Any team captained by Rupp was an automatic heavy favorite to take the crown; the only failures he'd known in securing one were due to a serious knee injury during his second year and a surprising upset in a late round during his fourth, when it was widely acknowledged he was playing for perhaps the weakest team in the field of sixty-four. Though there was no official annual league selection of Loft's most valuable player, the press had been mostly unanimous in anointing him MVP year in and year out. He dominated every tournament, eluding any defensive trick that could be thrown his way while laying down punishing slide tackles and striking hopeful dodgers with eerie accuracy. Meanwhile, his popularity with fans had become akin to idol worship fairly quickly. While most Loft teams, representing tiny and sometimes economically deprived populations, were delighted to have a few hundred fans from their town of origin make the trip to the tournament, Rupp often inadvertently corrupted daily life there when thousands of people took spontaneous vacations to watch him play. Even when playing in year three for TLO Mackville (Kentucky), whose title game appearance took place 1200 miles from the town, newspapers were filled with stories of citizens who had decided to get to Denver any way they could. Those who didn't travel gathered in bars and held Loft parties to make the night of the title game a unifying event rare in this modern age of community detachment.

Paul Rupp was both much more and much less than the average sporting celebrity. His demeanor, attitude toward the game, and approach to fame simply had no precedent. It was said he only lacked two things that might have made him a complete human being: an awareness of the outside world and any other interest besides Loft. Dedicated only to being the best, Rupp politely but firmly spurned the attention of the media and fans, and each night after practice went back to the dormitory-style housing in which he was mandated to live during the tournament and watched videos of athletes playing Loft. There were three hours of video study every night from January to August, seven days a week, no exceptions. Journalists cited this ferocious (and tedious) preparation ethic as the main reason for Rupp's success; only an above-average athlete, possessed by neither tremendous speed nor awesome strength, his immense knowledge of the movements and techniques of his opponents gave him a mental advantage no one could match. Because he faced so many competitors of whom he knew nothing (a by-product of the huge turnover rate in the ranks of Lofters), he narrowed his focus mostly on patterns consistent in all of them. He learned the behavioral quirks and tendencies of every type of player, becoming able to predict their motions and decisions on the fly. Personally hiring a statistical service to track and quantify every sort of action that could be performed during a game, he pored over charts and tables on weekends and in the cold months before open tryouts began again. It was said that he could size up an opposing player and know exactly what the man was capable of based solely on his body language during the first five minutes of a game. And those who were good enough and serious enough about the sport to return to it every year were known to Rupp's mind as intimately as he had known the members of his own teams. When he wasn't educating himself about the players, Rupp was mastering the art of strategy by learning what worked on the field and what didn't, when gambling made statistical sense and when it did not, what the likelihood was that a team would choose to try one thing and not the other. Though he had an assigned coach every year, he was given the authority to make virtually every decision on the field during the game. While many teams needed to use a precious timeout to meet for the setting of strategy, Rupp's teams had few such meetings during a tournament. His directions were followed to the letter and without second guessing.

His humorlessness was as famous as his disinterest in celebrating victory with anything other than a simple pumping of the fist and a handshake for a fellow teammate who had exceeded expectations. During training, Rupp was rarely invited to nights out by those he shared lodging with; rarely actively unpleasant, he simply never seemed to smile or share in a joke. He appeared totally detached, even somewhat lost, during conversations about anything other than Loft or perhaps action movies, which he tended to watch alone and seemed to be one of the few pastimes which gave him pleasure. He was occasionally linked to women in the towns where he trained but the relationships never lasted long. His interest in remaining someone's companion always seemed to have an expiration date. He had no threatening temper and didn't seem capable of any real cruelty beyond the playing field; he was just too obsessed with his raison d'etre to expand beyond himself.

He consented to interviews only when he perceived something he had said or done had been misperceived, and these were painfully dry affairs. Journalists sensed that his unwillingness to speak also had much to do with his obvious discomfort with exposing his lack of formal education. Never eloquent, he left the room if confronted with the sound of his own voice on television or radio. He knew that his brainpower extended only to Loft and there were those who pitied him somewhat for the way he devoted so much mental energy to the sport while remaining unable to make any sort of vivid statement about anything else he experienced in life. "Somewhere inside Paul Rupp might be a personality," a writer once noted, "but it has certainly never seen the light of day." Finding it necessary to act in a handful of commercials to boost his virtually non-existent official income, he spoke his lines dutifully and with all the passion of a bar of soap. Somehow it was just what the public expected and they completely forgave his woodenness. He was called "Easter Island" by some fans in reference to his slack-faced determination on the field and his reluctance to express any joy off it. The nickname was uttered with true respect by most. Rupp's one-track mind and his sheer relentlessness was a genuine inspiration for those who believed that the definition of greatness lay in a human being's desire and ability to reach the apex of his private mountain, with no apologies made, no distractions allowed, and a total mastery of the path to the top. It wasn't just young athletes who revered him and his iconoclasm; he was a role model for anyone with a dream who felt burdened by the things that prevented its realization. Here was a man who had simply cut away everything that stood between him and perfection, and who held fast to his course despite all the distracting adulation that came his way.

