As March Madness begins, debate reemerges on who started the brackets

As March Madness gets underway Tuesday night, a debate has reemerged on who invented the first betting pool for the NCAA Division I men's basketball tournament.

Jody's Club Forest, a bar and grill on New York's Staten Island, claims to be the birthplace of the tournament brackets now filled out by millions of Americans in office betting pools. But a Kentucky U.S. Postal Service worker who died in 2018 had also staked a claim as the father of bracketology.

Terence Haggerty, owner of Jody's Club Forest in the Wet Brighton neighborhood of Staten Island, said his father, Joseph "Jody" Haggerty, first offered customers tournament brackets to fill out in 1977.

"They were just hanging out one day and he was a creative guy," Haggerty told ABC News of his dad, who died in 2016. "And he would like to come up with some things to add business."

Haggerty's father, according to his obituary on the Harmon Funeral Home website, was a former high school basketball coach who opened Jody's Club Forest in 1976 with his wife, Mary.

Terence Haggerty said the first brackets were filled out by 88 customers who plopped down $10 each to enter the pool.

Haggerty said the idea caught fire and by 2006, the last year the bar offered the brackets, the jackpot had grown to $1.6 million. He said the contest attracted entries from local elected officials and even people from overseas.

"When the war was going on in Iraq, there were tickets being sent to Iraq," Haggerty said.

But Damon Stinson claims it was his father, postal worker Bob Stinson, who was the first to create the NCAA basketball tournament brackets in 1978, based on the idea of his recreational softball league bracket.

"My dad just thought it would be fun to fill out the brackets," Damon Stinson told The Associated Press. "It was kind of a betting thing but not really. It was kind of a who-knows-college-basketball-better kind of thing."

The annual tournament of 68 college teams is set to start Tuesday evening when Pennsylvania's Saint Francis tips off against Alabama State in Dayton, Ohio.

The University of Connecticut Huskies basketball team is the tournament's back-to-back defending champions and will play the University of Oklahoma in its first game on Friday in Raleigh, North Carolina.

UConn is seeded eighth in the tournament's West Region bracket.

The top seeds in the four brackets are Auburn University, Duke University, the University of Houston and the University of Florida.

The national championship game will be played on April 7 in San Antonio, Texas.