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Yes, as you fill your NCAA brackets this week with some 50 million others hungry for buzzers, Cinderella stories and the Final Four – while deploring the rebuffs and surprises – tip your pencil and thank Jody Haggerty, the late, boisterous Staten Island bar owner who, by most accounts, is the godfather of bracketology.
It was an invention that nearly landed him in federal prison (and then led to the spectacle of President Barack Obama fill out a bracket on ESPN.)
Haggerty, who tended bar at Jody’s Club Forest, was a man of many words and random questions. After his death in 2016, local newspaper columnist Tom Wrobleski wrote about their last meeting:
The conversation went something like this: Jody said that everyone knows what the First Amendment to the US Constitution is. And everyone knows what the Second Amendment is. Many people also know about the Fourth Amendment, he said. But what is the Third Amendment? …In other words, you never knew what to expect when you walked into Jody’s, what the topic of the day might be. It was one of the glories of the place, even for those of us who were only occasional customers.
In early March 1977, the topic turned to the upcoming NCAA tournament. Haggerty asked some customers to predict the winners of each game. They printed the pairs, chose the winners and paid $10 each – 88 people, $880 for the winner.
The pool swelled from year to year, to the point that there were real traffic jams to reach the bar. Jody’s Club Forest could barely keep up, according to Haggerty’s son, Terrence, who recounted the origins of pool in “Only a Game”, a sports program on public radio:
I would say in 1998, 1999 we started getting into computers. We had a computer scientist. He had a program for that. We probably had 30 people doing picks. We had them in different houses around Staten Island and, you know, basements, and it was… interesting.
The awards became so big that journalists began covering the event, which gave people the idea of creating their own pools across the country. At Jody’s Club Forest, the party turned into tension – over taxes. In 2005, the winner of the $1.5 million prize — that’s not a typo — was identified as “Noe Body.”
Bill Littlefield, host of “Only a Game” request Terrence Haggerty if the prize money was hidden in a box under the cash register. Not exactly, Haggerty explained:
The money was in the banks and, you know, it was spread here, there, everywhere. …. I don’t know if I really want to go into detail about how they got paid, if you can understand what I’m saying. I know it was a long time ago, but it’s something that we’re not 1000% comfortable, you know, talking about. You know what I mean? I hope you understand what I mean.
Haggerty had reason to be nervous. In 2006, after a winner apparently reported his winnings, the IRS opened an investigation that led his father to plead guilty to tax fraud, earning him two years of probation. The elder Haggerty shut down the pool, accusing the media of attracting too much attention.
“You and your colleagues did it,” he told the New York Daily News.
Sports Illustrated covered the fall of the swimming pool.
The title of the story: “Sadness of March”.
