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Cedar Rapids, Iowa 52401
Time Machine: 2 memorable moments
Terry Wilson jumped for joy, then had a pro golfer as a caddy
Time magazine published a striking photo of the Immaculate Conception basketball bench reacting to a basket during a February district tournament game at the Fieldhouse in Iowa City.
The photo was part of a March 8, 1954, photo spread rounding up the week’s best photos.
Gazette photographer John McIvor took the photo at the Feb. 23, 1954, game between the Cedar Rapids Immaculate Conception Greyhounds and the Williamsburg Raiders.
The focus of the photo was Terry Wilson, a Greyhounds’ guard, who seems suspended in midair as he celebrates a basket by a teammate in the last quarter of the game.
The game was a nail-biter. The Greyhounds had lost all five of their starting lineup to fouls or injuries by the fourth quarter. It was up to the reserves to pull off the win. The score was 56-54 with 16 seconds left. The subs managed the ball, and the Greyhounds won.
The team’s coach, Bob Jennings, had led the team to the Northeast Iowa Catholic League championship that year, the Dubuque Diocese’s Class A championship over Cedar Rapids St. Patrick’s, and the city’s parochial title.
The Class A district final was Feb. 27 in Iowa City and pitted the Greyhounds against the Marion Indians. It was the sixth time in seven years the two teams had met. Marion beat the Greyhounds, 54-49, to advance to a class A substate final March 13 opposite Grinnell.
Meanwhile, McIvor’s photo of Wilson’s leap placed first in the sports category of the Iowa Press Photographers Association contest in June.
In 1955, when Wilson was senior, the Immaculate Conception Greyhounds again took the city parochial and Northeast Iowa Catholic League titles. For the seventh time in eight years, the team lost to Marion in the sectional tournament.
Another memorable moment
Wilson also took up golf, which would have a greater impact on his life than basketball.
After graduating from high school, Wilson enlisted in the Marines. In April 1958, while he was stationed in Hawaii, he entered the Navy-Marine Invitational Golf Tournament in Honolulu.
Japanese pro golfing star Torakichi “Pete” Nakamura was on his way home after playing in the Masters Tournament in Augusta, Ga., where he dropped a hole-in-one during practice.
It turns out, Wilson had caddied for Nakamura in two tournaments in Hawaii — the 1957 Pabst Blue Ribbon play at the Pali course and the 1958 Mid-Pacific Open at Lanikai.
“As a result, they struck up a great friendship,” the Honolulu Advertiser reported.
Nakamura found out Wilson was in the Navy-Marine tourney. He asked Wilson how the first day went. Wilson said he’d carded a 78.
“That’s good,” Nakamura replied, adding, “I (will) caddy for you.”
True to his word, Nakamura, a well-known golf pro, showed up to caddy for Wilson, a Marine from Cedar Rapids, for the tourney’s second round.
Nakamura — who won the Japanese Open in 1952, 1956 and 1958 — knew what he was doing as a caddy, a job he’d held from age 14 until he turned pro at age 20.
“Pete is not only the greatest putter in golf, but I’m certain he is the most humble, too,” Wilson wrote in a letter to Alex Fidler, The Gazette’s street circulation manager he’d worked for as a kid. ”I was quite shocked when he offered to caddy for me, as not often do you have a champion golfer caddy for you.”
Although Wilson didn’t do that well in the tournament, he wrote Fidler that he’d “learned more in that one day” about golf “than most could learn in a lifetime.”
Nakamura, he said, had only one comment about Wilson’s game. “He no understand English,” the golf pro concluded about Wilson, meaning “I was doing the exact opposite of what he told me to do. I’m sure it will prove the most memorable day of my life.”
After Wilson was discharged from the Marines, he returned to Cedar Rapids, where his name would often appear in Gazette sports columns when he competed in golf tournaments. He retired in 1996 as a senior group corporate vice president for Archer Daniels Midland. He died in 2006 in Forsyth, Ill., at age 68.
Nakamura, who helped fuel the popularity of golf in Japan, died in 2008 at age 92.
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