Yardley Had NBA’s First 2,000-Point Season, but He Still Waits for Fame

Quick, name the first National Basketball Assn. player who scored 2,000 points in a season.

George Mikan, you say? Wrong.

Bob Pettit? Sorry.

Dolph Schayes? Good try.

Wilt Chamberlain? Bob Cousy? Bill Sharman? Oscar Robertson?

No, no, no and no.

You can find the right man in Newport Beach. He is 59, and runs an engineering company that sells industrial products such as filters and gauges. He isn’t in the Basketball Hall of Fame, yet, and he doesn’t make beer commercials.

He was born in Hollywood, went to Newport Harbor High School, got an engineering degree at Stanford, was drafted by the Ft. Wayne Pistons in the first round in 1950, played in six all-star games, ultimately chose engineering over basketball and left the NBA after seven seasons.

His name?

George Yardley.

Chances are you haven’t heard of him, but 30 years ago, his name was hardly obscure.

The year was 1958. The Detroit Pistons--they had since left Ft. Wayne--had a balding, 6-foot 5-inch, 185-pound small forward named George Harry Yardley. He had tremendous leaping ability--he could even dunk the ball--and was a master of that rather recent innovation, the jump shot.

Yardley’s last shot in the last game of the 1957-58 season gave him 2,001 points, making him the first player to reach the 2,000-point plateau.

Looking back on the record, Yardley says the mark means much more to him today. At the time, Yardley wasn’t thinking much about the record because his Pistons were getting clobbered by the Syracuse Nationals in the season finale.

“I don’t really remember trying too hard to do it,” Yardley said. “There was maybe 3 minutes left in the game, and I had gone about 10 minutes without scoring. My final basket was on a breakaway. I cherry-picked on them, and it was a dunk, which was doubly pleasing for me because they were really making a big effort not to let me do it.

“I don’t think I would have been gunning for it if they hadn’t put so much emphasis on it. I tried to figure out where all these guys came from. There were two or three guys on me all the time. So finally it got to the point where I decided if they wanted to keep me from doing it so badly, maybe I ought to try harder to get it.”

At the time, Yardley said, he valued Mikan’s season-scoring record of 1,932, which he broke in the same season, more than the 2,000 mark.

“If someone were to say today that I was the man to break Mikan’s record, nobody would know what that means. At that time, people would say that’s more important than scoring 2,000 points,” Yardley said.

But Mikan, 64 years old and working for a company that manufactures recreational vehicles, said from his office in Minneapolis that Yardley’s reaching 2,000 points was a major accomplishment.

“It was a big milestone,” said Mikan, the NBA’s first dominant big man. “Very few had come close to it. Today, the fellows play a much faster game, which produces more points. They also play more games.”

Bob Pettit, one of Yardley’s contemporaries who went on to pass the 2,000 mark with the St. Louis Hawks, honored Yardley’s accomplishment as well.

“No one had ever done it,” said Pettit, 55, who lives in Metairie, La. “It doesn’t matter if other players score over 4,000 points. There’s always a first, and George was the first to reach 2,000. That alone makes it a tremendous feat.”

Dolph Schayes, 60, who is in the real estate business in Syracuse, played alongside Yardley for the Nationals in Yardley’s last NBA season.

“Games weren’t as high-scoring as they are now,” Schayes said. “Scores were not in the stratosphere. Two thousand points was a great amount. If a player averaged 25 points a game, that was amazing.”

One milestone Yardley failed to reach in his NBA career was 10,000 points. Sitting in his office last week and scanning some NBA statistics, Yardley realized for the first time just how close he was to that mark.

Yardley finished with 9,998 points.

He joked about coming out of retirement for a basket. “Call up the Lakers,” he said.

Maybe if he had passed the 10,000 mark, he would be more familiar. Maybe people would then know that Yardley was the NBA’s original Bird.

That’s right. Even before Larry Bird was a bouncing baby boy, Yardley was known throughout the league as the Bird. Some thought he got the nickname because of his superior leaping ability, but Yardley offers a somewhat less glamorous explanation.

While attending Stanford, where he averaged 11.5 points over three seasons, Yardley got stuck with many a chore at his fraternity in his freshman year. It wasn’t long before everybody was calling him Yardbird, an old army term, and eventually he became, simply, the Bird.

“It’s gone from a term of degradation to a term of endearment,” Yardley said.

But the nickname was also a good description of how Yardley played the game.

“He could float through the air,” Mikan said. “He was a terrific player.”

Said Pettit: “At 6-5, he wasn’t that tall, but he had a tremendous springing ability. At the time there weren’t a lot of players who could leap like him. It was very effective.”

Schayes recalled Syracuse’s scoring capabilities when he teamed with Yardley.

“George was a scoring machine,” Schayes said. “It was great because teams couldn’t defend us. If they concentrated on me, George scored 20. If they concentrated on George, I scored 20.”

