Geoffrey Sills, Paul Rupp, and space 88
Sills had come to the field to invent a new sport. He had grown up at his father's knee watching football on autumn Sundays and baseball on summer Saturdays, at first captivated as most young boys are by the speed, pageantry, star power, and competition he saw unfold on TV. As he entered adolescence and fell more and more out of favor with his father, Sills' interest in sports remained but as a more intellectual pursuit; he wanted to learn precisely why he enjoyed what he saw and what made millions of people invest so much emotion in the day to day struggles of their favorite teams. Much as he spent years studying the psychology of theatergoers to determine how much he could stretch their imaginations before going too far, he watched endless hours of dozens of different sports, and talked to hundreds of fans, in a quest to intellectually grasp their rewards and their significance. In 2002, burned out by his exhausting work in the theater, he decided that slow days caring for his ailing father, from whom he was still estranged, would afford him the opportunity he had craved for some time to muse upon a task few would dare attempt: to invent, from scratch, a sport combining elements which made others great. His plan was not only to see the sport into being, but to see it played on a large scale, introduced to the world just as one of his new plays would be. He saw sport as a different kind of theater, and perhaps even superior in some ways, filled with drama and emotion but less predictable than any play. He regarded his challenge to come up with a new one---and a great one---as no less significant than any year-long creative project he had ever completed.
So he sat on that poorly mown lacrosse field behind the high school he had grudgingly attended for three years and he mused from morning to dusk, turning the cheap pink plastic ball over and over again in his hands, kicking it from place to place without meaning and without much grace; he had never really been into the actual playing of sports, finding it unpleasantly taxing. As the day progressed he ignored both his hunger and the very few passersby who noticed him. When he was involved in his work, he was unreachable, and when he wasn't working, his few friends knew, he was usually unreachable still. With a great intellect had come a life marked by long periods of loneliness and silence; Sills was truly content with both.
He left the lacrosse field as the sun began to set, having had only the germ of an idea, but the germ was enough, and his sport was on its way. The key idea had come to him through observing the uneven seeding patterns in the grass left behind by a disinterested groundskeeper, who had created a few wide swaths where the field was more dirt than playable turf. This random observation, combined with Sills' penchant for kicking the pink ball as high in the air as he could when frustrated over his inability to resolve some half-developed notion, formed the genesis of Loft.
Sills returned to the lacrosse field alone every day for the next twelve days. At night he returned to his father and to a blue notebook in which he compiled his notes. On day thirteen of his project, he got into his Jaguar and drove to an industrial park in Frederick. After taking a walk around the area, he called the number he saw on a For Lease sign clinging to an enormous unit nestled between a karate studio and a workshop that made road signs. By the end of the month he was given the keys to space 88, a disheveled cavern ninety yards long and sixty yards wide. Sills paid three workmen to clear out any clutter and on November 8 he stood in the middle of that empty space with a tape measure and a pail filled with white, green, and red chalk. On the thin gray carpet he'd had installed on the floor the space, he set about the four-day process of drawing a crude representation of the first Loft field. Still he worked alone, just the way he was accustomed to.
On November 14, the following advertisement was posted on a classifieds web site:
Twenty athletic men, ages 20-30, needed for one week's work in Frederick participating in a new sport. Should have some formal amateur league experience. Pay rate $15 an hour.
Sills received more than two hundred responses to his ad and briefly interviewed five dozen men over the phone during the next week. The following Monday his twenty hand-picked athletes showed up at space 88 for Loft training. Sills told them that his was an idea in progress and that if the men had any suggestions for improving Loft, there would be a full hour of discussion after five hours of practice, but he asked them to not question or challenge any rule or procedure during the practice session itself; it interrupted his thought processes. Secondly, he informed the men that once the rules were set on the sixth day, the seventh would consist of a head-to-head tournament with the winning team given $5,000 to split amongst themselves. This guaranteed that the athletes would go all out from day one. Those who were not selected to participate in the tournament based on what Sills saw of their skills and effort would merely be paid for their hours and dismissed with a brief thanks--after they signed a strict confidentiality agreement, of course. They were not to speak of Loft to anyone outside space 88.
