Real MARCH MADNESS!?!

This week in our local newspaper I saw a political cartoon featuring the earth depicted as a basketball. In a nearby spaceship circling the earth, one alien tells another alien that “it happens to earth every March.” For those of you not familiar with basketball, the comment refers to MARCH MADNESS!?! I know that you all in North Carolina feel that March Madness originated along Tobacco Road, but that is simply not true.

Only if you grew up experiencing HOOSIER HYSTERIA, can you truly know the roots of MARCH MADNESS. According to Wikipedia, HOOSIER HYSTERIA is the state of excitement surrounding basketball in Indiana or more specifically the Indiana high school basketball tournament. Originally HOOSIER HYSTERIA was structured upon the premise that any school of any size, any where in the state could play its way to the high school state basketball championship.

The NCAA basketball tournament that distracts so many folks this time of year was not initiated until 1939. As far back as 1925 HOOSIER HYSTERIA was observed and commented on by James Naismith, the inventor of basketball. Dr. Naismith visited an Indiana basketball state finals game which was played in front of 15,000 screaming fans. Dr. Naismith wrote that “while it was invented in Massachusetts, basketball really had its origin in Indiana, which remains the center of the sport.”

Some of my fondest high school memories have always been of basketball. It would start with the sectionals. My high school was located just outside the city limits of Fort Wayne, Indiana. Initially, we were a county school and played our sectional games at the Allen County War Memorial Coliseum in Fort Wayne. Since the weather in Indiana can be pretty unpredictable in March, it was always iffy as to whether you were driving in snow to get to the games. By my Junior year in high school after annexation, we were a city school. Going into the sectional tournament our team had a lackluster record. However, as can sometimes happen, our team turned it around. Our team won their first three games in the sectional tournament and set a school scoring record. One team member received a scholarship to play basketball for the Michigan State Spartans. During my Freshman year at Purdue University, I contemplated skipping a mandatory, Monday-night sorority pledge class meeting to see him play against Purdue.

If you want to get a feel for HOOSIER HYSTERIA, watch HOOSIERS. It is a 1986 film based on the true story of the 1954 Milan High School basketball team. Milan High School had a student body of 161 as compared to Muncie Central High School that had a student body of 1,600. Angelo Pizzo, the movies' screen writer and a Hoosier, took a lot of literary liberties with his depiction of the story. Angelo Pizzo once said that he had to fictionalize a lot of the story “because their lives were not dramatic enough, the guys were too nice, and the team had no real conflict.” In addition, the director of HOOSIERS, Dan Anspaugh, was Pizzo's college roommate and also a Hoosier. Pizzo and Anspaugh did do a good job though of getting across that whole “David and Goliath” appeal of Indiana high school basketball.

While growing up I did not realize how sexist HOOSIER HYSTERIA was though until I attended a high school basketball game in North Carolina back in the mid '80's. High schools actually played a girl's basketball game before the boy's basketball game. I was thunderstruck to imagine what would have happened if a school in Indiana played a girl's game before every boy's game back in the early '60's. Of course I was in high school before the enactment of Title IX which was a portion of the EDUCATION AMENDMENTS of 1972. Title IX has a tie to Indiana since Indiana Senator Birch Bayh helped write and sponsor this landmark legislation. Wow, Hoosiers helped get the ball rolling for Dr. Naismith's invention and a Hoosier also helped make it accessible to females.