A Merit Award, Kind of

As I had mentioned in a previous post, I had ridden the school bus for 2,300 hours. During my high school years, bouncing along with me on the back of the bus was a calculator sporting a Random Number Generator. Because of this, I could entertain myself by working through playoff brackets using randomly generated numbers as the team scores.

Working through a playoff bracket of 16 teams is cool, but using a bracket of 64 teams offered more opportunity experience both the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat. So, I thought to myself, if 64 teams is cool, then why not create the "Mother of all Playoff Brackets." 128 teams would work, as would 256, and 512. My bracket, however, featured 1,024 "teams."

I put "teams" in quotes because I had to be creative in my generation of so many tournament entries. My paper spanned 16 pages taped together with 64 teams on each page.

Now, there were maybe 100 teams in the four major sports back in 1984, and if I tossed in another 100 college teams, then I would still have to come up with another 824 teams. So, I included a number of high schools, local churches, the local library, radio stations, a handful of nation states, and there were probably several Popes tossed in there as well.

And this made for some interesting match ups, no doubt. Who would have thought that the state of Alabama would face off against Pope John Paul II to see who would go on to play the winner of the Detroit Red Wings versus Fat Albert?

In the end, though, it was Merit Island High School of Florida that waltzed through the biggest dance of all to claim the grand prize. At 22 years after the fact, I felt that it was time to announce their victory to the world. Congratulations, Merit Island. Congratulations indeed.