked off a stretch of dominance that forced the entire world to take notice.

Over the next five months, Punk entered 11 notable brackets according to Liquipedia. He didn't miss Grand Finals at a single one, and he took first place seven times. He went on a four-tournament win streak that included wins at NorCal Regionals, DreamHack Austin, and his most viewed win by far: E-LEAGUE, where Punk clinched a $150,000 prize in front of thousands of viewers on the TNT cable network.

This was a level of consistency nobody had been able to show in the first year and change of Street Fighter V's existence, and the person to do it wasn't one of the many legends of the franchise who pushed for glory in its latest iteration. It was an 18-year-old whose only past Street Fighter experience came in Street Fighter IV's online lobbies. Where did this prodigy summon this incredible Street Fighter skill?

Punk lived a pretty simple life as a kid: Go to school, maybe play some basketball after, and then come home and play Street Fighter. In school, he loved his math classes. "Math is my favorite subject," He told BornFree in a 2018 interview. "In school, I just loved math. It’s just so cool. …you’re either right, or you're wrong. There’s no maybe." Street Fighter was able to scratch that same problem solving itch for him, and he quickly dedicated himself to figuring out how to find the game's answers.

Consistent practice was the biggest factor in Punk's improvement. But despite the fact that he was only playing online, he was a student of the game. Getting good for him meant incorporating every concept and technique he could find. "I watched a lot of tournament matches or sets against high-level players and I just tried to learn from that," he told Bornfree. "I just saw them play and tried to learn what they did, all the tech, the setups, option selects. I just wanted to learn all that stuff and put it into my game."

Punk's family has always been supportive of his gaming pursuits. “My kids had every gaming system, because I didn’t want my boys to be in the street life out here," Punk's mother, Charlene Jones, said in an interview for ELeague. But gaming pretty quickly became more than just something to occupy Punk's time. His skills improved rapidly, and his family started to see what Punk was seeing: he might have a future in this stuff. "He started learning and learning, and I thought, 'Man, this boy got skills,'" Punk's brother Lamont Ware said.

Soon, it would be the rest of the world studying Punk. During the 2017 season, Punk was showing off the power of single hit confirms, particularly with his main Karin's crouching medium kick. Many players had assumed the timing was too tight to pull off consistently, and the punishment for getting it wrong and canceling into a special on block could be massive. But the way Punk took over the competitive scene with his mastery of the single-hit confirm completely changed the way Street Fighter V was played. By the end of the game's competitive lifespan, confirms like those off of Karin's crouching medium kick became a hallmark of top-level competitive play.

"Facing him for the first time is always like, 'What the heck? No one told me this was even possible,'" Daigo Umehara said on his stream during a coaching session in 2021. It's not just superhuman execution, though. "A lot of things Punk has shown to other players, they tend to be able to pull them off too after practicing," Daigo added. "What's great about him is that he is always the first one to try it, even when it seems impossible."

As Daigo pointed out, Punk's capacity to push the limits of Street Fighter's systems made him particularly difficult to play for the first time. His ability to do things that seemed impossible put doubt into the opponents, and as soon as that doubt crept in, Punk would exploit it and blow them up. That made Punk a particularly dangerous opponent in the short sets of tournament settings, something that made him seemingly immune to the usual randomness and variance of the double-elimination bracket format.

His combination of deeply studied play along with his mind-boggling reactions made him one of the strongest players in Street Fighter V history. He qualified for Capcom Cup every single year and won multiple major tournaments in every Capcom Pro Tour season. He took home the CPT North America Regional Finals in 2017 and 2018, and in 2019, he took home Final Round, COMBO BREAKER, Ultimate Fighting Arena and First Attack, among others.

But he was still missing a championship on the biggest stages in fighting games. He had come so close, too: in 2017, he rolled through Evo's 2600 Street Fighter V competitors to be the last one standing in winners side, but he was steamrolled by Tokido in Grand Finals. For somebody that talented who had risen through the ranks so fast, it was easy to assume he'd get his soon enough.

He had another chance at a big trophy at Capcom Cup 2019, where he once again rolled through the bracket to arrive in Grand Finals on Winners Side. But he couldn't hold off iDom's Laura and Poison, and Punk would have to settle for second place once again. The pandemic would then interrupt the Capcom Pro Tour and the rest of the Street Fighter V competitive scene. Punk kept grinding, but he still wouldn't find the big win he was looking for in the brief time after offline events for Street Fighter V returned.

Street Fighter 6 would be Punk's first opportunity to take on a Street Fighter game as an established player from the very beginning, and once again, he showed a consistency that was nearly impossible to match. He won his first major event, DreamHack Dallas, and despite the fact that Street Fighter 6 had the biggest competitive pool in fighting game history, with pros from all over the world and all sorts of games fighting to be the best, Punk wouldn't miss a Top 8 for nearly a full year.

Punk's skill, just as it was in Street Fighter V, was undeniable. But the story at Street Fighter 6's biggest tournaments also remained the same: Punk kept coming up just short. In August 2023, he fell at third at two of the biggest tournaments of the year, one week after the other, first at Evo Vegas and then at Gamers8. With these performances, Punk had put himself on a shortlist of the best players in the world, but the trophy kept eluding him. A brutal loss at second place at the Capcom Cup X Last Chance Qualifier, where only the winner earned the chance to fight for the million dollar grand prize, meant Punk was going to have to wait for Season 2 for his marquee win.

Punk started out the summer of 2024 with his biggest win yet, coming up from losers bracket to win CEO 2024 with a dominant 6-1 in Grand Finals over DCQ. About a month later, Punk was back in Vegas, ready to take another crack at an Evo championship. Just like 2017, he rolled through winners bracket. But just like 2017, his world class Grand Finals opponent hit back hard. Big Bird won the first set with a brutal 3-0. It was easy to wonder if history was about to repeat itself.

But Punk was able to stop the momentum right away in Game 1. The reset went back and forth, and eventually came down to the final round of Game 5. Punk's back was against the wall, one hit from death while Big Bird was still near full health. And then, the jump-in heard around the world. That one opening was all he needed. He backed Big Bird into the corner, opened him up twice, and that was that: Punk was an Evo champion.

Punk's win didn't just cap off the seven-year story of his chase for an Evo win. It ended a 22-year-old drought for American players in mainline Street Fighter games at Evo, as Punk became the first to win a Street Fighter Evo since AfroCole won Super Turbo all the way back in 2002.

The full story of Punk is just getting started. At just 26 years old, Punk could still have multiple decades of top level Street Fighter play left in him. He still has achievements to chase after, names to take, and trash to talk. As long as there's Street Fighter to be played, expect Punk to be there. And he'll probably be waiting in Grand Finals.

See more of Punk's story in Evo Legends Powered by Qiddiya Gaming on EvoFGC.