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This is Sophie Cunningham from Show Me Something. Do you know the symptoms of moderate to severe obstructive sleep apnea or OSA in adults with obesity? They may be happening to you without you knowing. If anyone has ever said you snored loudly or if you spend your days fighting off excessive tiredness, irritability, and concentration issues, it may be due to OSA. OSA is a serious condition where your airway partially or completely collapses during sleep, which may cause breathing interruptions and oxygen deprivation.
Learn more at don'tsleep on OSA.com. This information is provided by Lilly, a medicine company. Is it there? Shh. You won't believe what my new friend just told me about dinosaurs.
Is your child having conversations you never imagined? Are they learning without realizing it? It's not a tablet. It's not a toy. It's Miko Mini Plus, the AI-powered companion that turns curiosity into endless learning.
Hear the future of playtime. Meet the extraordinary Miko Mini Plus. Only at Costco. Hear that? That's what it sounds like when you plant more trees than you harvest.
Work done by thousands of working forest professionals like Adam, a district forest manager who works to protect our forests from fires. Keeping the forest fire-resistant synonymous with keeping a forest healthy, and we do that through planting more than we harvest and mitigate those risks through active management. It's a long-term commitment. Visit WorkingForestsInitiative.com to learn more. This is Our American Stories, and now a story from our own Monty Montgomery.
and Tim Harwood of Waterloo, Iowa's News Talk. 1540 KXELAM, Tim is the author of Ballhawks, a sports history about the Waterloo Hawks. A professional basketball team. Here's Tim. Um During the era just after World War II, Waterloo had around 70,000 people give or take.
Waterloo is an industrial city. It's in the middle of the farm belt, but it was the first place where John Deere tractors were ever built.
So a big manufacturing base that might have been more reminiscent of a Rust Belt city in Ohio or Indiana or Michigan. But this story isn't about John Deere tractors, it's about basketball. Waterloo Hawks basketball. The hawks of the late 1940s and into the first years of the 1950s were unique because they were, of course, the only. major league level team that Iowa has ever had going beyond Waterloo.
It's a unique circumstance for the entire state, and Waterloo is in the right place at the right time. But to understand why Waterloo ever had a professional basketball team, we have to go back. Back? to the Great Depression. During the Depression era, The best professional basketball players in the United States played for barnstorming teams.
They'd travel around the country, they wouldn't have a set schedule, they'd pick up games as they could find them, and For the real stars of the era, they could make a very good living. In fact, a better living doing that than they could trying to play for one team that might play two or three games a week. By the latter years of the Depression, into the mid to late 1930s, there was a major league that formed. It was called the National Basketball League eventually. And the name is something of a misnomer if you think of sports that are in the National Basketball Association or the National Football League or the big major leagues that we have today.
Because the game took root in places like Fort Wayne, Indiana, and Oshkosh, Wisconsin. And there were a variety of reasons for that. They had industrial bases. Many of the teams of that era were owned by companies. And so the players who Took those opportunities.
Not only in many cases played basketball, but also worked for the company that might have owned the team or for another large business in the community. The National Basketball League was the preeminent league, though. through World War II. Yeah. Coming out of the war years, The owners of major arenas in the East, primarily, Madison Square Garden, Boston Garden, even Chicago Stadium, more toward the Midwest, and others got together and looked at basketball at the pro level as something that could fill their buildings.
They, in many cases, had success with college basketball games, particularly at Madison Square Garden during the 1930s and 40s, and thought that they could fill. 25 to 30, or maybe more, dates in their buildings that otherwise might be idle with professional basketball. They formed their own league, the Basketball Association of America, and for a few years post-World War II. The National Basketball League, the Basketball Association of America competed against each other. And the level of competition rose.
It became challenging to try to get prestige. It became challenging to try to attract top players. There were bidding wars for players in some cases, and that got expensive because there wasn't nearly the money in professional basketball in the 1940s that there is today. It was a matter of determining who would control the future of professional basketball. They came up with a variety of ways to try to approach that situation, but in the offseason between.
The 1947-48 schedule and the 48-49 season. The Basketball Association of America hijacked four of the NBL's teams in their entirety. They talked the owners of the Minneapolis Lakers and the Fort Wayne Pistons and teams in Rochester, New York and Indianapolis, Indiana into jumping from one league to the other.
