As March Madness gets underway Tuesday night, a debate has reemerged on who invented the first betting pool for the NCAA Division I men’s basketball tournament.
Jody’s Club Forest, a bar and grill on New York’s Staten Island, claims to be the birthplace of the tournament brackets that are now filled out by millions of Americans in office betting pools. But a Kentucky U.S. Postal Service worker who died in 2018 had also staked a claim as the father of bracketology.
Terence Haggerty, owner of Jody’s Club Forest, said his father, Joseph “Jody” Haggerty, first offered customers tournament brackets to fill out in 1977.
“They were just hanging out one day and he was a creative guy,” Terence told ABC News of his dad, who died in 2016. “And he would like to come up with some things to add business.”
Terence’s father, according to his obituary on the Harmon Funeral Home website, was a former high school basketball coach and opened Jody’s Club Forest in 1976.
But Damon Stinson claims it was his father, postal worker Bob Stinson, who was the first to create the NCAA basketball tournament brackets in 1978, based on the idea of his recreational softball league bracket.
The annual tournament of 68 college teams starts Tuesday evening when Pennsylvania’s Saint Francis tips off against Alabama State in Dayton, Ohio.
The University of Connecticut Huskies basketball team is the tournament’s back-to-back defending champion and will play the University of Oklahoma in its first game on Friday in Raleigh, North Carolina.
The national championship game will be played on April 7 in San Antonio, Texas.