LOW-KEY APPROACH : George Yardley Downplayed His Success While Leading a Family of Real Sports

While they were growing up, Marilyn, Rob, Rich and Anne Yardley had no idea that their father, George Yardley, once had been a basketball superstar.

Sure, there had been clues--big basketball trophies in the den, pictures on the wall, people recognizing their father in restaurants--but it took the Yardley children many years before they realized that the name George Harry Yardley III meant something more, to other people at least, than just dear ol’ dad.

“He never ever talked about his basketball days,” Rich Yardley said. “We didn’t even really realize he had been a pro athlete until eighth grade or so when some kid told us.

“When people came up to him in restaurants we figured something was going on. But we didn’t understand why he was famous. We’d say, ‘Wow, is it because he’s bald?’ ”

Actually, George Yardley gained fame in the late 1950s with a nifty jump shot (he was one of the first to perfect it), tremendous leaping ability (he was one of the first to dunk), and by becoming the first player in National Basketball Assn. history to score more than 2,000 points--he scored 2,001--in a season.

He topped 2,000 points playing for the Detroit Pistons in the last game of the 1957-58 season.

But, as Yardley, now 60, points out, that was more than 30 years ago. The past has passed and the present and future are certainly more significant to him, as his family and manufacturing business have long taken top priority.

Today, the Yardleys--George, his twin sons, Rob and Rich, his daughter, Anne, his brother, Bob, and Bob’s son, Bill--represent one of Orange County’s many sporting families.

And although George Yardley is by the far the center of the family’s athletic success, he has plenty of talented company:

--Rob Yardley, 32, played basketball at Orange Coast College and at Redlands.

--Rich Yardley, Rob’s twin, played volleyball at Stanford.

--Anne Yardley, now Anne Yardley Caldwell, was a high school All-American in volleyball at Newport Harbor High School, and went on to a successful collegiate career at Texas A&M; and Arizona.

--Bob Yardley, 57, played basketball at Colorado after a standout season at Orange Coast (where during the 1950-51 season he averaged 20.3 points a game).

--Bill Yardley, 27, was a three-year captain and a three-year All-American in volleyball at USC. From 1985-86, he played on the U.S. national team.

Bill Yardley is the only one of the bunch still competing. His club volleyball team finished fourth at the U.S. Volleyball Assn. national championships two weeks ago, and he was named a USVBA All-American.

For the rest of the Yardley clan, however, talk of sports has been reduced to common chit-chat.

But when they get together in the family’s Newport Beach home, which sits atop a bluff overlooking Newport’s Upper Back Bay, the memories flow like a high-arching swish.

“I couldn’t make a good girls’ team today,” George Yardley said. “I mean it. Our play then was about at the level that the girls play in college today.”

Although many would have vast disagreements with Yardley’s assessment, Yardley himself is not one to boast about his accomplishments.

Although he said he considers the 2,001-point season as one of his two high points in basketball--the other was winning the Amateur Athletic Union national title in 1951 with San Francisco Stewart-Chevrolet--Yardley does not go out of his way to talk about his athletic exploits.

“The only real concern I ever really had was someday I would have to grow up and be a man,” he said.

Perhaps that is a hint why when Yardley became a father, he in no way pushed any of his children toward basketball, or any sport for that matter.

Said Rich: “If anything, the pressure was the other direction. He never encouraged us. . . . Most dads would at least play catch with their kids, but he never encouraged us one way or the other. Maybe that sounds bad, but I’m not disappointed at all.

“A lot of fathers try to live vicariously though their children. Dad didn’t have to live vicariously. He’d already lived it.”

He certainly had.

Yardley, a late bloomer who didn’t begin to reach his potential until after he had graduated from Stanford, was the first-round draft choice of the then-Fort Wayne (Ind.) Pistons in 1950.

But because he wanted to play on the 1952 Olympic team, Yardley turned down the offers to go pro, playing with AAU teams instead. But after breaking his wrist, his Olympic hopes were dashed. Yardley said that was the low point of his career.

“It was very disappointing,” he said. “I was the best player in basketball at the time, I had been an MVP (in the AAU) league for the last two years. It wasn’t good.”

He turned pro in 1953, and played for the Pistons until 1959 when he was traded to the Syracuse Nationals. After 1 1/2 years with Syracuse, Yardley quit for a year to start his business in California. In 1961, the Los Angeles Jets, an American Basketball League team, agreed to pay Yardley $500 a game.

“The good news was I only had to play home games,” Yardley said. “The bad news was that the checks all bounced.”

With that, Yardley retired from pro ball for good. Although he often missed the competition and the camaraderie, neither he nor his wife, Diana, missed the travel, especially the long journey back to California after the season ended each spring.

Especially horrendous was the journey home in 1957. Driving through Texas, the Yardleys were hit by a blizzard. The only motel in the nearest town of Shamrock was full. They drove through 20-foot high snowdrifts until they reached a farmhouse. The owner let the family stay in the garage, which had two large broken windows. Inside, a bum was passed out with a whiskey bottle by his side.

“It was awful,” Diana Yardley said. “George had to go out and find milk for the babies. I was left with this bum, and a tornado came and we thought, ‘Well, that’s the end of us.’ ”

The next day, the Yardleys learned that 17 people, stranded in their cars, died that night of exposure.

Yardley’s children were too young to remember any of this, of course. And of their father’s professional career, they can only remember a few flashes. Though nothing of the games themselves.

“I remember eating popcorn on the floor of some arena or something,” Marilyn Yardley said. “I remember riding on his shoulders going down the halls into a locker room, I guess. But I don’t think I connected it with anything like basketball.”

Actually, about 10 years after his retirement, George Yardley did make an effort to show his children he could play the game.

“I figured I had to be a father and let them see me play,” he said. “So I took them to a game I was playing in, in a local league.”

While the team warmed up inside the gym before the game, the Yardley children went outside to shoot some baskets. Moments later, they heard a whistle. They ran in, thinking the game was about to begin.

As it turned out, not only had they missed the opening tipoff, but the whistle they had heard was one signaling a double technical foul on their father. Yardley had kicked the basketball into the gym’s rafters, and there the ball had stuck.

“The ball stuck, so the official threw me out of the game,” Yardley said. “So we went home.

“And that was their indoctrination into the game.”