Ultimately, however, Yardley and Schayes were different in at least one respect. Unlike Schayes--and Mikan, and Pettit--Yardley is not in the Hall of Fame.

An effort is under way, headed by Carl Bennett, former general manager at Ft. Wayne, to enshrine Yardley in the hall with the rest of the legends at Springfield, Mass.

Yardley said he would consider it an honor to be inducted, but added that his life wouldn’t change in any way. He also said that one of the reasons he’s not in it now is the complicated nomination process, which he has been relatively unaware of and reluctant to deal with.

“It’s a political thing,” Yardley said. “I hate to have to stand up and say, ‘I deserve this and these other people say I deserve this,’ when I really don’t. If they want to put me in, that’s great. I accept. I’ll go down and sit on their doorstep all day if that’s what it takes.”

Whether Yardley makes it to the Hall of Fame or not, he’ll always be an NBA pioneer. Back then, the players were shorter, the play was slower, the paychecks were smaller, and the shoes were made of canvas, not leather. But according to Yardley, the action was every bit as physical as today. Perhaps even more so.

If the referee’s back was turned, Yardley said, you worried about your well-being.

“The first time around the league as a rookie, they just didn’t push you around, they hit you with a clenched fist in the face,” Yardley said. “I had a hundred stitches in my face just from playing basketball. The weak didn’t make it. It was a lot dirtier. I don’t see guys going out of the game anymore with big open cuts on their head, and that happened all the time.

“They didn’t throw you out of the game, there were no big fines. If you punched a guy and got into a big brawl, you might have gotten a technical foul, but they didn’t fine anybody. That was part of the game.”

Could Yardley and his contemporaries play in today’s NBA?

Yardley says no way. He says that today’s Continental Basketball Assn. would even be a stretch. He likens the style played in his era to the style of collegiate women’s basketball today, sans the violence.

“As I remember, we looked very much like the women do now,” Yardly said. “There was no dunking. I was the only guy in the West who could dunk a basketball that I know of. It was all flat-footed and set plays, rolls and picks.”

Schayes disagrees, adamantly.

“I almost went over and beat George on his big, bald head when I heard what he said about us playing like the women,” Schayes said. “George could play today, I could play today, all the great players could. We may not be dunking, but we would be playing a different style of game. We’d be playing with our heads, our smarts.”

The biggest difference in basketball today may not be the style of play, but the dollars that back it up. There is no more startling example of the inflation of player’s salaries than the 1958-59 NBA Guide.

In a short article on Yardley, the guide boldly stated that after his 2,001-point season, “The high-flying ‘bird’ . . . undoubtedly will rank as one of the highest-paid stars in the NBA this season, probably somewhere near the $24,000 mark.”

The article explained that the salary would work out to “about $11.99 for each point (Yardley) scored last season.”

Yardley actually made $25,000 that season, but says he had to take a pay cut the next season, when he went to Syracuse, so that he wouldn’t be making more than Schayes, his new team’s star player.

Most people would say that Yardley, unfortunately, played in the wrong era, because he missed out on the million-dollar salaries. Yardley says just the opposite.

“I think these guys were born in the wrong era,” Yardley said of the current NBA stars. “I feel sorry for them. There’s so many horror stories you hear. Because they have the money, they attract some pretty smooth-talking guys, the agents.”

According to Yardley, the money nowadays often hurts the players more than it helps them.

“You have a psychological problem if you retire at the age of 35 with no goals in your life,” he said. “You have nothing left to do. You have all the money you need, you have no skills, you have no judgment in investments.”

Yardley says he doesn’t plan to retire soon from the company he founded nearly 30 years ago. With the first of his four children beginning school, he left the NBA in 1960 and bought a failing engineering company from a business associate for one dollar. He financed the company initially with money made from basketball.

Today, the George Yardley Company does more than $20 million in sales. The company that started with basketball seed money is giving Yardley more money than he ever made for making jump shots.

But money isn’t one of Yardley’s top priorities. He said that if your goals are in order and you put in the effort, the money will come.

In 1961, he agreed to play home games for the Los Angeles franchise in the American Basketball League for $500 a game. Problem was, the checks bounced. But Yardley didn’t go after the money.

“You see, I told you I don’t care about money,” he said, laughing.

Yardley remains active athletically, in golf, and he was a nationally ranked senior doubles tennis player, winning six United States Tennis Assn. championships in three different age groups before knee deterioration forced him to give up that sport. Now he has two plastic kneecaps.

But they don’t keep him off the golf course, where Yardley plays to a 9 handicap.

And he is already in one hall of fame, Orange County’s. The Basketball Hall of Fame may be next.

“His pro career may not be that long-lived, but that shouldn’t detract from his accomplishments,” Schayes said. “I think George deserves to be in the Hall of Fame.”