John Walters

NEW YORK - "I honestly think it's the most important sporting event in the country, a national treasure, because it unifies us for the month of March the way we're not unified at any other time of the year. It brings teams and people together from small towns and big cities, rural areas and urban ones, the East coast, the South, the Midwest, everywhere."
--Mike Krzyzewski, Duke head coach, in "How March Became Madness"

Billy Packer and bracketology. Seeds and Cinderella. The Big Dance. "One Shining Moment". Ambitious alliteration: Sweet Sixteen. Elite Eight. Final Four. March Madness.

The NCAA men's basketball tournament, now in its 70th year, is more than a sporting event. It is a lexicon, and a season — the sports fan's bridge from winter to spring. Just as a plethora of agnostics celebrate Christmas, a multitude of sports unenthusiasts eagerly fill out a bracket for the office pool.

"I consider it the No. 1 sports event in America," says sports television pioneer Eddie Einhorn, who attended his first Final Four in 1956 as a senior at Penn and called in reports to campus radio station WXTN. "At the start of the tournament, you've got 65 teams from all over the country. Even Montana can get in (though not this year)."

Beginning Thursday CBS will commit 68 hours to televising parts of all 63 games (excluding the play-in game) of the tournament. CBS, which holds exclusive television, radio and digital rights to the tourney, is in the midst of an 11-year, $6 billion deal with the NCAA.

How did the big dance get so big?

Much of the growth traces back to Einhorn, whose trajectory in sports television mirrors that of March Madness. In 1957, when Einhorn was a first-year law student at Northwestern —studying not far from where the initial championship game was played, but more on that in a moment — he created a loose network of radio stations and called the game himself. Einhorn even persuaded hoops legend George Mikan to be his color commentator.

Five years later, long before television rights for the championship game were a notion, Cincinnati played Ohio State (who had a sixth man named Bob Knight) in the championship game. It was Einhorn who cobbled together seven affiliates in Ohio that showed interest in the game and put it on air for them.

March Madness NCAA men's tournament bracket Get game stories, scores, stats, rosters, more from our special feature. NBCSports.com

It was also Einhorn whose TVS network (which was little more than a loose consortium of affiliates thrown together depending on the regional interest in a particular game) broadcast the monumental UCLA-Houston game in 1978. That game aroused NBC Sports, who the following year paid more than half a million dollars for the rights to the NCAA championship game, and who made, if not the entire tournament, then at least the Final Four, a network television event.

You can even thank (or blame) Einhorn for ESPN analyst and former Notre Dame coach Digger Phelps. Einhorn, now a part-owner of the Chicago White Sox, arranged the Notre Dame-UCLA series in the early '70s, which saw the Irish end the Bruins' 88-game win streak. That series helped make Digger a TV star.

As Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski once told him, "You were there when the train pulled out of the station, weren't you, Eddie?"

With the help of Einhorn, 72, it's time to take a look back. To discover how a tournament that lost money its first year ($2,531…or about what a courtside seat to the Final Four may run you) now earns more than $500 million annually on rights fees alone.