12. Ike Mahoney
Football, Track & Field, Baseball, Basketball / Omaha / 1901-1961
QUICK FACTS:
Related: As an athlete, Mahoney was a man for all seasons
Played for: Omaha Commerce High, Omaha Tech High, Creighton Bluejays, Chicago Cardinals and Chicago Bruins (pro basketball)
Best athlete from Nebraska played with or against: Could have been Commerce teammate Frank Rokusek, who was the starting end and captain of the 1924 Illinois team. Red Grange, an Illini junior that season, later said "Rokusek really made a football player out of me."
Best moment as an athlete: Beating Notre Dame, where he originally committed, in a home-and-home basketball series in his senior year of college
Omaha's first highly recruited high school athlete was Ike Mahoney, a four-sport standout who played two sports in college and three sports professionally.
Colleges from coast to coast wooed the student from Omaha Commerce (later Omaha Tech). His original choice was Notre Dame, but he ended up enrolling as a freshman at Creighton. He was the Bluejays' first two-sport star, in football and basketball.
He played both sports professionally in Chicago, and his sandlot baseball skills garnered a contract from the Pittsburgh Pirates.
The late Gregg McBride, upon Mahoney's death in 1961, wrote in The World-Herald about Mahoney's basketball prowess: "More than 40 years ago he demonstrated a brand of shooting, ball handling and floorwork that would have made him even more sensational had they used the modern rules in the 1920s.''
Mahoney played in three Class A basketball finals, with Tech winning in 1921, and set the tournament's career scoring record of 141 points that held up for more than 30 years.
He was the first three-time All-Nebraska basketball player. He received all-state honors in football, lost only two games as a starting pitcher in baseball and medaled in the state track meet.
-- Stu Pospisil
QUICK FACTS:
Related: As an athlete, Mahoney was a man for all seasons
Played for: Omaha Commerce High, Omaha Tech High, Creighton Bluejays, Chicago Cardinals and Chicago Bruins (pro basketball)
Best athlete from Nebraska played with or against: Could have been Commerce teammate Frank Rokusek, who was the starting end and captain of the 1924 Illinois team. Red Grange, an Illini junior that season, later said "Rokusek really made a football player out of me."
Best moment as an athlete: Beating Notre Dame, where he originally committed, in a home-and-home basketball series in his senior year of college
