Iowa's Long-Lost NBA Team Who Beat the Celtics

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Insured by NCUA. This is our American Stories and now a story from our own Monty Montgomery and Tim Harwood of Waterloo Iowa's News Talk 1540 KXEL-AM. Tim is the author of Ball Hawks a sports history about the Waterloo Hawks a professional basketball team.

Here's Tim. 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 was 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.

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 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 off season 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 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 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 but right next door in Cedar Falls he decided that he 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 two leagues the basketball 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 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 KXELAM 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 pieces of American sports history here on Our American Story. 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biggest star for the hawks initially 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 had played for a season in tallito before he came to waterloo he chose the nbl because the team in tallito offered to get him a job that would keep him busy he was a an accounting major at st john's and so wanted to put his business skills to use took an offer to go play in tallito because they could promise him a job during the off season that would supplement his basketball income another all-american player was from the university of tennessee's named dick mehan 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 me and actually was uh i believe in the air force at that point 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 off season 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 a 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 and dive right into the schedule after that it's interesting that a lot of players had off-season jobs typical average players contracts as a professional basketball athlete in the 40s and 50s might have been in the range of forty five hundred dollars a year five thousand 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 off season 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 nix 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 nix 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 the nix and the nix hung with them but new york took that game by the final of 68 to 60 just a few days later the hawks beat the boston celtics four days after hosting the new york nix and beat them pretty soundly 80 to 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 nix 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 nix played a more prestigious opponent at least a 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 nix they played the philadelphia warriors instead and the nix had a different opponent that night but they they did end up seeing just about all of the major venues of the era that were hosting the nix and the hawks were competitive they were very successful early on and you could say that they 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 season they were the sixth 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 but 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 1948-49 season that slowed them down when things appeared to otherwise be going along pretty well and the hawks finished their first game well and the hawks finished near the bottom of their division fifth out of six teams in 1949-50 in the spring of 1950 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 fifty thousand dollar 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 fifty thousand dollar bond would be forfeited it had to be backed by an insurance company or a bank and well the hawks and the sheboygan redskins were able to manage that because they had tremendous community support in both cases 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 1950s 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 kx elam am what a story about a time and place that players had part-time jobs ball player half the year an accountant or whatever the other half tim harwood's story of the waterloo hawks here on our american story you wouldn't settle for watching a blurry tv would you so why settle for just okay tv sound upgrade your streaming and sound all in one with roku stream bar this powerful two-in-one upgrade for any tv lets you stream your favorite entertainment in brilliant 4k hdr picture and hear every detail with auto speech clarity whether you're hosting a party or just cleaning the house turn it up and rock out with iheart radio and room filling sound learn more about roku stream bar today at roku.com happy streaming are you looking to step up to a 4k smart tv one that gives you unparalleled clarity and picture resolution then we've got good news for you because the visio 65 inch v series 4k smart tv is now just 348 with all your 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