So the National Basketball League in the summer of 1948 needed teams. They needed to fill out their roster of cities that would be able to make them a viable league. And they were able to add a few different clubs, including a team in Waterloo. The Hawks came into being because they had all the right elements in place. They had a...
Hippodrome building on the National Cattle Congress fairgrounds that could seat seven to eight thousand people. They had a Basketball floor that was in place that was brand new. And they had a reputation already for supporting. Sports teams. They also were in a very fortunate circumstance because a local who had moved on and become a wrestling promoter primarily in Des Moines had come into possession of the team's roster that had played in Toledo, the franchise rights had gone to a former boxer and boxing promoter, wrestling promoter named Pinky George.
Pinky had been a fighter in the 1920s and ultimately had managed to make a career as a promoter through the Great Depression. He actually managed a couple of boxers who would fight Joe Lewis during their careers as they made their way up to the top of the boxing world and have a chance at the legendary champion of the era. He had originally intended to bring professional basketball to Des Moines. But the details just didn't come together. There wasn't the kind of support that he was hoping to have.
It was challenging to find a venue to put the team in. And so, because he was familiar with Waterloo after having grown up right next door in Cedar Falls, he decided that he'd put the Hawks in the Hippodrome. And there was a lot of enthusiasm for that immediately from Waterloo fans who always, I think, felt like. The city had a lot to offer. They felt like they had big shoulders for a small city, I think would be a fair way to describe it.
And so when they had this opportunity, they jumped at it. But the situation was still untenable between the two leagues. The Basketball Association of America hadn't extinguished the NBL. The National Basketball League was still hanging on and With bidding wars for players with the the efforts that both entities were having to put forth to try to claim that they were the preeminent league. It finally became inevitable.
And you can tell from the acronyms that the two leagues Used, the NBL and the BAA would come together, they'd merge and become the NBA. They lost several teams in the process, but Waterloo was determined. The community and its leaders were determined that they were going to keep a team in the city and have a chance to play against opponents from New York and Boston and Philadelphia and all of the places that you really do think of as major league destinations then and now. Waterloo had its place as they saw it, as the people of the time saw it in Major League Basketball. You know, they had players who were all-Americans.
They had visiting teams coming in that had stars that people knew from their years in college and who had gone on into professional basketball. They had players from the World War II era who had served during the war prior to returning to college and then ultimately becoming professional basketball players. And you've been listening to Tim Harwood of Waterloo, Iowa's News Talk 1540 KXCLAM. And this is a story of a league we all now know and the maturation of professional sports. And hearing about these two leagues finally, in the end, the NBL and the BAA merging to form what we all now know as the NBA.
And when we come back, more of the story of the Waterloo Hawks. little piece of American sports history here. on our American story. Ten athletes will face the toughest job interview in fitness that will push past physical and mental breaking points. You are the fittest of the fit.
Only one of you will leave here with an IFIT contract for $250,000. This is when mindset comes in.
Someone will be eliminated. Pressure is coming down. This. Watch it on Prime Video starting January 8th. Yeah.
Shhh. You won't believe what my new friend just told me about dinosaurs. Is your child having conversations you never imagined? Are they learning without realizing it? It's not a tablet.
It's not a toy. It's Miko Mini Plus, the AI-powered companion that turns curiosity into endless learning. Hear the future of playtime. Meet the extraordinary Miko Mini Plus. Only at Costco.
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After that, it'll cost $12 every four weeks. You can cancel any time. But don't wait, this Black Friday seasonal offer won't be here for long. Go to Washington Post dot com slash iHeart and grab this deal before it's gone. That's Washington Post dot com slash iHeart.
This is Sophie Cunningham from Show Me Something. Do you know the symptoms of moderate to severe obstructive sleep apnea, or OSA, in adults with obesity? They may be happening to you without you knowing. If anyone has ever said you snored loudly or if you spend your days fighting off excessive tiredness, irritability, and concentration issues, it may be due to OSA. OSA is a serious condition where your airway partially or completely collapses during sleep, which may cause breathing interruptions and oxygen deprivation.
Learn more at don'tsleep on OSA dot com. This information is provided by Lilly, a medicine company. Bring incredible sound into every corner of your home this holiday with the new Wim Sound smart speaker. Get high-resolution audio with a 1.8-inch touchscreen, smart control, and modern design in one powerful speaker for just $2.99. From quiet mornings to lively holiday gatherings, Wim Sound makes every moment sound better and feel better too.
