Sport: Champion (Balding) Bird

The professional basketball season still had a few games to go last week when the Detroit Pistons' George ("The Bird") Yardley broke one of the brightest records in the game. Helping the Pistons beat the Minneapolis Lakers, 132-116. the Bird tossed in 49 points, pushed his year's total to a record 1,953. Watching him while he did it was the old titleholder: George Mikan, 33, the great Minneapolis center who held the seven-year-old mark of 1,932. By week's end Yardley had raised his record to 1,975.

The Bird's closest competitors for scoring honors this season: Syracuse's Dolph Schayes, 1,755, St. Louis' Bob Pettit, 1,644, and Cincinnati's Clyde Lovellette, 1,593. Next to those graceful giants, balding, knob-kneed, bony-shouldered George Yardley, 29, is an improbable-looking champion indeed. When he puts on his basketball uniform he looks like an absent-minded scientist who left home without his trousers. The illusion ends when the game starts. Then the Bird's loose, court-covering lope, his deft shots, his imperturbable balance in under-the-basket brawls, all blend into a 6-ft.-5-in., 195-lb. paragon of pro basketball.

Yardley is a graduate aeronautical engineer whose basketball career began when he sandwiched practice sessions between trips to the lab at Stanford (class of '50). He shone as a member of the Stanford varsity, but he really learned the game, he says, when he got out of school and joined the A.A.U.'s high-pressure "amateur" league.

Roundball among the amateurs was every bit as rugged as it is among the pros. Now as then, the rougher the game, the better Yardley likes it. He says that he scores best when a guard is climbing all over him: "When a guy is on top of you, you know where he is. You can watch the basket." Yardley has driven the Pistons to a place in the National Basketball Association championship playoffs. All their opponents know that if bothering Yardley makes him dangerous, leaving him free to shoot might turn him into—well, a man who would set a record that nobody could hope to break.