Brackets and Boxing: A Brief History of Professional Pugilism’s Experimentation With Tournaments
It’s one hell of a trick that the NCAA pulls off every year with “March Madness.” From November through February, only the hardcore college hoops fans care about the sport. Then all of a sudden, we hit mid-March and college basketball becomes the absolute center of the American sports universe. People who couldn’t have named three active players one week before are dropping everything to watch Western Kentucky face Marquette in the middle of the afternoon on a weekday. It’s a testament, in large part, to the power of brackets. Throw a bunch of competitors in a single-elimination grid, and people are instantly intrigued. Add the opportunity to gamble on the outcomes, and those observers go from intrigued to invested. But even without the money and the office pools, there’s something universal and timeless about the “win or go home” urgency and beauty of 64 becoming 32 … and 32 becoming 16 … and so on, until a single champion is left standing.
