March Madness afflicts millions of American sports fans each spring. Victims of the fever exhibit spontaneous outbreaks of basketball jargon, cry over busted brackets and call in sick to work on Thursdays and Fridays. There is no known cure for March Madness. But basketballogists know its origin. The malady was first diagnosed in 1939 by Illinois high school sports administrator Henry 'H.V.' Porter.
He was as Illinois as a horseshoe sandwich. And he loved high school basketball. 'When the March Madness is on him, midnight jaunts of a hundred miles on successive nights make him even more alert the next day,' Porter wrote romantically of the state’s exuberant high school basketball fans during the raucous statewide tournament in March 1939.
Homo of the Hardwood Court is a hardy specie ,' Porter wrote in his influential 1939 essay under the headline, 'March Madness.' His description of basketball fans of the Great Depression still hits nothing but net today. 'The thud of the ball on the floor, the slap of the hands on leather, the swish of the net are music to his ears … He is biased, noisy, fidgety, boastful and unreasonable — but we love him for his imperfections.
Musburger traces the phrase he popularized to Porter and to Illinois, where he worked as a young reporter in the 1960s after graduating from Northwestern. 'At that time, the Illinois high school basketball tourney was very much bigger than March Madness, which had not really taken off yet,' Musburger, now the face of VSiN Network, told Fox News Digital in an interview. 'Towns in the Midwest lived for high school basketball.