Nation on brink of Madness
H.V. Porter probably never envisioned this.
In 1939, Porter, the chief executive of the Illinois High School Association, invented the term March Madness to describe the state’s basketball tournament.
Sixty-five years later, America associates March Madness with the pinnacle of the college basketball season, a monthlong excuse to skip work, check the Internet every 25 seconds and pay attention to schools like Murray State and Valparaiso despite the fact that you have no idea where they’re located.
March Madness launches legacies (Michael Jordan) and ends careers (Rick Neuheisel). It even inflates the vernacular. (How many creative ‘Big Dance’ metaphors have you concocted this spring?) Look, without March Madness would anyone wonder what Bryce Drew is doing these days? Or would anyone know that Princeton, with its back-door cuts, is famous for more than just nerds?
This whole phenomenon would surely blow the bow tie right off Porter’s neck – assuming every 1930s high school basketball coach wore a bow tie.
Porter’s term crept onto the national college basketball scene in 1977, when Chicago sportswriter Jim Enright wrote ‘March Madness,’ a book about the Illinois state high school tournament. Brent Musberger, a former Chicago sportswriter, carried the term with him when he went to work for CBS.
Now, CBS is the source for all things March Madness – beginning with Sunday’s selection show, on which CBS talking head Billy Packer ripped the NCAA Tournament selection committee for awarding 27-1 St. Joseph’s a No. 1 seed. CBS later interviewed St. Joe’s coach Phil Martelli, who this spring has appeared on every media outlet this side of the Playboy Channel.
‘Is Billy Packer playing for a team?’ Martelli snapped. ‘We’d like to play against them. He’s got a lot to say.’
And so does everyone else on TV and around the water cooler this time of year. There’s nothing more awkward than watching CBS’s sitcom stars do basketball-related promos during March Madness. If only we could watch Ed Bradley dunk on Morley Safer during a ’60 Minutes’ spot. Now (ITALICS) that’s (ITALICS) good TV.
Yet the real March Madness news always tickles our spines. Or makes us shake our heads.
Murray State, which plays Illinois in the first round, suspended second-leading scorer Kelvin Brown on Tuesday after he was charged with possession of marijuana. Brown was already facing an arrest warrant for driving away from a gas station without paying. Murray State’s nickname? The Racers.
Some March Madness misfits pay farther down the road. Neuheisel, Washington’s football coach and an all-around slime ball, was fired last summer for betting on the 2002 and 2003 NCAA Tournaments and lying to NCAA investigators about it. Thankfully, Neuheisel rebounded last fall by returning to the sidelines – as a volunteer quarterbacks coach at Rainier Beach High in Washington.
March Madness, though, isn’t all about money. OK, it’s (ITALICS) mostly (ITALICS) about money. After all, who among us would care about Vanderbilt’s first-round game without that precious $5 stake in an office pool?
Still, the tournament has produced some classic moments over the years. Jordan’s game-winner in the 1982 national championship game during his freshman year at North Carolina. Drew’s heave and subsequent head-first slide 16 years later for Valparaiso. Christian Laettner’s 1992 turn-around jump shot that left Duke teammate Thomas Hill in tears, his hands clasped atop his fade haircut, providing one of the most indelible images in NCAA Tournament history.
In the end, March Madness probably makes room for too much of the madness, too much of the chatter from TV blow-hards, too much of the corporate influence that’s seeped too far inside an already tainted sport governed by a hypocritical and bureaucracy-laden organization.
Look past that, at least for a month, and you’ll see things differently. H.V. Porter would’ve wanted it that way.
Darryl Slater is a staff writer at The Daily Orange, where his columns appear occasionally. E-mail him at dpslater@syr.edu.