One of the men selected for the sport's trial run was named Paul Rupp. Rupp was twenty-eight, quiet, muscular, and claimed to have played on the University of Maryland's soccer, basketball, and baseball teams, followed by three years with the Bowie Baysox, a minor league affiliate of the Baltimore Orioles. In truth, Rupp had neither college nor amateur league experience of any kind. While he had excelled at high school sports, he had turned down a partial athletic scholarship to Towson State University in order to work in his family's sheet metal shop. After a falling out with his father at age twenty-three, he left the family business and spent three years in the army, earning a reputation as a skilled boxer while stationed in Germany. He returned to Maryland and worked as a mountaineering tour guide in the Shenandoah Valley for a time, but he had engaged in no formal athletic activity beyond keeping himself in perfect shape by rock climbing and hiking on the weekends. He showed up to play Loft at an age when most athletes are considered just barely past their prime. But Paul Rupp was no ordinary athlete.
It was the blind luck of geography which brought him into Geoffrey Sills' world; had he lived another twenty miles distant, Rupp would have never come across Sills' internet posting. Finding himself at loose ends during a two week vacation, Rupp answered the ad and the rest is history. During Loft practice he said little, but immediately proved himself to be not only in top notch shape, but the newborn sport's most energetic and talented player. Geoffrey Sills was not terribly interested in sporting brilliance at the time, requiring little more than a gathering of warm bodies to develop the rules he had in mind, but Rupp's fellow Lofters, even those who did not go on to play professionally, never forgot how he dominated the group both advancing and obstructing, even hurling himself with abandon onto the hard floor if a dive was required to save a ball in play. On the third night of practice, remembered Walter Lopes, who would become Rupp's teammate on the 2005 Loft champion team from Vandalia, Illinois, Rupp took Geoffrey Sills aside as everyone was leaving for the night and started to explain something that was bothering him about the arrangement of the field's unusual pattern of lines, which was one of the most original features of the sport. As he spoke with Sills he became more and more animated, running a sample route and gesturing emphatically as Sills continued to disagree with him. The conversation became heated, Lopes recalls, and ended with Rupp merely nodding in aggravation before he departed. Never again did he speak directly to Sills, and never again would he vocally contribute to Loft's development. Instead what he did was play the game brilliantly and with every ounce of energy in his body. What he could not convey to Sills with words he did with his play, improvising on the field and putting the ball and his team through every permutation of action he could in order to expose Loft's strengths and weaknesses. Some Lofters still claim that without Rupp's daring physical efforts, Geoffrey Sills would not have made the sport as contact-oriented as it later became. It was the addition to the proceedings of real, hard hitting that made Sills move the second round of practices outdoors, where he leased an abandoned soccer field from the county and set about the process of creating a fully realized grass playing area where Lofters could dive freely and engage in blocks and rolling tackles without fear of destroying their bodies on the unforgiving floor.
But that grass field wasn't ready yet, which meant that the first ever Loft championship tournament took place before a humorless crowd of one inside space 88 on Sunday, December, 6. Also watching were four video cameras rented for the occasion, so that Rupp could examine the tapes later. The teams were called the Montagues and the Capulets, a reference lost on almost all the athletes present, and certainly Paul Rupp, who would later admit to not having read a book or seen a play since he was sixteen years old. Sides were chosen playground-style, with Rupp being named one of the captains. And then Sills blew his whistle to begin play, acting as the sole referee, just like usual. The seven-on-seven competition lasted four hours with a brief break for lunch in the middle. Paul Rupp's team won with ease, despite the Capulets' attempts to concentrate about ninety percent of their energies on slowing him down. He was simply too good. Rupp paid out the prize money on the spot in fifty dollar bills, offered a few curt words of thanks to everyone he had selected for the tournament, and ushered them out of the building. He had a lot of tinkering to do.
