Eighth Wonder: The Fabulous Waterloo Wonders

The Bumbles'  Monday Movie Meme theme this week is Game On about favorite sports movies. I'm not participating, but the most-listed movie so far is "Hoosiers", a favorite of mine. If you haven't seen the movie, it is a great movie about a small-town basketball team taking on the big city teams to win the Indiana state high school basketball championship in 1954. There are great performances by Gene Hackman, Barbara Hershey and Dennis Hopper, as well the unknown actors playing the basketball stars.

The mention of that movie reminded me, as it always does, of the hometown heroes basketball team where I grew up in southeastern Ohio. The Waterloo Wonders.

The five main players: Stewart Wiseman, Curtis McMahon, Orlyn Roberts, Wyman Roberts and Beryl Drummond.

Waterloo, Ohio (Lawrence County), in 1933 in the midst of the Great Depression, was actually more bustling than it is today. It boasted an inn, a mortuary, two doctors, a barbershop, and three stores. Today there are very few jobs, but the people are a close-knit community of farmers and teachers. There are no movie theaters for kids to go to, no bowling alleys, no libraries, no malls in which to hang out with their friends. There is one restaurant and a post office. In fact, Waterloo High School (later Waterloo Elementary) no longer functions as a school, though it is still standing.

But in the mid-thirties, Waterloo had something to brag about. Their basketball team. The Waterloo Wonders. It consisted of five players (with three subs) who grew up dirt poor. They didn't even have a real basketball when they learned to play on backboards made out of baskets nailed to the barn door. They wound rags that they begged from their mothers' rag baskets until they had something comparable to the size of a regulation basketball. When they could get time away from working on the farm, they played basketball. And boy did they ever play!

In 1933, under the brilliant coaching skills of Magellan Hairston, this team came out of the woodwork to win the Ohio state high school championship. And then they did it again the next year. The story of how they accomplished that is the stuff that legends are made of. "In two remarkable seasons, Waterloo played nearly 100 games, winning all but three, most of them on the road against much bigger schools. In one stretch the team won seven games in nine days; it boasted a 56-game winning streak. That makes the Wonders more akin to the great professional barnstormers of that pre-NBA era." (Sports Illustrated)

At that time, basketball was a very static sport. Players weren't in constant motion as they are today. After every basket, the ball was returned to center court for a jump shot and most shots were made with feet firmly planted and with two hands. When the Wonders came on the scene they wowed the audiences with their trick shots (running hook shots) and ball passing. In fact, the ball rarely ever touched the floor. The boys learned to play with those rag balls and rag balls don't bounce, so they were continually passing. The other teams soon found themselves bumfuzzled and feeling out of their league. The Wonders "wasn't just beating other schools, it was destroying them by football scores: 52-14, 40-14,69-9". (SI)

Their schedule was grueling, sometimes playing five games in seven nights, and most of them weren't at home. "On (one) occasion, due to a scheduling mix-up, Waterloo found itself playing two different schools on the same night. Rather than cancel one game,  (Coach) Hairston had his starters run up a big halftime lead in the first contest, then left behind his subs to mop up as the starters took off for the nightcap. Waterloo won both games." (SI)  Another time, the boys got held up by a bad snowstorm while traveling to Cleveland for a game. Coach Hairston managed to find a telephone and called the other coach saying they would be very late, or maybe not make it at all and so he would forfeit the game. They were urged to try to make it so they pressed on, arriving at 11:00 p.m. The gym was still packed and they played the game which, of course, they won.

After those two championship seasons, college coaches were breaking down the gym doors to recruit those five players onto their teams. University of Kentucky's famous coach, Adolph Rupp (for whom Rupp Arena is named), tried to recruit the whole team!  Sadly, only one of the boys went to college, Stewart Wiseman who was a teacher's son. He played basketball at Rio Grande College (pronounced ry-oh grand) which was close to home and which boasts a pretty famous basketball player of its own, Clarence Bevo Francis, who singlehandedly scored more than 100 points in a single game. 

The four other starters eventually ended up forming a barnstorming team which played such teams as the Harlem Globetrotters, the New York Rens, and even the (then) New York Celtics. "In 1937, after two narrow losses to the dominant pro team of the day, the New York Celtics, the upstart Wonders beat the Celtics in a third game, 47-39, before a crowd of 7,000 in Cleveland." (SI) World War II ended their basketball careers, but they could still be found occasionally in an exhibition game or showing off one of their trick shots in front of a crowd.

By the time I was a teenager, Waterloo H.S., along with Windsor, Aid and Mason schools,  had been incorporated into Symmes Valley High School, my alma mater. I went to school with kids who bore the names of those Wonder boys and an awful lot of those Wiseman kids became teachers. Our basketball team rarely had winning seasons and none that were remotely close to those of the Waterloo Wonders, but the star players on the team were usually boys from Waterloo. In that little village, they still loved their basketball.

If you would like to read the entire Sports Illustrated article, here is the link.

And here is a link to a YouTube clip from a documentary filmed by WOUB-tv, Ohio University's public television station.