Word: tournaments
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RAINER WENDT, German police-union head, on four bandits who stormed a poker tournament in Berlin and stole about $330,000 in jackpot money in a chaotic heist caught on videotape...
...first NCAA men's basketball tournament, held back in 1939, had only eight teams. What a boring bracket. America's obsession with college basketball has helped the tournament, more colloquially known as March Madness, grow into a 65-team sports celebration. Every year die-hard fans and clueless cubicle dwellers alike navigate the maze of March Madness seeding brackets trying to predict the winner in their office pools. Last March, President Obama's bracket received as much scrutiny as his economic policies. The tournament season has grown so mad, in fact, that a cottage industry has sprouted around...
This term first appeared in 1996, when the Philadelphia Inquirer noted that Joe Lunardi, a spokesman for St. Joseph's University and a college-hoops junkie, referred to himself as a "bracketologist" when projecting the tournament field. In 2002, ESPN.com featured Lunardi's "bracketology" predictions, and since then the word and Lunardi himself have become as ubiquitous a March presence as inebriated St. Patrick's Day revelers. Dozens of other "experts" have entered the bracketology game, and there's even a website that tracks the performance of the pundits, as if they were evaluating stocks or anything else of consequence...
Bracketology has expanded beyond basketball too. For example, a 2007 book called The Enlightened Bracketologist: The Final Four of Everything used the NCAA-tournament format to rank a wide range of minutiae, from cooking tools to hairstyles to animated characters. Bart Simpson outlasts Homer in a stirring first-round matchup, and in the video-game tournament, Tetris beats Zelda to take the title. No upsets there...
...maintain this winning attitude, as it bids farewell to co-captain Louis Caputo (184) as well. Caputo—a two-time All-American himself—had a disappointing end to his career, bowing out to longtime nemesis Phil Keddy of Iowa in the second round of the tournament. Yet his sustained excellence through four years promise to influence the next generation of Harvard grapplers, including rookie Steven Keith (125), the Crimson’s only other representative at NCAAs...