Wat Misaka

• 1. Introduction

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  Wat Misaka stood five feet seven inches tall and played point guard, and in 1947 he walked onto an NBA floor before any other non-white player had ever done so. His name is Wataru Misaka, and in the same year Jackie Robinson broke baseball's color line, Misaka quietly broke one of his own. There were no press conferences. There were no interviews. "It wasn't a big thing," he said. "Nobody cared." What follows is the story of how a boy from a basement apartment on 25th Street in Ogden, Utah, became the first non-white player in what would become the National Basketball Association, then walked away from the game entirely to become an engineer.

• 2. 25th Street

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  Wataru Misaka was born on the 21st of December, 1923, in Ogden, Utah, the son of Tatsuyo and Fusaichi Misaka. The family lived in the basement of his father's barber shop, wedged between a bar and a pawn shop on 25th Street, a block Misaka himself described as a "ghetto." He grew up poor alongside his two younger brothers. Misaka was raised as a Nisei, a second-generation Japanese-American, in what a University of Utah magazine called an era of "virtual apartheid." Restaurants would not serve him. Neighbors would cross the street to avoid him. Nisei children were excluded from extracurricular activities and played in their own separate baseball and basketball leagues. When his mother urged the family to move back to Hiroshima, Misaka chose to stay in Utah. He was outside the relocation zone when Japanese-Americans were forced into internment camps, and he felt guilt over that distance from his friends' fate, even as it gave him room to keep pursuing basketball. At Ogden High School, he led the team to a state championship in 1940 and a regional championship in 1941.

• 3. Weber and the Utes

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  Weber College was where Misaka first made his mark at the collegiate level, helping lead its basketball team to two championships. He was named Most Valuable Player of the 1942 junior college postseason tournament, and in 1943 the college named him its athlete of the year. At the University of Utah, the young Utes finished the 1943-44 season with an 18-3 record, earning invitations to both the NCAA tournament and the National Invitation Tournament. The team chose the NIT because it was considered more prestigious and meant a trip to New York City. They lost to Kentucky in the first round but entered the NCAA tournament after Arkansas withdrew due to a team accident. Utah seized the chance and won the championship, beating Dartmouth 42-40 in overtime. Two nights later, Misaka and his teammates played NIT champions St. John's in an exhibition at Madison Square Garden and won 43-36. During those early seasons, Misaka was frequently booed by fans hostile to a Japanese-American player while Japan and the United States were at war. His teammates formed a bond around him that helped him stay on the floor. After the war ended and the Utes kept winning, Misaka became the crowd's favorite rather than its target. The Utah program came to be nicknamed "the Cinderella team."

• 4. Army and Return

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  Misaka was drafted into the United States Army and eventually rose to the rank of staff sergeant. He served for two years, spending part of that time in the American occupation of Japan. When he returned to the University of Utah, he encountered a double standard that his teammates did not face: they were guaranteed their spots on the team upon returning from deployment, while Misaka was required to try out again. He made the team. The 1947 NIT brought Utah back to New York for an eight-team tournament. In the final, they defeated Kentucky 49-45. Misaka personally held Kentucky's All-American guard Ralph Beard to a single point throughout that game. A crowd estimated at 15,000 to 20,000 gathered for the celebration parade back in Utah in March 1947. Some observers argued the Utes' victory was the greatest athletic achievement in state history up to that point. His jersey number 20 was officially honored by the Utah Utes on the 22nd of January, 2022, recognizing both his championship contributions and the discrimination he had overcome.

• 5. Three Games in New York

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  The New York Knicks selected Misaka in the 1947 BAA draft, and he debuted as the first non-Caucasian player in the Basketball Association of America that same year. The first African-American player would not enter what became the NBA until 1950. Misaka played three games in the 1947-48 season and scored seven points before being cut mid-season. He believed the Knicks simply had too many guards. He said he did not feel discrimination from teammates or opposing players during his time there, though he kept to himself. The one teammate he was close to during training camp was Carl Braun, who would later be inducted into the Hall of Fame. The milestone Misaka represented passed without ceremony. The NBA itself, formed in 1949 through the merger of the BAA and the National Basketball League, later adopted the BAA's history and counts Misaka as the first non-white player in league history. Misaka declined an offer to join the Harlem Globetrotters after his playing days ended.

• 6. Life After the Court

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  Misaka returned to Utah to earn a degree in engineering. He was practical about the choice. "The salary for a rookie and the salary for starting engineer weren't much different," he recalled. He went on to work as an electrical engineer at a company in Salt Lake City, married a woman named Kate, and had two children. He died in Salt Lake City on the 20th of November, 2019, at the age of 95. Basketball was not the only arena where he found late-life recognition. He was inducted into the Japanese American National Bowling Hall of Fame in 1997, two years before his 1999 induction into the Utah Sports Hall of Fame. At the age of 80, he bowled a near-perfect score of 299. In 2012, he attended a Knicks game and reflected publicly on Jeremy Lin's rise to prominence with the same franchise. In an interview, Misaka downplayed his own career in comparison, believing his three-game NBA tenure did not warrant the same attention as Lin's. A documentary film, Transcending: The Wat Misaka Story, directed by Bruce Alan Johnson and Christine Toy Johnson, premiered in 2008. In 2025, the Salt Lake City-based Plan-B Theatre Company staged a one-man show called Kilo-Wat at the University of Utah's Kingsbury Hall, telling the story of his career and military service.