March Madness? It started as an ex-Badgers player’s idea
Harold Olsen didn’t foresee the nuttiness known as March Madness.
Fans painstakingly fill out brackets for 68 teams, wager big bucks, watch hundreds of hours of hoops action on TV, phones and computers and some even schedule vasectomies to coincide with the tournament so they can lie on the couch and watch basketball.
If Olsen were alive to see this, as we head into the weekend of the Sweet Sixteen, he’d probably laugh. All he wanted to do was create a basketball tournament to rival the National Invitation Tournament.
The Rice Lake native had grown up on the hardwood, playing four years at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He was a two-time All Big Ten player, a firstteam All-American and a member of the 1915-’16 Badgers team that compiled a 20-1 record on its way to becoming national champs.
After graduating from UW in 1918, Olsen didn’t leave basketball. He took off his knee pads and uniform, picked up a clipboard and whistle and became a coach for the rest of his life.
Nicknamed “Ole” and “Pops,” he coached at Bradley University in Peoria, Ill., and at Ripon College, where his Red Hawks squads won several conference titles. In 1922, he was named Ohio State’s head coach and spent more than two decades in Columbus, leading the Buckeyes to five Big Ten championships.
Olsen also was chairman of the National Collegiate Athletic Association Basketball Committee in the 1930s, and that’s where his connection to the tournament started.
He wanted to create a true national championship tournament to compete with the then-more prestigious NIT. So the first NCAA tournament was organized in 1939 with just eight teams. East and west regionals were held in Philadelphia and San Francisco, with the Final Four at Northwestern University’s gym in Evanston, Ill.
Now a multimillion-dollar operation with Final Four tickets selling for thousands, the first NCAA tournament lost money. Organizers gave away tickets to get fans to go to the games and the tournament ended $2,600 in the red.
Olsen’s Ohio State squad, which had won the Big Ten Championship that year, lost to Oregon in the final, 46-33.
By then, the pace of play had picked up thanks to the 10-second rule requiring teams to move the ball over the center line after gaining possession. That was Olsen’s idea.
The 10-second rule went into effect in 1937. The NBA dropped it to eight seconds in 2001, but the NCAA still gives teams 10 seconds to bring the ball up the court.
Like many coaches after him, Olsen eventually left college basketball for the pros. He coached the Chicago Stags to the finals of the first Basketball Association of America championship in 1947, losing to the Philadelphia Warriors. The BAA later became part of the NBA.
While coaching the Stags, Olsen found time to be a member of the 1948 U.S. Olympic basketball committee; America won the gold medal at the London Olympics that year.
The Stags didn’t stick around long, but the team managed to acquire the draft rights to Hall of Famer Bob Cousy before folding in 1950. Cousy never played a game for the Stags, though. When the team disbanded, Cousy’s rights were sold to the Boston Celtics, where the slick-playing guard helped build a basketball dynasty.
By that time, Olsen had moved back to college, coaching at Northwestern University from 1950 until he resigned in 1952 because of ill health. He also operated a popular boys basketball camp in Sarona near his hometown from 1929 until his death.
Olsen died in 1953 at the age of 58. He was posthumously inducted into the first class of the Basketball Hall of Fame in 1959. He’s buried in Skokie, Ill.