11 Weird Old-Timey Sports Teams

Can you name a professional sports team from Iowa? No? Well, back in the 40s, they had an NBA team for about one year. 

And that short-lived NBA team wasn’t the only sports team to fade into the past. Let’s explore the most obscure, strange, defunct, and forgotten sports teams of yore, as adopted from the above episode of The List Show on YouTube.

1. The Tonawanda Kardex 
2. The Providence Steam Roller
3. The Cleveland Spiders
4. The Macon Whoopees
5. The Worcester Worcesters
6. The Piedmont-Westernport Drybugs
7. The Oorang Indians
8. The Harlem Magicians
9. The Jacksonville Tea Men
10. The Waterloo Hawks
11. The Caribous of Colorado

The Tonawanda Kardex 

It’s a record that will never be broken. On November 6, 1921, football fans were treated to the debut of the Tonawand Kardex, also known as the Tonawanda Lumbermen, a squad based just outside of Buffalo, New York. The team’s name came from the American Kardex office furniture company, which was sponsoring them. The Kardex, a.k.a. Lumbermen, were absolutely steamrolled by the Rochester Jeffersons 45 to 0, and promptly folded. With just one football game to their credit and a win percentage of 0.0, they are the shortest-lived and least successful pro football franchise in history. 

How obscure were the Kardex? NFL.com lists question marks next to the names of some players. In fairness, the Kardex played for the American Professional Football Association, which was the precursor to the NFL. And while they dipped out extremely quickly, it was not that uncommon at the time for pro sports teams to form, play a game or two, and then fold due to lack of financial resources, talent, or both. Kardex the company only paid for the team’s uniforms, not for salaries or any other equipment. 

The Providence Steam Roller

Another misbegotten football franchise was the Providence Steam Roller—and yes, that’s singular, not plural. The Steam Roller competed in the NFL for seven seasons from 1925 to 1931 and played in the Cycledrome in Rhode Island, a now-closed arena originally intended for bicycle racing. It turned out to not be ideal for football as the tracks cut the corners of the end zones and the seats were so close to the action that sometimes players steamrolled fans.

The Steam Roller were pretty good, earning a league championship in 1928 based on their win percentage. In 1929, they played what’s believed to be the first-ever night game in NFL history, a make-up game with the Chicago Cardinals at a minor league baseball stadium in Providence. The football was painted white so it was more visible, which made it look a little like a giant egg. 

Thanks to the 1929 stock market crash, the team disbanded two years later, but its name lived on. A pre-NBA basketball franchise dubbed the Providence Steamrollers popped up in the late 1940s and lasted only three seasons.

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The Cleveland Spiders

The Cleveland Spiders were the pariahs of baseball at the turn of the 20th century. In 1899, they succeeded in earning the worst single-season record in the history of the game, going 20-134. The team was so deficient in even the most basic fundamentals of baseball that they played mostly on the road because they couldn’t attract a crowd to their home games. One had about 70 people in attendance.

It wasn’t always this way. The Spiders started out as a fierce and feared squad who had such a heated rivalry with the Baltimore Orioles that the Spiders needed a police escort in Baltimore. But then Spiders owner Frank Robison bought the St. Louis Perfectos and thought it would be a good idea to send most of his good players to Missouri; this had the consequence of gutting the Spiders’ talent pool. That’s when the Spiders became something of a league joke. 

Cleveland eventually got its mojo back with the Cleveland Naps, which was named after its star player, Napoleon Lajoie, and an ode to the mid-afternoon snooze. When Lajoie left the team in 1914, they became the Cleveland Indians and are currently known as the Cleveland Guardians.

The Macon Whoopees

The Macon Whoopees were an ice hockey team out of Macon, Georgia, that originated in 1973 as part of the newly-formed Southern Hockey League. The name was a play on a song titled “Makin’ Whoopee,” which is a euphemism for sex. The name had the desired effect of getting publicity, including mentions on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson as well as t-shirts that popped up in Richard Nixon’s White House. 

Unfortunately, the Whoopees didn’t draw big crowds, which prompted owner Gerald Pinkerton to contemplate moving the team elsewhere. Even though they played less than a season owing to cash flow problems, the name was too good to abandon. The team returned to Macon in 1996, this time dropping the s, and played through 2001. 

