Dick Ives--Hall of Fame, April 8, 1979

Ives named to Register's 'Sports Hall'

By RON MALY
Register Staff Writer
04/08/1979

He was the kid from the tiny town of Diagonal, the one who could shoot the eyes out of the basket and who'd run through the walls of Iowa Fieldhouse for a guy named Pops.

When Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima and the Battle of the Bulge had been or would be splashed all over the front pages of the nation's newspapers in those war years, The Kid was giving the folks back home some relief by punishing Chicago and Indiana and Western Illinois on the basketball floor.

Dick Ives was his name. He'd come to the Iowa campus as a 17-year-old freshman in 1943, and brought with him a hot hand that made a shambles of the record book.

Thirty-five years ago, it was practically unheard of for a player to score 43 points in one game. Some teams couldn't even do that.

But Ives did it. In that brilliant freshman season, he hit the University of Chicago with a 43-point knockout blow. The Hawkeyes won the game, 103-31, to run their record to 12-0 against a school that was in its last year as a Big Ten member.

The 43 points accounted for a Big Ten one-game scoring record. So did Ives' 19 field goals in the same game. Dick won the conference scoring title with 208 points in 12 games -- the first freshman ever to do so.

What's more, Ives' 327 points in the 18-game 1943-44 season was a school scoring record.

And that was just the start of a brilliant Hawkeye career for Ives, an all-American who today becomes the 90th member of The Des Moines Sunday Register's Iowa Sports Hall of Fame.

DIAGONAL WAS big stuff in Iowa high school basketball when Dick Ives came along.

"We were a good country ball team when I was playing there," said Ives, who now lives in Miami, Fla., "but we weren't as good as the teams my brother, Max, played on. Max's team won the state championship in 1938.

"But Pops Harrison, the Iowa coach, had heard of me. He knew I was out there in Diagonal, and we began corresponding by mail.

"I could have had a full-ride basketball scholarship to Drake, but I'd always wanted to play for Iowa, so I went there and even paid my $65 tuition fee."

Yes, and he also mowed lawns in Iowa City for 40 cents an hour, polished door knobs and swept up the floors in the athletic department offices at the Fieldhouse to pay that $65.

"I was jealous that I wasn't given an athletic scholarship," Ives commented. "I'd go out with Pops and help him recruit other players, but I wasn't given a scholarship myself.

"The football program was lousy at the time, so there weren't many other good athletes on the campus.

"Finally, Pops found a couple of guys who agreed to pay my tuition in the second semester."

Because World War II was going full-blast, freshmen were eligible for athletic competition on the college campuses then.

"Slip Madigan (Iowa's football coach in 1943 and '44) even asked if I wanted to come out for the squad," Ives said.

"I was a 6-foot 1-inch, 175-pounder. I said I'd be a cowardly flanker. 'Promise not to hit me and I'll come out,' I told him.

"But Pops about had a heart attack when he heard about the possibility of me going out for football."

But Ives did report for the Hawkeye squad in 1944.

"I was the only player at Iowa to win a baseball letter without ever coming to bat," he said.

"I was known as Warmup Ives -- a relief pitcher of great reknown."

HARRISON'S FIRST Iowa team -- the one Ives played on as a freshman -- had a 9-3 Big Ten record and tied for second in the standings.

"I started at forward with Ned Postels, Jack Spencer, Dave Danner and Skip Herwig," Ives said.

"Herwig was a 6-4 graduate student who played center," Dick said. "We told him to get out of the key, go to the corner and stay there. He followed instructions and stayed in the corner.

"Because we lost our last game to Northwestern (42-41), it cost us our chance to tie for the championship."

The following season, however, there was no stopping Ives and the Hawks.

They finished with a 17-1 record (with the only loss to Illinois) and won the Big Ten championship. After the season, Ives was named an all-American.

"We had the Wilkinson brothers -- Clayton and Herb -- then," Ives said. "Clayton was the center, Herb a guard. Danner had gone into military service and Murray Weir was a freshman and our sixth man.

"That team was the first one ever to sell out the Fieldhouse," Ives said. "We didn't draw very well during my freshman season, but we got crowds of 14,000 and 15,000 during the season we won the title.

"They even had to bring in portable bleachers to handle the fans."

Keep in mind that crowds in those years were estimates and Iowa, like other schools around the nation, had inflated attendance counts. Capacity at Iowa Fieldhouse is now listed as 13,365.

If Iowa would seize a Big Ten championship now, a spot in the National Collegiate playoffs would naturally follow.

After the 1978-79 regular season, five Big Ten teams -- Iowa, Michigan State, Purdue, Indiana and Ohio State -- went to post-season tournaments.

These days, if you're pretty good but not quite good enough to get into the NCAA playoffs, there's always the National Invitation Tournament.

It didn't quite work out that way for Ives' Iowa teams.

There was the war, you know.

"We were invited to a tournament after my first season," Ives said, "but there were travel restrictions because of the war. In addition, at the end of the season we didn't have enough guys left on the team to scrimmage. Some were going into the military.

"We had problems the next season, too. Some of the guys didn't want to leave school to play in a post-season tournament, so we had to decline the invitation."

Iowa tied for third place in the Big Ten in Ives' junior year and tied for sixth when he was a senior. In his four seasons, he scored 843 points.

"In my senior year," he said, "we had a big guy named Noble Jorgenson, who, in my estimation, could have been the greatest player of my era.

"He could have been even better than George Mikan, but he never played that way and eventually flunked out of school."

IVES GOT his degree in 1947 in physical education, then coached basketball and baseball for one year at old Parsons College.

"I then went into the hardware business in Cedar Rapids, and married a girl from there. We moved to Florida in 1954."

Ives, who has been divorced for five years, is in partnership in a company in Miami that processes potatoes for restaurants.

He has a daughter, Susan, 26, who teaches school in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

"I've been staying with friends lately," Ives said, "because my home nearly burned down. The air conditioner got too hot and caused a fire that did $20,000 in damage."

Ives watches basketball occasionally on television, but hasn't seen a college game in person for quite a while.

"I play golf quite a bit," he said. "I picked up a club for the first time the week I graduated from Iowa. I recall playing on a course that had sand greens out there along the road from Iowa City to Davenport."

Ives had great admiration for Harrison, the late coach.

"He was a wonderful individual and a very inspiring man," Ives said. "A couple of months before he died, about 30 of his former players got together for a party with him.

"Even though Pops was on his death bed, he gave a speech you wouldn't believe. What an inspiration."

Not until John Johnson scored 46 points on Dec. 7, 1968 did an Iowa player ever surpass Ives' 43 against Chicago.

Ives' total is still No. 3 on the school's all-time list. Johnson's 49, which came Feb. 24, 1970 is No. 1.

"I have no regrets about anything that happened to me at Iowa," said Ives. "Well, I guess I do think they still owe me that $65 in tuition money."

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