By John Eckberg
The Cincinnati Enquirer

Sausage maker Terry Jump of Springdale can't remember a time when there wasn't a betting pool for the NCAA college basketball championship under way at his workplace.

"It's been going on ever since I started - about 27 years ago," he says. "I'm not in one this year, but that's only because by the time I hear about it, all the slots are usually sold out."

As the NCAA basketball tournament gears up for its annual three weeks of nail-biters, workers from one end of Greater Cincinnati to the other today are picking winners, praying for losers and filling out slots on a 65-team bracket.

The gambling forms every March have become about as commonplace in most offices, factories and shops as coffeemakers, bulletin boards and drinking fountains. And as long as all the money in the pool is paid out to the top placer or placers, it's legal, law enforcement officials say.

It's an All-American ritual that some companies have decided to support, rather than discourage.

Why not? asks Mark Meister, vice president of sales and marketing for Post Glover Resisters Inc., an Erlanger-based manufacturer of electronic equipment.

"Yes, we allow the basketball pools, and, yes, they're great," Meister says. "We call it our own March madness because it's the end of our fiscal year, too. Everybody in the company will get a form to fill out. We put in some gift certificates for first, second and third place. It basically is a way to build a little camaraderie."

How has the NCAA basketball pool grown to be such an important tradition in the American workplace?

The college game is hugely popular. Last year, according to the NCAA, about 29 million seats were filled at college basketball arenas, and those millions of people are today looking over their picks.

Former NBA coach and TV sports personality Dick Vitale - a man of many words, almost all of them spoken at a machine-gun pace - says that for most people, the NCAA pool is a way to bring a little thrill to the otherwise gloomy days of March.

"Clearly, office pools are happening all over America," Vitale says. "I personally think it creates excitement for the game, and it's done in good taste."

The popularity of the pools might simply be a reflection of the adrenaline generated by the tournament. It's an event where, almost every year, a Cinderella story may unfold as an unheralded team from a little-known college prevails over a powerhouse loaded with NBA-caliber talent.

That kind of magic is intoxicating, Vitale said, and not just for brown-bag workers on the factory floor or the Dilberts cocooning in their cubicles.

Professional baseball players, for instance, get a big charge out of the event as well.

"Every year, I go down to spring training (for Major League Baseball), and the baseball players are all talking about who they like and who they don't like," Vitale said.

"The NCAA pool is something that has really caught on with sports fans in America. That adrenaline is special and unique."

Banned in some workplaces

Still, not all companies share in the excitement.

In January 2002, the Society for Human Resources Management posed this question on its Web site: With the Super Bowl coming up and NCAA March Madness on the horizon, what is your organization's stance on betting pools in the workplace?

Of the companies that responded to the unscientific, online poll, three in 10 indicated that the pools were prohibited, 57 percent said pools were neither banned nor promoted, and 14 percent said the betting pools were permitted. The society, based in Alexandria, Va., is the world's largest association devoted to human resource management and represents more than 170,000 members.

Because the NCAA betting pools have become such an annual workplace institution, one local activist this year decided that her new charity would try to use pools to bring money and attention to her cause.

"We're partnering with existing pools this way," said Ellen Flannery, founder and president of CancerFree Kids, a nonprofit run from her Loveland home. "People run the pools the way they've always done it, but now each participant makes a contribution of a few dollars to CancerFree Kids, and we have donors willing to offer up additional prizes. Prizes are distributed at random to pool participants."

Interested office pool organizers can contact Flannery at 513-652-KIDS (5437) or at ellen@cancerfreekids.org.

So far, two large Tristate companies have signed up, and that should help develop a greater awareness of the threat of childhood cancer and lead to funding for research, Flannery says.

"The reason we thought this might work is that so many people participate in these pools who don't care that much and don't have much of a chance of winning," she says.

"By adding this element, it tends to legitimize how much time people are spending while at work on their pool. Now people actually have a chance of winning something and can feel like they are doing something good at the same time."

Still, William L. Hart, president of the Employers Resource Association, based in Cincinnati, cautions that employers should probably not embrace NCAA gambling pools willy-nilly.

While most companies view pools with a wink-and-a-nod - some executives even participate - allowing betting pools and football pools in the workplace is not the smartest thing, he says.

"I hate to sound like an ogre, but if you really wanted to protect the organization, you wouldn't allow it," Hart says. The problem is that rules prohibiting workplace solicitation of employees need to be uniformly enforced.

"If you want to protect the integrity of that rule, you really shouldn't allow collections for flowers for a sick person or the sale of cookies," Hart says. "If you do, you're running the risk of watering down the ability to enforce the no-solicitation rule at some future date."

But hey, it's fun

But sausage maker Jump does not care about any of that.

"I had Valparaiso as a pick one year," 45-year-old Jump says.

Valparaiso University did not make it to the finals - nor did Jump win any three-figure betting pool that year - but that particular tournament did leave him with something.

"Valparaiso had a pretty good run for me there for a while. And yeah, I guess I will take the memory of that run with me to my grave."

E-mail jeckberg@enquirer.com.