Abdicating to be King

Hoopfest reaches legal drinking age this year, so let’s hoist one in honor of its most bizarrely cherished traditions.

The Loser King shirt.

There have been all sorts of fitful evolutions within our civic pump-and-grunt, from relations with the downtown merchants to trying to keep brain-dead adults from fomenting riots in the 8-year-olds bracket. But we have apparently broken even stranger ground in the race to mollify, woo and now regulate Hoopfest’s also-rans.

After last year’s event, Hoopfest executive director Rick Steltenpohl proposed a new rule: that a team couldn’t forfeit its way into what he still respectfully tries to call the consolation bracket.

He was outvoted.

NBA teams can tank games – and do, don’t kid yourself – just to get more ping-pong balls in the draft lottery, so Hoopfest teams can still intentionally forfeit for a crack at a Loser King T-shirt, even though such a tactic makes you more loser than king.

“Maybe we should just sell Loser King shirts,” Steltenpohl said. “An adult team entry is $120? We could sell shirts for $30 and probably double our revenue.”

This is about the time when a history lesson is in order.

Hoopfest has always guaranteed teams three games, though it’s technically a double- elimination tournament. Lose your first two and you are hurled into a four-team consolation bracket in order to get your promised third game. If you win that one you play for the consolation title – which is actually 13th place.

In the early years, a regrettable pattern began to emerge.

“We found that people wouldn’t show up for the consolation brackets,” Steltenpohl said. “Since they were out of the running for the championship, these games didn’t hold any meaning or interest for them.”

So the organizers turned to Steve Kutsch, who has become the head of Hoopfest’s wardrobe department over the years, having designed nearly all the player shirts as well as volunteer shirts and other apparel.

Drag racing had Big Daddy Roth; Hoopfest has Steve Kutsch.

Kutsch looked at his mission and approached it in straightforward fashion – that is to say, he didn’t empty his cache of clever.

“Literally,” he recalled, “the shirt said, ‘I’m King of the Losers.’”

This tickled enough of the failed combatants that the dropout rate waned. Not everyone, however, appreciated the humor.

“I got a call from a guy all angry,” Steltenpohl said. “He said, ‘My kid is not a loser.’ Seriously? You’re telling us of all the things at Hoopfest, that’s what bugs you? ‘Whoever did it should be reprimanded or fired,’ he said. Really?”

When Hoopfest was launched 21 years ago, it was at least in part cribbed from the famous Gus Macker tournament in Michigan, where the consolation champ is not the Loser King but the “Toilet Bowl” winner.

“I thought Loser King was a little better than that,” Steltenpohl offered.

So then Hoopfest’s mission became to, well, disguise the truth. And it is here where Kutsch’s gifts have truly blossomed.

“From then on it became our inside joke – we had to hide ‘Loser King’ somewhere on the shirt,” Kutsch said. “It always says ‘13th place’ or ‘Consolation winner,’ but ‘Loser King’ is on the there somewhere, too, and there’s always a clown or a jester.”

CIA code-crackers would get a run for their algorithms from Kutsch.

One year, he borrowed the concept of Mad Magazine’s old inside back cover, whereby folding the shirt in thirds produced a different picture – and the Loser King legend. More recently, pulling the shirt taut revealed the words printed upside down.

It was once spelled out in Braille, another time in Chinese. Yet another time it was a UPC code – take it to the supermarket and put it under the scanner and up would pop “Loser King.”

“We did one where it was glow-in-the-dark sign language,” Kutsch said. “If you wore it in black light, it would show up. But then I was kicking myself for wasting two ideas on one shirt.”

Fact is, the artist is too good. Where what Hoopfest originally wanted was kitsch, now players covet a Kutsch.

“In one bracket last year,” Steltenpohl reported, “both teams wanted to forfeit to get to the Loser King game.

“Look, they’re great shirts and fun. But I don’t want one. I want a champion’s shirt. Why do people go crazy over free shirts? People will jump off a two-story building to get a shirt. Really? It’s a shirt.”

Ah, but this one declares you to be king of the losers. And sometimes, you just need to prove it.