He kept Paul Rupp's phone number though, as well as the numbers of several of the others who had shown up to play. Sills watched videotape for week, filled another notebook with notes, and sooner than expected, his outdoor field was ready for use. Another ad went up on the Internet asking for more athletes, for ten straight days of work this time, but at a lesser pay rate--Sills did not yet have money to burn. Rupp was there early on the day the second round of practices began. Although Sills had never overtly hinted to anyone that he intended to make Loft a professional sport, Rupp had quit his job upon receiving the follow-up invitation. Obviously he suspected something grand was in the offing---if not now, then at some point in the near future, and he intended to be a part of it. He would later say that he remained totally ignorant both of Sills' playwriting career and the man's bold intentions throughout the entire process of Loft's invention. He would have devoted his days and nights to Loft even if it had never traveled anywhere beyond space 88.
Two weeks later, there was no doubt that if being a Lofter ever did become a true profession, Paul Rupp would be its master. After taking home a new five hundred dollar bonus for taking his team to victory in the second tournament, he was again sent home to await further instruction. Three full weeks of Loft play had given Sills all the notes and videotape he needed to go forward with his grand plan. What the athletes who attended the outdoor practices remembered most about him was his visible distrust of the few passersby who idled a bit to watch the men play. Some of them asked questions about what was going on; Rupp was short with them, as he was with most people, and fed everyone the same lie: that the men were rehearsing for a display of choreographed sport for an upcoming Thanksgiving Day parade in North Carolina.
Geoffrey Sills' father died in his home two days after the second Loft tournament. Only three days later Sills was on a train to New York to begin mining for investors for the league he now envisioned, and to meet with a group of lawyers about the rights he would possess concerning its development. It would be only two years before the league came into being, but those two years felt immeasurably longer to Paul Rupp, who privately went about the process of becoming the greatest Lofter there would ever be. He had no money to rent a field or hire fellow players; in fact, he was not legally allowed to play the sport or even speak of it to anyone else. This did not stop him. For two years he worked in a pet food warehouse, spending his weekends bicycling, hiking, swimming, and developing his Loft skills all on his own, occasionally practicing with one or two other men, casual acquaintances from pickup basketball games. He did not reveal either the nature or the name of the activity he involved them in. For all they knew, Rupp was just an eccentric practitioner of an odd combination of volleyball, soccer, and dodge ball whose pieces didn't seem to add up to any sort of definable whole. Rupp eventually found out who Geoffrey Sills was and kept an eye on any news involving what sort of projects Sills was involved in. There was always just enough to keep him hopeful that Loft would one day become a full time occupation. Sills turned out a single theatrical play over the next two years as he honed his sport and negotiated for its introduction to the world, and in the meantime, rumors leaked out of what he was developing. Fed by these rumors, Rupp labored on, keeping in perfect shape. Where Sills' loneliness stemmed from an intellectual alienation from those around him, Rupp's isolation, which was just as intense, was a product of utter disinterest in anything but the thing which grew to obsess him: athletic perfection. There was no room for anyone else in his quest to dominate a sport which no one yet knew about. After a life of searching for something to feel passionate for, a quest made all the more difficult by his only average intelligence and minimal interest in anything he did not fully understand, he had discovered that thing. For better or for worse, it was Loft.
From the beginning, Geoffrey Sills held total control over every aspect of Loft's development. After privately cementing such details as the weight and color of the ball used in the sport and well as the exact field dimensions which had revealed themselves slowly and organically during practices, he turned his attention to what interested him most: the structure of the league and the fan experience. He wrote often in his notes that what made one sport more compelling than another was often not what happened on the field but what happened between games and outside the lines. A child of the theater, he knew that limiting an experience only increased its rewards, and Sills intended to go farther with the concept of artificial scarcity than any other sport ever had: there would be no actual Loft season, just a single annual one-and-done knockout tournament to grip the viewing public and make every game truly meaningful. And when people entered the stadium, Sills would expect them to commit their attention in a way more akin to watching a play than soaking up some sun as athletes did their thing. He believed that sports fans had long been seduced by the peripheral niceties of cozy stadiums and the coddling of commercial-driven TV broadcasts, and he intended to make Loft a more personal, intellectual experience for spectators, believing they longed to be totally absorbed, not just breezily entertained. He even went so far in his early notes as to ban scoreboards within the stadium, requiring word-of-mouth communication among fans to keep current, but later dropped this overly challenging requirement.