The Worcester Worcesters

The Worcester Worcesters came together in 1880 as the result of a novel way of raising money. The city of Worcester, Massachusetts, sold stock in the baseball team so the area would have representation in the National League. And while they only played two seasons, the team was pretty good. Pitcher Lee Richmond was the first to deliver a perfect game in the history of Major League Baseball. He did this even though he was still a student at Brown University and played a game with friends at 5 a.m.—just hours before the team faced the Blues.

The Worcester Worcesters were later renamed the Boosters—but they could have also been called “the Worcester Tattletales.” They allegedly ratted out the Cincinnati Reds in 1880 for serving beer at games, which was prohibited at the time. The Reds wound up being kicked out of the League.

The Piedmont-Westernport Drybugs

Baseball had a lot of trouble filling out teams during World War I. In West Virginia, there were just four minor league teams playing, including the Piedmont-Westernport Drybugs, named after an insect that was believed to live near the Potomac River. No such bug existed, however, making the Drybugs possibly the only pro sports team to be named after an entomological error. The team only had two weeks to put a roster together. And before long, half of the players announced they were quitting to seek better-paying work.

The Oorang Indians

The Oorang Indians out of Ohiowas actually made up of Native Americans. And the sole reason for its existence wasn’t for love of the game—it was mainly to advertise and sell puppies. 

The Indians were owned by Walter Lingo of Larue, Ohio. In 1922, he paid $100 for the rights to an NFL franchise and brought on football legend Jim Thorpe, himself a Native American, to be a player and coach. Lingo also owned a kennel for the Airedale breed of dog. He believed the team’s games would be an excellent marketing gimmick for peddling his canines. At halftime, he even had dogs come out to perform a stunt show in which they chased raccoons up fake trees. And it worked: One year Lingo sold 15,000 Airedales. 

Unfortunately, Lingo also trafficked in demeaning Native American stereotypes, including halftime stunts like tomahawk throwing. It’s just as well the team folded after just two seasons.

The Harlem Magicians

Everyone loves the wacky hijinks of the Harlem Globetrotters, the traveling exhibition basketball team that plays cruel jokes on their hapless foes the Washington Generals. One of the team’s star players in the 1940s and 1950s was Marques Haynes, who was thought to be the greatest dribbler in the game. But when Haynes had a contract dispute with the team in 1953, he left to join a rival theatrical hoop squad, the Harlem Magicians. Keep in mind this was a time before so-called serious basketball was serious business: People went to be entertained, and both the Globetrotters and Magicians indulged them. In 1957, the Magicians sold so many tickets in Mexico City that they played three games in one day.

But the Globetrotters weren’t loving the competition. Globetrotters owner Abe Saperstein kept up a series of legal full court presses on the Magicians, which led to their sporadic activity. Saperstein argued the Magicians were in violation of his trademarks, which included “Magicians of Basketball” and even “Harlem.” Haynes rejoined the Globetrotters in 1972 and later reformed the Magicians in the 1980s.

The Jacksonville Tea Men

The Jacksonville Tea Men, formerly known as the New England Tea Men, were an expansion team for the North American Soccer League beginning in 1978. Who owned them? Lipton, the popular tea brand. 

The team name made sense for New England—think Boston Tea Party—but the team’s move to Jacksonville rendered it a little confusing, as Florida is not exactly known for its tea. The Tea Men played through 1982, and two years later the NASL shut down entirely.

The Waterloo Hawks

The Waterloo Hawks of Iowa competed in the NBA’s first-ever full season in 1949. Unfortunately, the Hawks fell victim to team owners in larger markets that wanted to scuttle teams from smaller parts of the country. Hence the Hawks joining teams from Anderson, Indiana, and Sheboygan, Wisconsin, as collateral damage.

The Caribous of Colorado

Soccer was sweeping the nation back in the 1970s. Or, sweeping Denver, at least. That’s where the Caribous of Colorado got their start. The name came from the Caribou Ranch, a recording studio founded by marketing specialist and Caribous co-founder Jim Guerico. Because the ranch was Western-themed, so was the soccer team—right down to tasseled brown and tan player jerseys. The problem with the fringes? Opposing players kept grabbing them, forcing the team to trim them down. The Caribou also wore cowboy hats during their entrance. 

The Caribous finished last in their first season and were soon sold to media mogul Ted Turner, who relocated them to Atlanta and dropped the Clint Eastwood aesthetic. 

In 2014, the Colorado Rapids soccer team announced they’d be wearing the retro Caribous fringe jerseys, which prompted a lot of excited feedback from fans who had fond memories of the saloon soccer style. They were disappointed to learn it was just an April Fools’ joke.