Get the gift of the season for the music enthusiast in your life or for yourself. Wim Sound, beautifully designed, effortlessly connected. Shop now at Amazon and search Wim Sound. That's W I M S O U N D. And we continue here with our American stories and the story of the Waterloo Hawks.
Who, when we last left off, had joined the newly formed NBA. But before we get into the rest of the story, we have to know who the players on the Hawks were. Here again is Tim Harwood. Arguably, the biggest star for the Hawks. Initially, he was a player named Harry Boykoff.
At one point, he actually held the scoring record for Madison Square Garden as a college player, a big guy, a lanky center, and not particularly fleet of foot, but had a tremendous personality at the same time. Actually, he had played for a season in Toledo before he came to Waterloo. He chose the NBL because the team in Toledo offered to get him a job that would keep him busy. He was an accounting major at St. John's and so wanted to put his business skills to use, took an offer to go play in Toledo.
Because they could promise him a job during the offseason that would supplement his basketball income. Another All-American player was from the University of Tennessee's named Dick Meehan, and he was the biggest scoring star for the Waterloo Hawks. During their season in 1948-49 when they were in the National Basketball League, he was among the top scorers in the league that season. Meehan actually was, I believe, in the Air Force. At that point, it would have been the Army Air Corps during World War II.
It was quite a bit different in that era. Today, we think of athletes, regardless of their sport, training year-round, and it's a full-time job to be an athlete. In that era, the 1940s and into the 1950s, players would arrive at the start of the season, and they'd have a couple of weeks, and that would be when they would be getting in shape. And during the offseason, there wasn't a tremendous amount of training. There weren't a lot of rules regarding what players could do with their time.
There were some players, actually, in the era, and you don't see this at the NBA level today that I can think of in any sense, where there were players that, in some cases, would play professional sports. They might be baseball players in the summertime, play basketball in the winter.
So, when they would arrive in the fall, they would train for a few weeks. They'd play a few preseason games strung together and dive right into the field. the Schedule after that. It's interesting that. A lot of players had off-season jobs.
Typical average player's contract as a professional basketball athlete in the 40s and 50s might have been in the range of $4,500 a year, $5,000, some were less, some were more. Although that was a reasonably good amount of money to be making for six months. For many players who were college educated, who had aspirations to be executives or to have careers that would be fitting for their college degrees. They were working some other job in the offseason on the assumption that they were only going to be professional basketball players for a few years. They'd have a whole lifetime ahead of them where they would need to earn an income.
Waterloo's first NBA game was actually against the New York Knicks in October of 1949. And it was a tremendous way to. start Waterloo's time in this new league after being what they considered a major league basketball city for one year.
Now to begin the second season of Major League Professional Basketball. The Hawks were hosting the New York Knicks. It was Waterloo in northeast Iowa. Literally over a thousand miles away, hosting a team that had come in on their own private rail car from New York and that was. The epitome, it was the team from New York, and that's all that mattered.
And so, Waterloo on opening night in 1949-50 hosted the Knicks and hung with them. But New York took that game by the final of 68-60. Just a few days later. The Hawks beat the Boston Celtics four days after hosting the New York Knicks and beat them pretty soundly, 80-66. And that was the first win for Waterloo against an opponent in the National Basketball Association.
In a lot of ways, that's the highlight of the Hawks story. But teams like the Knicks and the Philadelphia Warriors, Boston Celtics, weren't particularly excited about putting Waterloo Hawks on their marquee. And so they found some creative ways to get around hosting home games against Waterloo. They would play double headers where The let's say the team in Philadelphia might play the team from Baltimore, and the undercard game, the early game, was New York versus Waterloo, and that would be in Philadelphia. And then Waterloo would be in New York, for example, and might play Baltimore or Philadelphia while the Knicks played.
A more prestigious opponent, at least more prestige in terms of the city that they came from.
So the Hawks did play in Madison Square Garden just before Christmas in 1949, but they didn't play the Knicks. They played the Philadelphia Warriors instead, and the Knicks had a different opponent that night. But they did end up seeing just about all of the major venues of the era that were hosting professional basketball. And it just wasn't against the team that you might have expected on the opposite bench. In the 1948-49 season, the Hawks were competitive.
