Whether you choose a fan favorite or go all in on a Cinderella story, creating the perfect March Madness bracket is now a yearly tradition.
But before the days of online brackets and office pools — where did the original idea come from?
“A lot of people like to say that we started the brackets and stuff like that, which we’re pretty proud of,” said Terence Haggerty, owner of Jody’s Club Forest on Staten Island. “I’m not going to tell you it’s official that we were the ones who started it. My father just started a pool, and it just grew and grew, and the popularity of it was just astronomical.”
Haggerty’s dad, Jody, founded his Irish pub in 1976. A few months later, he came up with the idea to bet on the NCAA basketball championship. For $10, you picked the Final Four teams and the national champion.
Jody’s first pool, in 1977, had 88 entrants and a jackpot of $880. It quickly became the talk of the town. Haggerty says every March for 30 years, Jody’s Club and the surrounding streets were packed with people trying to get their picks in.
“It got to the point where they literally closed the street down,” said Jimmy Steinhilber, a participant in every single pool since 1977.
“It was the thing to do on Staten Island,” Steinhilber said. “If you were a sports fan, you were in Jody’s pool. And if you weren’t, then you weren’t a sports fan. That’s pretty much what it was.”
The pool quickly became a family affair, and a huge part of Haggerty’s childhood.
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“I remember my mother on Saturday morning going over the numbers,” Haggerty said. “My father was the face of it, don’t get me wrong, but my mother was the nuts and bolts of how it ran.”
By 2006, it was a national phenomenon, with 166,000 entries and a jackpot of $1.6 million. The major winnings prompted a visit from the IRS, which had an office just two blocks away.
“There was the gentleman who won in ’06 and claimed that he won on his taxes. So that was it,” Haggerty said. “So the jig was up.”
The Haggerty family’s unforgettable ride coincided with an equally historic bracket pool hundreds of miles to the south.
In Louisville, Kentucky, Damon Stinson says his dad, Bob, came up with the idea for creating individual brackets in the 1970s, inspired by a recreational softball league.
“That’s just when it clicked and he decided, ‘You know what, why don’t we do this for the NCAA basketball tournament?’ And so to re-create that excitement, he went home that night and he got a ruler and a pencil, put it to paper, and drew out his own brackets,” Stinson said.
What started with pencil and paper in the living room transformed into “Bob’s Jackpot” with hundreds of people involved and thousands of dollars in winnings.
“To understand my dad, you really have to understand the people in the city of Louisville,” Stinson said. “We really love college basketball, and we love sports, and we’re not afraid to make a wager or two along the way.”
Stinson said his dad traveled a lot for his work in the U.S. Postal Service and shared his bracket idea with anyone and everyone along the way.
Even inspiring a young Damon to get in on the action.
“In high school, I decided to copy my dad’s model,” Stinson said. “I got busted with $350 in my pocket and a bunch of brackets in my backpack. And yeah, I got in a little trouble for that.”
While Stinson said his dad really believed he had the original idea, he was never in it for the money.
“He probably could have thrown a patent on it or something of that nature, and probably made a whole lot of money out of it, but that wasn’t his spirit,” Stinson said. “His spirit was more about the passion of it all, and that’s where it really comes from.”
While there may be more than one origin story for how the iconic March Madness bracket got its start, one thing is clear: A true sense of community — and an unwavering love for the game — has always been at the heart of it all.
“My dad was a very fun, loving person and this was a way for him to kind of use what everybody was into to try to pull everybody together, and it worked,” Stinson said.
“What that pool did for our neighborhood was it brought us, it brought a community together,” Haggerty said. “It really did.”
