This is the third in a series of examinations of basketball-related legends and whether they are true or false.

Special theme week!

All legends involving National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) basketball!

Let’s begin!

BASKETBALL LEGEND: The NCAA co-owns the trademark “March Madness” even though the Illinois High School Association (IHSA) had been using the term for decades before the NCAA began using it.

STATUS: True

Starting in 1908, all high schools in the state of Illinois (that were part of the Illinois High School Association (IHSA), of course) began competing in a single-elimination basketball tournament in March, with the last team standing crowned the champion of that particular year.

At the time, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) did not even HAVE a similar tournament. The first NCAA tournament of this style began in 1937 (the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA) Men’s Basketball National Championship), with the National Invitational Tournament (NIT) following in 1938 and the NCAA Men’s Division I Basketball Championship, finally, following the next year.

So when IHSA official, H. V. Porter, first coined the term “March Madness” in 1939, it was clear that he was talking about the IHSA tournament, not any college tournament. It would not be until the 1980s that the NCAA tournament began to be widely known as “March Madness.” Heck, there was even a book written in the late 70s called “March Madness,” and that was specifically about the high school basketball tournament. Most sports historians agree that it was most likely sports broadcaster Brent Musberger (who both went to school in Chicago AND began his sports journalism career in Chicago) who began referring to the NCAA tournament as “March Madness” when the network Musberger worked for, CBS, began airing the tournament in 1982.

So by the 1990s, the term was most famous around the country for the NCAA’s use of the term, not the IHSA’s use.

But it was at this point in time that the IHSA decided to pursue a trademark claim for the term, and they first went about it by suing a computer game company, Vantage Inc., who the NCAA had licensed the term “March Madness” to.

The IHSA’s theory is a pretty standard one, they came up with the term and they used it for decades exclusively, so it should be their term, not the NCAA’s.

However, in a fairly landmark case of intellectual property law, the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit disagreed, basically creating a brand-new form of trademark!

One of the worries trademark holders have is that their term will become “generic.” For a trademark to remain protected, people must automatically associate the term with the company seeking the protection. For instance, when you say “Chips Ahoy,” you know specifically what company you’re thinking of. However, if you say “aspirin,” you don’t know WHAT company you’re referring to, because the term “aspirin” has just become a generic descriptive term for all pain-relieving pills. That is why the original trademark owners of the term “Aspirin” (Bayer) have lost the trademark protection on the term.

Well, here, the court basically ruled that way for the IHSA. They determined that the IHSA failed to protect their term from becoming popularized as describing the NCAA tournament.

However, the Court also determined that this really wasn’t a case of the term becoming “generic,” either, as the term is specifically used to describe a basketball tournament held in March (with most people associating it with the NCAA).

So instead of ruling the term “generic” and saying NOone could use it, the Court came up with a new concept – BOTH the IHSA and the NCAA could use the trademark! This was the first Court-ordered “dual-use trademark.”

BASKETBALL LEGEND: A NCAA game once ended with a team playing 1-on-5!

STATUS: True

In 1982, two small colleges got together to play a basketball game.

It was the Knights of West Coast Christian College (which closed its doors in 1992) versus the Sea Lions of University of California: Santa Cruz (who have since changed the name of their team to the Slugs…

)

The Knights were a bit short-manned for the game, having only 8 players available to play.

Well, early on, foul trouble plagued the Knights and they lost three players to fouls (you can only commit 4 fouls during a game – the fifth foul results in your removal from the game, you have “fouled out”).

Later on in the game, another player fouled out, so the Knights had to play 4 on 5, and yet were still leading the Sea Lions!

However, a string of fouls towards the end of the game resulted in SEVEN of the eight remaining Knights to foul out of the game with just over two minutes left to play!

All that was left was guard Mike Lockhart!

The NCAA rules at the time stated that a game could continue 1 on 5 under certain circumstances, including if the team with the 1 player was leading at the time (which the Knights were, 70-57).

There were two major drawbacks – one, Lockhart himself had four fouls, so a fifth foul would end the game in a loss for his team, two, it is pretty difficult to inbound the ball if you don’t have anyone to inbound the ball TO!

The first problem was dealt with by Lockhart just being very careful, the latter was solved by Lockhart just bouncing the ball off of the legs of the Sea Lion players, then collecting the ricochet (if he could).

Shockingly, Lockhart went on to hold off the Sea Lions, who actually ended up being forced to foul Lockhart towards the end of the game, in which he proceeded to hit 5 out of 6 free throws to lead the Knights to a 75-67 victory!

Pretty cool, no?

No wonder the story has been picked up frequently over the years by Christian ministries looking for inspirational stories!

BASKETBALL LEGEND: Everett Case created the ACC Tournament.

STATUS: False Enough That I’m Going With False

Everett Case was best known for being the head coach of the North Carolina State Wolfpack from 1946 until 1964.

One of the great coaches of his day, Case was also a great salesman for the sport of college basketball, as he helped drive the popularity of the sport in the South.

Originally, North Carolina State was part of the Southern Conference, along with the other great Southern basketball squads like North Carolina, Duke and Maryland.

However, the Southern Conference was very much a football conference at the time (although Case was doing his best to change that in North Carolina), and it was football that led to the formation of the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC).

You see, going into the 1951 season, people were beginning to almost “fear” college bowl games, mostly because there was so much money wrapped up in a team going to a bowl game that they would do anything they could to get there, including rigging their schedule so that they would not have to face the best competition. And since the Southern Conference had an unwieldy 17 teams in it, there was no good way to pick who was the “champion” of the conference. So the Southern Conference decided to ban teams from playing in bowl games, hoping that this would curtail any sketchy behavior. Naturally, colleges disagreed with this idea, and Marylan and Clemson both received and ACCEPTED invitations to play in bowl games in 1952.

They were suspended by the Southern Conference, but that just drove Maryland, Clemson and six other schools (including Duke, North Carolina and North Carolina State) to leave and form their own conference that would allow bowl games – the ACC.

It was here that Everett Case came up with an idea that was quite controversial for a few decades – while the ACC college football teams would decide a champion via polls, the ACC college basketball teams would decide via a round-robin, single-elimination tournament. So you could go 24-0 during the regular season, but if you lost in the ACC tournament, you were NOT the ACC champion – the team that won the tournament was, even if they were 11-13.

So that is an innovation that is clearly Case’s, and it was that innovation that helped drive the early interest in the ACC tournaments (which soon expanded into television, as well). However, it is often said that Case INVENTED the ACC tournament, or that he CREATED the ACC tournament. I just don’t find that accurate.

Due to its size, the Southern Conference had been doing tournaments for years (since 1922).

It is pretty clear that “all” Case did (the quotes are because it IS significant) was to adapt the Southern Conference tournament with his “winner takes all” idea.

That was most likely a great idea and led to significant interest in the ACC (that continues to this day), but it does not count as “creating the ACC tournament,” I don’t think.

Amusingly enough, one tournament Case DID create was the “Dixie Classic,” a yearly basketball tournament (hosted at North Carolina State’s stadium, naturally) made up of the four North Carolina members of the Southern Conference (then later, the ACC) – NC State, North Carolina, Duke and Wake Forest.

The tournament ceased being held after about a dozen years – the reason?

A point shaving scandal.

Perhaps the Southern Conference knew what they were talking about when they were worried about the morals of college sports (do note that NC State was also suspended for a number of years in the late 1950s when it was alleged that Case had paid a high school recruit)….

Okay, that’s it for this week!

Feel free (heck, I implore you!) to write in with your suggestions for future installments! My e-mail address is bcronin@legendsrevealed.com