March Madness History
March Madness
March Madness, what does it mean, what's it all about? When you do a search for March madness on google you get about 2.8 million results, depending upon which database you access. At the time of my query, the number 1 spot didn't belong to a basketball team or a sport gambling site, not even close. The site in the number 1 position belonged to a middle school student out of Kentucky, a person by the name of Sandye Kabalen who attends Clark Moores Middle School in Richmond.
As I read over this person's site it became quite clear that the page wasn't about this person's love for the game of basketball but rather, a page about math. The author of this page who happened to rank #1 for a very lucrative term or phrase wasn't trying to promote anything other than a novel way to help other children understand math. Good on you Sandye Kabalen.
Further down the google list in position #3 is the Illinois High School Association web site at http://www.marchmadness.org. Upon further inspection of their site we discover that the ISHA states that the term March Madness originated in 1908 when a small invitation high school basketball tournament mushroomed into a 900-school competition by the 1930's. As the tournament wound down to what was known at the time as the "Sweet Sixteen", it was drawing sell out crowds to the University of Illinois Huff Gymnasium. And keep in mind that this was well before television was invented and the college game became popular with the average fan.
In 1939 the assistant executive secretary of the Illinois High School Association, Henry V. Porter, was so impressed by the phenomenon that he wrote an essay titled "March Madness". The term struck a chord with the newspaper reporters of the time and they used the phrase to describe phenomenon throughout the 1940's and 50's.
Although the term is now a registered trademark owned by the Illinois High School Association, more people have come to think of it as being the NCAA Basketball Tournament. Which will undoubtedly bring us back to google to continue our search on March Madness.
The #10 position in google belongs to a writer for the National Review named Stephen Moore. Now Mr. Moore clearly enjoys the game of basketball and offers many suggestions on how to make the tournament better. My favorite suggestion is for a woman named Bonnie Bernstein to wear a halter-top. Now I have no idea who she is but if another man thinks she should be wearing a halter-top, clearly I would have to take his word for it that this would be most beneficial to at least another form of March Madness!
As I clicked through more and more pages in google I would have to admit that the consensus would all agree that the term has something to do with basketball. It doesn't matter if it is high school basketball of old or collegiate basketball of today. March Madness has come to unite a lot of people who use the sport to fill their own needs. Whether it is a school age child who uses it as a means to help other children focus on mathematical problems or video game manufacturers looking digitize a past time, March madness touches so many lives in so many different ways. Personally, I view March Madness as a signal that yet another long cold winter has come to an end.
