Did you know that Iowa once had an NBA team? Yes, Iowa, the state of corn fields. An NBA team. Once. Go figure.

"Once" is for one season, 1949-50, the NBA's first. The Waterloo Hawks were based in Waterloo, Iowa, population 65,000. The early NBA had teams in such metropolises as Anderson, Indiana and Sheboygan, Wisconsin, so Waterloo wasn't that big of an outlier.

One of the Hawks' best players was the handsomely-mustached Harry Boykoff, a 6'10" New York Jew who starred at college at St. John's, once scoring 54 points in a game.

The Hawks finished with the NBA's second-worst record, and dropped down to the minor leagues, before disbanding soon after. As for Boykoff, he went to the Boston Celtics, where he was reportedly the league's highest-earning player at a cool $14,000 a year. Halfway through the season, he was traded to the Tri-Cities Blackhawks, another early NBA team, the predecessor of today's Atlanta Hawks. (What is it with all these Hawks?)

Those Blackhawks were shared among, well, three cities: Moline and Rock Island, Illinois, and also Davenport, Iowa. So you can say that Iowa once had TWO NBA teams.

Go figure.