December 9, 2025 • 20 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, for a brief moment, Iowa found itself on the map of professional basketball. The Waterloo Hawks arrived with modest expectations and ended up claiming a win that still startles anyone who follows the early years of the league. They beat the Boston Celtics, then faded from view as quickly as they appeared. Tim Harwood, author of Ball Hawks: The Arrival and Departure of the NBA in Iowa, tells the story of how a small Midwestern town became the home of an NBA franchise and how that unlikely chapter continues to echo through local sports history.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is our American stories, and now a story from
our own. Monte Montgomery and Tim Harwood of Waterloo, Iowa's
News Talk fifteen forty kx e lam. Tim is the
author of Ballhawks, a sports history about the Waterloo Hawks,
a professional basketball team.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
Here's Tim.
Speaker 3 (00:36):
During the era just after World War Two, Waterloo had
around seventy thousand people give or tay. 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 rest belt city in
(00:58):
Ohio or Indiana or Michigan.
Speaker 4 (01:01):
But this story isn't about John Deere tractors. It's about basketball.
Waterloo Hawks basketball.
Speaker 3 (01:10):
The Hawks of the late nineteen forties and into the
first years of the nineteen fifties 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.
Speaker 4 (01:32):
But to understand why Waterloo ever had a professional basketball team,
we have to go back back to the Great Depression.
Speaker 3 (01:41):
During the Depression era, the best professional basketball players in
the United States played for barnstorming teams. They 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
(02:04):
they could trying to play for one team that might
play two or three.
Speaker 2 (02:07):
Games a week.
Speaker 3 (02:08):
By the latter years of the Depression, into the mid
to late nineteen thirties, 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
(02:30):
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
(02:54):
company that might have owned the team, or for another
large business in the community. The National Basketball League was
the pre eminent 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
(03:16):
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 nineteen thirties and forties, and thought that they
could fill twenty five to thirty or maybe more dates
(03:40):
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 Two, the
National Basketball League the Basketball Association of America competed against
each other, and the level of competition rose. It it
(04:00):
became challenging to try to get prestige. It became challenging
to try to attract top players that were bidding wars
for players in some cases, and that got expensive because
there wasn't nearly the money in professional basketball in the
nineteen forties that there is today. It was a matter
of determining who would control the future of professional basketball.
(04:23):
They came up with a variety of ways to try
to approach that situation. But in the off season between
the nineteen forty seven forty eight schedule and the forty
eight to forty nine 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
(04:46):
Wayne Pistons, and teams in Rochester, New York, and Indianapolis,
Indiana into jumping from one.
Speaker 2 (04:53):
League to the other.
Speaker 3 (04:54):
So the National Basketball League in the summer of nineteen.
Speaker 2 (04:58):
Forty eight needed team.
Speaker 3 (05:00):
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
(05:20):
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.
(05:41):
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
(06:02):
promoter named Pinky George. Pinky had been a fighter in
the nineteen twenties 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
(06:24):
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. That was challenging
to find a venue to put the team in, and
so because he was familiar with Waterloo after having grown
(06:44):
up but 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
(07:05):
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 Association of America
hadn't extinguished the NBL. The National Basketball League was still
hanging on and with bidding wars for players, with the
(07:30):
efforts that both entities were having to put forth to
try to claim that they were the pre eminent 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.
(07:52):
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 the 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
(08:14):
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 Collagen who had gone
on into professional basketball. They had players from the World
War Two era who had served during the war prior
to returning to college and then ultimately becoming professional basketball players.
Speaker 1 (08:38):
And you've been listening to Tim Harwood of Waterloo, Iowa's
news Talk fifteen forty kxclam and this is the 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
(08:58):
form what we all now know the NBA. And when
we come back more of the story of the Waterloo Hawks,
a little piece of American sports history. Here on our
American story. And we continue here with our American stories
(09:41):
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.
Speaker 3 (10:01):
Arguably the biggest star for the Hawks initially was a
player named Harry Boycoff. 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.
(10:23):
Actually 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 Saint
John's and so wanted to put his business skills to use.
Took an offer to go play in Toledo because they
(10:46):
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 nineteen forty eight forty nine when they
were in the National Basketball League. He was among the
(11:07):
top scorers in the league that season. Me And actually
was I believe in the Air Force at that point.
It would have been the Army Air Corps during World
War Two. It was quite a bit different in that era. Today,
we think of athletes, regardless of their sport, training year
(11:29):
round and it's a full time job to be an
athlete in that era, the nineteen forties and into the
nineteen fifties, 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
(11:49):
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 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.
Speaker 2 (12:09):
So when they would arrive in the fall.
