Now that the 64 teams in the Men’s Division I NCAA Basketball Tournament has been sliced down to a mighty four (congratulations,: OSU, Kentucky, Louisville, and Kansas); and in keeping with the spirit of ``March Madness’’, I came up with my Final Four of most memorable events associated with the word``March.’’
They are:
1.) Most Memorable Military Engagement:
`Sherman's March to the Sea’’(November 15, 1864 to December 21, 1864) Maj. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman after capturing Atlanta, marched the Union Army to the sea, capturing the city of Savannah in December, and then marching through South Carolina into North Carolina.
2.) Most Memorable Line from a Newspaper Article: ``La verite est en march; rien ne plus l’arreter.’’
``Truth is on the march and nothing can stop it.’’
-Emile Zola, Le Figaro, November 25, 1897.
The article—titled J’Accuse (I Accuse)-addressed to French president Félix Faure was written by famed novelist Emile Zola in which he laid out the gross injustice inflicted on Captain Alfred Dreyfus who had been wrongly convicted in late 1894 of handing military secrets to Germany. Zola persuasively argued that the Jewish officer had been the victim of deep-seated anti-Semitism and circumstantial evidence, and more appalling still was that his conviction was based largely on a forged document.
Zola’s highly publicized article swayed public opinion, resulting in Dreyfus’s conviction being overturned in 1899.
3.) Most Memorable Musical March: Felix Mendelssohn's "Wedding March"
This famous March was first performed in Potsdam in 1842, as a part of Mendelssohn's incidental music for the Shakespeare play A Midsummer Night's Dream. It then became a wildly popular piece of wedding music soon after princess Victoria Adelaide Mary Louise, the oldest child of Queen Victoria, married Frederick William IV of Prussia on January 25, 1858.
4.) Most Memorable Marching Band:
On November 20, 1982 with John Elway's Stanford team clinging to a one point lead with just 4 seconds left in the game-the University of California Golden Bears, using 5 lateral passes managed to matriculate down the field and plow there way through the Stanford Marching Band-to score one of the most controversial and highly disputed game winning touchdowns in college football.
-Bill Lucey
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March 25, 2012
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