It has been argued by some that Sills' greatest achievement was a marketing one. In only two years he was able to create a hunger for Loft in America before tickets to a single game were sold to the public. This he accomplished through the production of a television show called, simply, Loft, which over the course of twelve hour-long programs traced the training of the four hundred-odd Lofters who would participate in the inaugural tournament. While slowly being taught the rules and strategies of Loft, viewers followed the drama of the selection of the teams after nationwide tryouts and the players' subsequent departure to small towns throughout the country to set up camp and prepare for the tournament. Open tryouts lasted ten days, slowly whittling down the roll of potential players and ending with actual staged games of Loft which showed impartial representatives of the Association of American Lofters just which finalists were good enough to advance, with men who had quickly become friends during the first days of the tryouts going head-to-head to settle the rosters. At the end of training, the sixty-four assembled teams were assigned not to big cities but to places like Ketchum, Idaho; Inverness, Florida; and Red Roak, Michigan. The athletes would play their hearts out for populations which had never even fielded minor league baseball teams. Not only were regional rivalries immediately created, but teams were embraced wholeheartedly by their hosts, giving rise to the tradition of Arrival Day, when the seven Lofters who played for their team first came to a town inevitably festooned with streamers and loud with the music of marching bands. The competition among towns to outdo those in other states when it came to welcoming the men who would live there for months while they trained was both comical and touching. Americans learned about places whose existence they never suspected, athletes learned the congenial humility of living through winter and spring in a small town not their own, and their hosts did everything they could to treat them like royalty. Disallowed from receiving any official payment for playing Loft beyond a small three-month per diem, the volunteer athletes were wined and dined and taken in by strangers. Loft, the documentary TV show, became an enormous hit and when tickets went on sale for the first August tournament in Boston, they eventually sold out. Emboldened by regional pride, people from all over America boarded planes, trains, and buses to follow their team to Fenway Park, even though they had no guarantee the team would even survive past the first round of the tournament.
Paul Rupp played for TLO (The Lofters of) Vandalia, a town 250 miles south of Chicago. He made it through the open tryouts with a breeze, and if he was disappointed that there would be no substantial pay for being a Lofter, he never showed it. After two years of playing the game, he was chomping at the bit to take the field in front of thirty-five thousand people and show them all how it was done.
Even as the inaugural tournament began, Geoffrey Sills, having already amassed a personal fortune from pre-selling Loft to the country, was in negotiations to give most of that money away to charity and to theatrical groups he considered groundbreaking. He was also in daily complex negotiations of another sort, attempting to do what seemed utterly impossible: dictate the ultimate destiny of a concept, a product, and a market force that was already employing hundreds of people and influencing the lives of thousands more, to say nothing of the legion of Loft fans and commentators that was growing every day. Sills' team of lawyers was carefully laying the legal groundwork to make sure his original vision went uncorrupted in every aspect. Accustomed to complete directorial respect for his brilliant stage plays, Sills was applying the same notion to Loft: while he refused to act as league commissioner, appointing instead the head of a major computer company to that office, nothing about the sport could be changed or altered without his consent. As he made strides to return full-time to the theater, he remained the sport's most influential figure behind the scenes. He never realized just how much mental energy and how many boardroom discussions, arguments, and courtroom struggles it would take to ensure that the entire sweep of Loft's story remained his creation alone. But from day one, neither the athletes nor the fans had to think about any of that. Sills wanted to give them a sport of pure excitement and joy and he would allow nothing to interfere with that. Nothing ever did.
He was in the stands as TLO Athens (Ohio) triggered the ball into play against TLO Vandalia (Illinois) on a hot August day to get the inaugural tournament underway. Sean Van Persig's initial trigger landed squarely inside the target circle, scoring a graze, and the ball was then struck forward by Paul Rupp, beginning his offense's attack. The crowd cheered, and the Loft era truly began.
