By KATE SANTICH

By KATE SANTICH
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
ORLANDO, Fla. -- The obsession began early in life. When the boy was 2, he would gather his building blocks and create little communities across his mother's living-room floor, showing intense concentration and a keen eye for symmetry.
At 4, he built towering houses out of playing cards. At 5, he discovered origami, creating swans and elephants and frogs from colorful layers of paper.
And when he was 8, Jeff Goetz put together thousand-piece jigsaw puzzles, working on them late into the evening, even after his father had turned in for bed.
"On some level, I think we've always known," Joanne Goetz says, glancing at her husband.
There were Lego bricks, of course, and model cars and sophisticated balsa-wood planes with parts so intricate most adults would struggle to connect them. The aircraft still hang from the teen's bedroom ceiling.
But nothing would prepare the Longwood family for what was to come when Jeff turned 12.
That was when he first solved The Cube.
As in Rubik's.
One in quintillions
The Hungarian brain-teaser introduced to the globe a quarter-century ago has more than 43 quintillion possible configurations -- 43,252,003,274,489,856,000, to be precise.
Jeff Goetz managed to find the right one, the one that aligned the cube's pieces so that each side is a single, solid color.
Oh, at first he had to use a book his grandfather gave him -- "Conquer the Cube in 45 Seconds" -- a manual that would scare off most readers with its excruciating level of detail. Jeff took no pride in solving the puzzle that way, even though a lot of eventual cube maestros begin with a bit of coaching. There are, after all, more than 60 books devoted to the cause.
"I couldn't really say I solved it," he says. "So I stopped for a while, because I thought it was impossible to do on my own. And then one day I was just really bored, and I thought it would be cool if I could do it."
It proved more than cool. It was addictive.
Jeff began to practice daily, timing himself to see how quickly he could unscramble the cube and training his fingers and wrists to handle the speed without cramping. He'd practice in his bedroom, on car trips, between tennis matches, at camp, even in class, holding the cube under his desk, when he thought the teacher wasn't looking.
Making his own
The boy is 15 now -- a strapping, 6-foot-tall high-school sophomore with dark, curly hair, a deep voice and an uncommon intellect. He not only has a collection of 65 cube spinoffs -- including Rubik's Revenge, Rubik's UFO Puzzle and Rubik's Homer Simpson Head -- he also is inventing his own cubelike puzzles and selling them on eBay, though his mom has to handle the finances because he is underage. One of his creations recentlysold for $72.
But more pertinently, Jeff Goetz can now solve the cube in a mind-boggling 31 seconds.
He is, in cube-speak, a "speed cubist."
Perhaps you thought the Rubik's Cube was a fad, that it made a brief splash in the early 1980s and then dropped off the face of the earth. A vast majority of people never could solve the blasted thing.
In Great Britain, it was reported that one frustrated professor hurled it against a wall, ran over it several times in his driveway and then announced, "I am the happiest man in England."
Don't be fooled
The six-sided plastic puzzle, created by Erno Rubik, might even seem rather pedestrian in today's computer era -- its simple three-piece by three-piece by three-piece design makes it look like a toddler's plaything. But the cube's inner axis, which allows the pieces to rotate, is nothing shy of brilliant.
In fact, Rubik's little puzzle became the world's best-selling toy or game of all time. Roughly 100 million cubes sold in the first five years alone.
Demand actually far outstripped supply -- and that was part of the problem. Opportunistic vendors in Taiwan, Korea and Hong Kong pirated the design to produce a flood of cheap imitations -- cubes that fell apart or lost their colored stickers -- and the market dried up and collapsed. By 1985, the cube went out of production.
But for the loyal few, it never really went away.
"It just went underground," says Dan Gosbee, a 41-year-old Toronto engineer who contends he can do the cube in an astonishing -- and still unofficial -- 12.17 seconds. "Back in '81, there was a group called Cubism for Fun, based in the Netherlands, that started holding contests. To date, it's still going. They invite puzzle freaks, as we're called."
Although some cubists work layer by layer, Jeff prefers to start at the corners and move inward. After three years of cubing, he performs by rote, looking at the cube only to choreograph his next move.
His friends at Lake Mary High School in Lake Mary, Fla., don't quite understand the attraction, though they like to watch, a bit mesmerized, as he speed-cubes. Some even want to try it.
"They last about a minute and then give up," says boys' tennis coach Scott Reagan, who also teaches math. "I think that's why the cube fascinates Jeff, because he likes a challenge. He doesn't ever give up."