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What Exactly is March Madness?
Sports
Jan 11, 2002, 17:41
By Kelly Reynolds Staff
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“March Madness”, which now refers to the annual 64 team NCAA basketball tournament, is a phrase that was initially coined by an Illinois magazine that described a high school basketball tournament as March Madness. As a result of this 1939 article, the phrase March Madness soon became the official name of that high school’s basketball championship series.
The origin of the college basketball tournament began in 1938 with the National Invitation Tournamnet (NIT). This was the first postseason basketball tournament to be played in the United States, and started the evolution of March Madness. Following suit, the NCAA started a basketball tournament of its own one year later, which would eventually be dubbed March Madness.
The first NCAA basketball tournament played in 1939 did not turn out to be financially successful. Although this college basketball series lost a total of almost $2,600, the fans expressed enough interest to support two additional postseason basketball tournaments that same year.
It wasn’t until the NCAA basketball tournament that featured Magic Johnson versus Larry Bird that March Madness really began. The March 26, 1979 match-up between Johnson and Bird received an enormous amount of publicity and became the highest rated college basketball game in history. Although the basketball game itself was a shut out and therefore aniticlimactic, the publicity it spawned began the craze that would forever after be known as March Madness.
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