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.
Lucky
Lester
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