As we gear up for March and basketball tournament season, this is the first of several mini-excerpts we'll offer from The Madness of March: Bonding and Betting with the Boys in Las Vegas by Alan Jay Zaremba. Read from the prologue:

"The first weekend of the NCAA basketball tournament brings a dedicated legion of basketball bettors to Las Vegas. From early Thursday morning until Sunday evening, men—and the crowd is overwhelmingly male—sit in rowdy smoky casinos watching up to forty-eight college basketball games. Who are these people? They pay to fly out to Las Vegas, spend money on lodging, sit for four days straight watching basketball games, and often lose hundreds of dollars on near misses and if onlys, and yet as they taxi to the airport on Sunday evening they are planning their betting strategy for the following year with undiminished passion.

In March 2003 the NCAA considered canceling the NCAA tournament because the start of the games coincided with the beginning of the Iraq war. On Tuesday evening, March 18, during an internationally televised address, President George Bush announced that Saddam Hussein had twenty-four hours to give himself up. If Hussein did not do so, sometime after the twenty-four hours had elapsed the United States would strike.

On Wednesday night—twenty-four hours later to the minute—two planeloads of basketball bettors waited by an America West gate at New York's Kennedy airport for their flights to Las Vegas. Both flights were completely sold out. Above the bar where the travelers were clustered, television anchors described the beginnings of the war.

The men at the bar paid no attention to newscaster Peter Jennings. They were looking at their ncaa tournament brackets.

On Thursday morning, hours after the United States had launched its attack, the tension at the Tampa International airport was palpable. Reporters randomly asked passengers if they were unnerved. Baggage underwent more scrutiny than usual, and security at the airport was extensive. I boarded my Southwest flight to Las Vegas with some anxiety. I was not settled into my seat for more than two minutes when a fellow in front of me—a stranger—turned around and asked me if I thought Marquette could cover the spread.

Later that day I was seated in the Paris Hotel on Las Vegas Boulevard—the Strip—watching the games. The Paris theater was filled with bettors from all over the country who, apparently, were not troubled by the international crisis. Four movie screens were suspended from the ceiling above the stage. The well-oiled spectators who filled the theater were focused on the four basketball games projected on the giant screens. When Dan Rather periodically interrupted the contests with reports from Baghdad, the booing in the theater was deafening."