After his fourth year as a professional Lofter, in which he failed to win a title for the first time when playing a full tournament, Rupp inadvertently transformed himself from star to legend when he stopped doing commercials and interviews of any kind, took no more money for personal appearances, and vowed that he would never again share in the financial bonus awarded to the sport's annual champion. His vow of poverty, he explained, had no purpose beyond proving to himself that his motivations for becoming the best player he could be were not tainted by a desire for riches. Disappointed with what he perceived as a personal lack of drive during the fourth year tournament, he felt he needed to completely avoid the possible corruption of monetary reward in order to re-capture his desire to win. He wanted everyone who watched him play to know that he had taken the field for only one reason: to get that crown. Fans were amazed and overwhelmed by this unprecedented sacrifice and the media deified him, with the exception of a few philosophical sportswriters who strived to speculate on what sorts of personal demons were pushing Rupp toward self-martyrdom. He had no interest in being praised for his choice and refused to discuss it beyond his final interview with Sports Illustrated. While turning his back on financial gain made him more famous than ever, it only heightened the invisible wall between himself and his teammates, as he seemed to retreat further into a world of endless practice, video study, and rumination they did not share or understand.

There were a handful of Lofters who became temporarily famous for their achievements on the field, but only Paul Rupp was a household name. Every year dozens of successful Lofters who might have become stars did not return to open tryouts because they could make better money at even the lowest levels of other professional sports. Rupp refused all offers that came his way while similarly talented Lofters chose to try basketball, football, and soccer. In fact, a Lofter who had led his team to the title in the second year (when Rupp was conveniently sidelined after knee surgery) and in doing so set the tournament scoring record for an advancer quietly opted to report to the Green Bay Packers six weeks later, where he went on to have a middling career as a backup tight end. He never played in front of a TV audience as large as the one that had watched him score 35 potentials against TLO Norwich (New York) in 2006, but at least he could afford to feed his family.

Geoffrey Sills was often criticized for Loft's policy of keeping players poor, but he was intractable in his insistence that Loft remain a sport played only by those who participated for the love of the game. The A.A.L. donated tens of millions of dollars to charity in an effort to keep any private individuals or companies from profiting too much from the sport, and it put back every penny it could right back into the tournament, keeping ticket prices low and making sure that no one ever had to pay to watch a game outside the stadium. Loft's famous Principles of Foundation, the eighty page document which dictated its purpose, organization, and daily procedure, guaranteed that the fans were kept much happier than the athletes. Much to Sills' contentment, it was an ironclad legal document which managed to withstand the constant overtures of wealthy business interests who wanted to vastly expand Loft's profit potential. It drastically limited the amount of money that could be made in such secondary Loft industries as fantasy leagues, video games, and clothing merchandise, and stripped the TV networks of their ability to engage in any sort of advertising during the action of a game. Commercials of any kind were allowed only between stages one, two and three; still, the ratings for the tournament were high enough that the networks rotated the rights to show it, happy to break even on the deal. The Principles of Foundation gave Loft the power to create millions of dollars without the creation of many millionaires other than the game's creator.

After Loft's third year, people more or less forgot about Geoffrey Sills, who rarely attended games and whose involvement in the sport eventually amounted to little more than an occasional signature. He considered Loft one of his better achievements in drama but was anxious to pick up where he left off in the theater. Eventually he declined to speak about the game in any real detail, although it continued to fund any number of his theatrical projects. When he did talk about Loft, he was inevitably asked what he thought of Paul Rupp. Sills, always anti-social, had never spoken to the man after "directing him" years before during Loft's infancy, but he tended to be unguarded in his praise. It was not so much Rupp's athletic skill that intrigued Sills as the way he conducted his life. In Rupp he saw a kindred spirit; both men cared about their craft to an extent that made them seem exotic and strange to normal people. They lived in utterly different worlds beyond that and would never become friends, and as fate would have it they would never even be photographed together. So as Rupp continued to win championships, it was never Sills' hand he shook as the crowds cheered, but the appointed commissioner's instead. The playwright had moved on.

Move on to Championship Night, 2012

Return to main page