Speaker 3 (12:11):
They would train for a few weeks, they'd play a
few preseason games strung together, and dive right into the
schedule after that. It's interesting that a lot of players
had off season jobs.
Speaker 2 (12:25):
Typical average players.
Speaker 3 (12:27):
Contracts as a professional basketball athlete in the forties and
fifties might have been in the range of forty five
hundred dollars a year, five thousand, some were less, some
were more.
Speaker 2 (12:39):
Although that was.
Speaker 3 (12:40):
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 asumption
(13:00):
that they were only going to be professional basketball players
for a few years and 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 nineteen forty nine, and it was
(13:20):
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
(13:42):
one thousand miles away, hosting a team that had come
in on their own private railcar 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 nineteen forty nine fifty hosted the Knicks
and hung with them, but New York took that game
(14:04):
by the final of sixty eight to sixty Just a
few days later, the Hawks beat the Boston Celtics four
days after hosting the New York Knicks and beat them
pretty soundly eighty to sixty six. 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
(14:31):
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 posting home games against Waterloo.
(14:53):
They would play double headers where that 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,
(15:17):
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 nineteen forty nine, 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,
(15:40):
and it just wasn't against the team that you might
have expected. On the opposite bench. In the nineteen forty
eight forty nine 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
(16:04):
the start of the nineteen forty nineteen fifty 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 nineteen forty eight to forty
(16:25):
nine 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 nineteen forty nine to fifty. In the spring
of nineteen fifty, there was a sentiment among the large
(16:45):
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 and
as far as many of the columnists for the major
papers saw it. So the National Basketball Association worked through
(17:09):
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 dollars
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,
(17:33):
that fifty thousand dollars bond would be forfeited. It had
to be backed by an insurance company or a bank,
and 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 nineteen fifty and ultimately the rest of the league
(17:59):
voted to so 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
(18:20):
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
(18:41):
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
(19:02):
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
(19:26):
level of pro basketball at the time, I think, really
felt a disappointment.
Speaker 2 (19:30):
It wasn't something that they wanted to brag about.
Speaker 3 (19:32):
We look at it today as being a major accomplishment
for a city of seventy or eighty thousand people to
have a team playing against opponents from New York and
Philadelphia and Boston.
Speaker 1 (19:47):
And you've been listening to Tim Harwood of Waterloo, Iowas
News Talk fifteen forty kx E LAM. What a story
about a time and place the players had part time
jobs player half the year and accountant or whatever the
other half. Tim Harwood story of the Waterloo Hawks. Here
on our American Stories
This is our American stories, and now a story from
our own. Monte Montgomery and Tim Harwood of Waterloo, Iowa's
News Talk fifteen forty kx e lam. Tim is the
author of Ballhawks, a sports history about the Waterloo Hawks,
a professional basketball team.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
Here's Tim.
Speaker 3 (00:36):
During the era just after World War Two, Waterloo had
around seventy thousand people give or tay. 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 rest belt city in
(00:58):
Ohio or Indiana or Michigan.
Speaker 4 (01:01):
But this story isn't about John Deere tractors. It's about basketball.
Waterloo Hawks basketball.
Speaker 3 (01:10):
The Hawks of the late nineteen forties and into the
first years of the nineteen fifties 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.
Speaker 4 (01:32):
But to understand why Waterloo ever had a professional basketball team,
we have to go back back to the Great Depression.
Speaker 3 (01:41):
During the Depression era, the best professional basketball players in
the United States played for barnstorming teams. They 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
(02:04):
they could trying to play for one team that might
play two or three.
Speaker 2 (02:07):
Games a week.
Speaker 3 (02:08):
By the latter years of the Depression, into the mid
to late nineteen thirties, 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
(02:30):
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
(02:54):
company that might have owned the team, or for another
large business in the community. The National Basketball League was
the pre eminent 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
(03:16):
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 nineteen thirties and forties, and thought that they
could fill twenty five to thirty or maybe more dates
(03:40):
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 Two, the
National Basketball League the Basketball Association of America competed against
each other, and the level of competition rose. It it
(04:00):
became challenging to try to get prestige. It became challenging
to try to attract top players that were bidding wars
for players in some cases, and that got expensive because
there wasn't nearly the money in professional basketball in the
nineteen forties that there is today. It was a matter
of determining who would control the future of professional basketball.
(04:23):
They came up with a variety of ways to try
to approach that situation. But in the off season between
the nineteen forty seven forty eight schedule and the forty
eight to forty nine 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
(04:46):
Wayne Pistons, and teams in Rochester, New York, and Indianapolis,
Indiana into jumping from one.