They were very successful early on, and you could say that they ran out of gas. You could argue that they were either the sixth or the seventh best team in the nine-team National Basketball League. During that season and into the start of the 1949-1950 NBA season, the Hawks were a slower, more methodical team. They weren't as athletic as some of the opponents that they faced, and that was probably their downfall. They also dealt with some injuries, particularly in the 1950s.
48-49 season that slowed them down when things appeared to otherwise be going along pretty well. And the Hawks finished near the bottom of their division, fifth out of six teams in 1949-50. In the spring of nineteen fifty. There was a sentiment among the large cities, among the owners, among the media, that a city like New York and a city like Waterloo or Sheboygan, Wisconsin shouldn't be in the same league. They weren't on par as far as some of the owners saw it, and as far as many of the columnists for the major papers saw it.
So the National Basketball Association. Worked through a couple of ideas that they thought might push some of the smaller city teams out of the NBA. They, for example, had to put up a $50,000 performance bond, where if the team couldn't operate, ran out of money, couldn't pay its players, couldn't make its road trips, and failed to be a functioning entity within the NBA, that $50,000 bond would be forfeited. It had to be backed by an insurance company or a bank. And the Hawks and the Sheboygan Redskins.
We're able to manage that because they had tremendous community support in both cases. Uh And so they went to the league meetings in April of 1950. And Ultimately The rest of the league voted to exclude Waterloo, Sheboygan. and Denver. from the scheduling process.
That was really the end for Major League Professional Basketball in Waterloo. I'd like to read something from the local paper, The Waterloo Courier. This was an article from. just a few years after Waterloo had had a team in the NBA. Recapping the era, the article says.
The fortunes of pro basketball fluctuated and even when crowds were good there was one difficulty or another, sometimes a losing season, sometimes mounting expenses, and sometimes strife within a league itself. Waterloo Pro basketball fans always have insisted that the city would be in the NBA today. if the big city members had not forced out smaller cities. I think that captures the sentiment of Waterloo in the early nineteen fifties and. The disappointment that many people felt that They'd had something.
and it had been taken away from them. And in many ways, that's why the story of the Waterloo Hawks. isn't really well known today, even in Waterloo itself. Because At the time, The people who had made it happen, who had made basketball viable in Waterloo at the highest level of pro basketball at the time, I think really felt a disappointment. It wasn't something that they wanted to brag about.
We look at it today as being a major accomplishment for a city of 70 or 80,000 people to have a team playing against opponents from New York and Philadelphia and Boston. And you've been listening to Tim Harwood of Waterloo, Iowa's News Talk 1540, K-X-E-L-A-M. What a story about a time and place that players had part-time jobs, ball player half the year, and accountant or whatever the other half. Tim Harwood's story of the Waterloo Hawks. Here on Our American Story.
10 athletes will face the toughest job interview in fitness that will push past physical and mental breaking points. You are the fittest of the fit. Only one of you will leave here with an IFIT contract for $250,000. This is when mindset comes in.
Someone will be eliminated. Pressure is coming down. This. It's Trainer Games. Watch it on Prime Video starting January 8th.
Then the space hamster flew his hot air balloon all the way to the bottom of the ocean. Where did that story come from? Book? Dream? Nope, it came from a conversation.
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Come for the Black Friday seasonal savings. Stay for the award-winning reporting. For a limited time, access to the Washington Post is just 99 cents. That's unlimited access to all of the posts for only 99 cents every four weeks. That's a great deal for the first year.
After that, it'll cost $12 every four weeks. You can cancel any time. But don't wait, this Black Friday seasonal offer won't be here for long. Go to Washington Post dot com slash iHeart and grab this deal before it's gone. That's Washington Post dot com slash iHeart.
Bring incredible sound into every corner of your home this holiday with the new WimSound smart speaker. Get high-resolution audio with a 1.8-inch touchscreen, smart control, and modern design in one powerful speaker for just $2.99. From quiet mornings to lively holiday gatherings, WimSound makes every moment sound better and feel better too. Get the gift of the season for the music enthusiast in your life or for yourself: WimSound, beautifully designed, effortlessly connected. Shop now at Amazon and search WimSound.
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Mm-hmm.
