This year, March Madness begins on the Ides of March which actually is appropriate. I started down the rabbit hole of March Madness thinking that it perhaps was inspired by the March Hare and the Mad Hatter in the Disney animated musical “Alice in Wonderland.” They sang that wacky “Unbirthday Song”….or maybe the madness came from the Lewis Carroll books which inspired the 1951 movie.
But no. Unless you believe the folks from Indiana who claim the phrase, “March Madness” was coined in1942. It appeared in a poem called “The Ides of Basketball Madness” printed at the end of an essay written by Henry V. Porter, a teacher and coach at Athens High School in central Illinois.
Falling deeper down the rabbit hole, I learned that the phrase “mad as a March hare” dates back to Elizabethan England, where people noticed that male hares behave erratically when their breeding season begins. In England, that’s just about the Ides of March.
Similarly, in conifer forests and cedar bogs of the Great Lakes Region, our snowshoe hares also seem to go mad around the Ides of March when the male hares (called bucks) start competing for females by boxing with their huge hind feet. As March progresses and the females come into heat, courtship involves frenzied chases and then dance-like leaping during which the pair takes turns urinating on each other.
Breeding rabbits, brackets, squeaky shoes…In the words of Shakespeare “Oh, that way madness lies; let me shun that.”
King Lear' (1605-6) act 3, sc. 4, l. 21