Speaker 2 (04:53):
League to the other.
Speaker 3 (04:54):
So the National Basketball League in the summer of nineteen.
Speaker 2 (04:58):
Forty eight needed team.
Speaker 3 (05:00):
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
(05:20):
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.
(05:41):
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
(06:02):
promoter named Pinky George. Pinky had been a fighter in
the nineteen twenties 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
(06:24):
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. That was challenging
to find a venue to put the team in, and
so because he was familiar with Waterloo after having grown
(06:44):
up but 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
(07:05):
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 Association of America
hadn't extinguished the NBL. The National Basketball League was still
hanging on and with bidding wars for players, with the
(07:30):
efforts that both entities were having to put forth to
try to claim that they were the pre eminent 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.
(07:52):
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 the 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
(08:14):
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 Collagen who had gone
on into professional basketball. They had players from the World
War Two era who had served during the war prior
to returning to college and then ultimately becoming professional basketball players.
Speaker 1 (08:38):
And you've been listening to Tim Harwood of Waterloo, Iowa's
news Talk fifteen forty kxclam and this is the 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
(08:58):
form what we all now know the NBA. And when
we come back more of the story of the Waterloo Hawks,
a little piece of American sports history. Here on our
American story. And we continue here with our American stories
(09:41):
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.
Speaker 3 (10:01):
Arguably the biggest star for the Hawks initially was a
player named Harry Boycoff. 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.
(10:23):
Actually 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 Saint
John's and so wanted to put his business skills to use.
Took an offer to go play in Toledo because they
(10:46):
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 nineteen forty eight forty nine when they
were in the National Basketball League. He was among the
(11:07):
top scorers in the league that season. Me And actually
was I believe in the Air Force at that point.
It would have been the Army Air Corps during World
War Two. It was quite a bit different in that era. Today,
we think of athletes, regardless of their sport, training year
(11:29):
round and it's a full time job to be an
athlete in that era, the nineteen forties and into the
nineteen fifties, 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
(11:49):
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 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.
Speaker 2 (12:09):
So when they would arrive in the fall.
Speaker 3 (12:11):
They would train for a few weeks, they'd play a
few preseason games strung together, and dive right into the
schedule after that. It's interesting that a lot of players
had off season jobs.
Speaker 2 (12:25):
Typical average players.
Speaker 3 (12:27):
Contracts as a professional basketball athlete in the forties and
fifties might have been in the range of forty five
hundred dollars a year, five thousand, some were less, some
were more.
Speaker 2 (12:39):
Although that was.
Speaker 3 (12:40):
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 asumption
(13:00):
that they were only going to be professional basketball players
for a few years and 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 nineteen forty nine, and it was
(13:20):
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
(13:42):
one thousand miles away, hosting a team that had come
in on their own private railcar 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 nineteen forty nine fifty hosted the Knicks
and hung with them, but New York took that game
(14:04):
by the final of sixty eight to sixty Just a
few days later, the Hawks beat the Boston Celtics four
days after hosting the New York Knicks and beat them
pretty soundly eighty to sixty six. 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
(14:31):
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 posting home games against Waterloo.
(14:53):
They would play double headers where that 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,
(15:17):
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 nineteen forty nine, 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,
(15:40):
and it just wasn't against the team that you might
have expected. On the opposite bench. In the nineteen forty
eight forty nine 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
(16:04):
the start of the nineteen forty nineteen fifty 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 nineteen forty eight to forty
(16:25):
nine 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 nineteen forty nine to fifty. In the spring
of nineteen fifty, there was a sentiment among the large
(16:45):
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 and
as far as many of the columnists for the major
papers saw it. So the National Basketball Association worked through
(17:09):
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 dollars
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,
(17:33):
that fifty thousand dollars bond would be forfeited. It had
to be backed by an insurance company or a bank,
and 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 nineteen fifty and ultimately the rest of the league
(17:59):
voted to so 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
(18:20):
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
(18:41):
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
(19:02):
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
(19:26):
level of pro basketball at the time, I think, really
felt a disappointment.
Speaker 2 (19:30):
It wasn't something that they wanted to brag about.
Speaker 3 (19:32):
We look at it today as being a major accomplishment
for a city of seventy or eighty thousand people to
have a team playing against opponents from New York and
Philadelphia and Boston.
Speaker 1 (19:47):
And you've been listening to Tim Harwood of Waterloo, Iowas
News Talk fifteen forty kx E LAM. What a story
about a time and place the players had part time
jobs player half the year and accountant or whatever the
other half. Tim Harwood story of the Waterloo Hawks. Here
on our American Stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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