Is that really true? Of all of the urban mythology of college basketball, is one of New York’s five wards actually the birthplace of filling the NCAA tournament bracket?
Before all these office pools were really defined in March, the “creative businessman” who appears to be the creator of the owner of an Irish pub on Staten Island, calls out his son.
“We created a pool that exploded over time,” said Terence Haggerty, the current owner of the bar. “Looking back now, how did you get it off? How did you do it? It was crazy.”
Through the decades of Jordan and Lettner’s rally and magic, through the rich embarrassment that word of mouth and contests took off, Jody’s Club Forest, a West Brighton neighborhood favorite, bets its claim as a bar (not without at least one conter humiliation to the crown) that will help ignite the bracket into the bracketed dollar business.
Hagerty’s parents, Mary and Jody, opened the club in 1976 and had already hatched the idea of running a college basketball pool to boost business by the next college basketball season. The rules were simple. I paid $10 and only selected the final four teams, national champions and total points as tiebreakers in the winner takeall format. 32 Team Tournament Field – There is no need to fill the line every round, but a total of 88 entries were warped, with the winner being $880.
By the time Jody’s club closed its pool in 2006, under scrutiny from everyone, from the IRS to sports illustration, the Jackpot was a whopping $1.6 million for the winner.
“We probably never imagined where it would be in a million years,” Terrence Hagerty said.
Candidate for Kentucky
Every year, a Cinderella is required, and Jody’s Forest Club can punch tickets as founder of gambling contests.
But is it possible to have a pencil idea of all the line winners doing the first swing in Kentucky in the 1970s, at bourbon, basketball and Louisville homes?
Bob Stinson, who passed away in 2018 at the age of 68, was a US postal service worker who applied the idea of using the Kentucky Derby Betting Slip recreational softball league bracket and fury to create his own bracket for the 1978 NCAA Tournament.
“My father thought it would be fun to fill in the brackets,” said his son, Damon Stinson. “It was kind of a bet, but it wasn’t. It was like knowing college basketball better.”
Stinson said his father sketched the bracket using rulers and unlined papers, and only required nominal admission fees. The winner won more bragging rights than the life-changing Bonanza, but that was fine with Bob Stinson, who traveled around the country for his work and brought brackets with him every March.
“He was proud of it,” Damon said. “Well, not just watching the game, let’s fill in this. He self-promoted the idea. He was tech-savvy that day. When Excel came out, the first thing my dad did was build a tournament bracket. This was perfect.
Damon Stinson says he was once kicked out of Catholic schools to sell brackets to other students for $10 each, and was caught with $350 and “a lot of brackets in my backpack.”
When you try to prove the real inventor of March Madness Pool, it seems as unbelievable as choosing the perfect bracket.
Stinson said his father really believes, but he made the first one.
“Yes, 100%. He traveled for work so no one saw what he was doing,” Stinson said. “He traveled a lot across the country around the same time he came up with ideas and spread them. He really believed. The real 1-64, we write them down, we’ll be round, that literal form is what he started.”
Hoop dream
Jody’s Club has no approval that it was a basketball betting hub. There are no banners outside, and photos or framed snapshots of past winners will not win. The decoration was primarily a homage to Hagerty’s parents, raising the children about 12 blocks away.
Haggerty admitted there was no real evidence that the bar was the first place to run an organized pool.
“If someone says, ‘No, it’s mine,’ I’ll go straight away,” Hagerty said. “Look here. It’s not something we really promote. It’s not how we were. It’s not how my dad was. It’s definitely not how my mother was.
Haggerty has no record of ticket winners – not even a $1.6 million jackpot, but on a recent trip to the pub, past champions have made a bar stool sheet, pint and pinned, which won a share of six-figure payments in 2003.
“The cut-off days for submitting tickets were as big as the other holidays around here,” he said.
When Syracuse won the national championship, Driscoll attacked it big. He used Wind Drop to invest in improving his home, especially in a new kitchen.
The real March madness at the club was thinking about where to cram mountains and mountains. Regular cash registers don’t hold hundreds, thousands, and twice! – Millions of people bet in the pool. The family once asked the nuns to hold a large collection.
“It was sprinkled here, a bit of a scattering there, little by little everywhere,” Hagerty said. “Bank. It was hidden in the house at some point. It was quite an operation.”
Pools are essentially a mom and pop business, and it took a few days to start an era without a fast, reliable computer to enter all your picks. The route to buy tickets – firefighters, police officers, elected officials, even Mike and a mad dog, Hagerty meandered the streets. Haggerty said the ticket collection will be pushed into nearby dry cleaners and other local bars, making it easier to crowd and give everyone a fair shot to play.
“It was the best week of the year,” Hagerty said.
The end of the pool
The jackpot swelled to around $997,000 in 2004, and the following year it exceeded $1.2 million. This, like the first pool in 1977, was $10 and cash only, but in 2006 it expanded to 166,000 entries and $1.6 million in prize money.
The numbers have raised a red flag in the federal government thanks to largely swollen media attention. After it was believed that the winner had requested a prize on the tax form, the IRS knocked on the door of Jody’s club. The bar was sunny for the pool – no one had taken his eyes off the top, and the bar would not benefit from seasonal business – but the IRS discovered that Jody Haggerty had underreported his income in three years. Hagerty pleaded guilty to tax evacuation charges, took probation and was forced to pay compensation.
The charges were a fatal blow to Jody’s March Madness slice.
Embarrassingly by infamy, Jody Hagerty closed the pool ahead of the 2007 tournament. Jody Haggerty passed away in 2016 without another March bet being placed on the pub.
“Part of that killed my dad, I felt,” Hagerty, 42, said of the investigation. “My dad was not really the same.”
Even after his mother died in 2019, Hagerty never had a serious idea of reopening the pool.
“What we went through was horrifying,” Hagerty said. “But if you do that, I think it’ll spike soon.”
Jody’s Club Forest remains an annual marching destination for basketball addicts who know the role of the bar. Was it really the first? Is that important too? – When making the art of betting pools and parentheses an integral part of March’s madness.
“I’ve started something that no one’s approaching since then,” Hagerty said.
