Jan. 7, 2009

By Jim Sumner
theACC.com

Rich Yunkus was a high school senior in Benton, Illinois when he received an unexpected phone call from Oxford, England. Bill Bradley was on the line, the same Bill Bradley who had been the nation’s best college player a few years earlier at Princeton.

Bradley was in England, studying on a Rhodes Scholarship, but thought that calling Yunkus on behalf of his alma mater was an important use of his time.

Yunkus eventually got used to this sort of thing. John Havlicek called to pitch Ohio State. Southern California offered to have John Wayne meet Yunkus at the airport, if he would only agree to visit the school. Over 200 universities offered him basketball scholarships.

Why was Yunkus such a hot commodity? Well, first he was 6’9” tall. Plus, he was a good athlete, with a soft, accurate, left-handed stroke that extended out to 20 feet. He was also a straight-arrow honor student.

Yunkus also had advanced fundamentals for a high school player. His prep coach, Rich Herrin, would later coach with great success at Southern Illinois. Yunkus says, “Coach Herrin always gave 100% and expected that in return. That was a great lesson to learn early.”

Yunkus thought he would take those skills to Duke. “Duke was the only school for me when I was growing up,” he recalls. “I was always wearing a Duke shirt. But when I visited, it just didn’t seem right. Nothing specific, no incidents or anything, just a feeling that Duke wasn’t the place for me.”

Yunkus cut his list to Florida, Vanderbilt, and Georgia Tech. He decided to go to Atlanta. “I wanted to go south but not too far south. Tech was the right distance. I liked the fact that the school was an independent and traveled all over the country. And the academics were first rate.”

Another attraction was Tech’s veteran coach John “Whack” Hyder. “He had an open-door policy. He treated you like a person. He was always there for you: A surrogate father.”

Freshmen weren’t eligible for varsity competition in 1968 but after the required year on the freshman team, Yunkus moved right into the starting lineup as a sophomore.

His roommate and fellow sophomore Jim Thorne moved right into the starting lineup alongside him. Thorne has a point guard’s appreciation for Yunkus’ talents.

“He was a smart guy. He understood the game. Being left-handed threw opponents off. He had a great sense around the basket and was very skilled at getting position. He was a terrific shooter who didn’t need much time to get off a shot and was a very good passer. He was good in every aspect of the game.”

Yunkus averaged 24 points and 10 rebounds per game in 1969, as Tech played in the Sun Bowl Tournament in El Paso and visited Notre Dame and Tulane. But the road wasn’t kind to the young Yellow Jackets. They finished 12-13.

Tech returned four starters for 1970 and showed distinct improvement. The Yellow Jackets started 5-1 before a late December trip to Los Angeles and the Bruin Classic. UCLA pounded Tech, 121-90. Yunkus recalls UCLA guard John Vallely smiling wickedly at him right after the game, saying “Nice try.”

Tech then lost the consolation game to Indiana, 87-65.

Yunkus could hardly be blamed for the setbacks. He scored 38 points against the Bruins. He then followed that up with a 41-point effort against Dave Cowens and Florida State a few weeks later, but Tech lost that game, 89-83.

The Yellow Jackets had better luck on its next high-profile road trip. For years, Charlotte had hosted a two-day twin-bill known as the North-South Classic. North Carolina, NC State, Clemson, and South Carolina were the participants, with the North Carolina schools playing the South Carolina schools on consecutive nights.

Unlike the earlier Dixie Classic and the later Big Four tournaments, these games were part of the ACC schedule. South Carolina came to view Charlotte as less than neutral and dropped out of the arrangement. Georgia Tech agreed to fill the vacancy.

The Yellow Jackets went to Charlotte with a 12-7 mark. They opened against fifth-ranked NC State, on Friday the 13th of February and more than played the role of scary guest. Jumping to a 17-point, first-half lead, Tech held off a comeback bid for an 87-77 win. Yunkus sparked the upset with 27 points and 20 rebounds.

Still, Tech didn’t think they had garnered the respect they deserved. “I remember picking up the Charlotte paper the next morning,” Yunkus recalls, “ and all they could talk about was [UNC star] Charlie Scott. We were some kind of fluke.”

That talk didn’t survive the night. Yunkus toasted the 10th-ranked Tar Heels to the tune of 47 points, making 14-of-21 field goals and 19-of -20 foul shots. He added 13 rebounds. With Tech up 76-65, Yunkus scored 10 consecutive points, salting away the 104-95 victory.

The 47 points matched the school record set by Yunkus earlier that season in an 88-61 win over Furman. (At one point during that game, Yunkus had outscored Furman 41-35, before Hyder mercifully pulled him for a rest.)

Thorne says his roommate’s performance in Charlotte “put us on the map.” It certainly put Tech on the NIT’s map. Tech defeated Duquesne 78-68 in its first NIT contest but lost a 56-55 heartbreaker to local favorite St. John’s when a close charge/block call went against Thorne at the end of the game.

Georgia Tech finished 17-10, while Yunkus averaged 30.1 points and 12 rebounds per game. The scoring average remains the best single-season mark in Georgia Tech history. AP and UPI both named Yunkus second-team All-America.

Opposition coaches were determined not to allow Yunkus to average 30 points per game the following season. He says, “Opposing teams put more effort on stopping me. I was double-teamed all the time. But that was all right with me if it freed up other people. That’s how you win ball games. We had really good role players. We had experience, more of an attitude of ‘been-there, done-that.’”

The talent and experience added up. A 10-1 start fueled a school-record 23-win season. Victims included Florida, Georgia (twice), Oklahoma City, and Pittsburgh.

North Carolina got an 87-58 payback in the North-South but Tech recovered to beat State 73-66 the following night. Yunkus scored 18 points against UNC, 24 against NCSU.

Tech followed with a grueling trip to Hawaii, which resulted in a pair of losses to Hawaii. Returning to the mainland, Tech won four straight to finish the regular season at 20-8.

The NIT came calling again but so did the NCAA. Today, the idea of turning down the NCAA for the NIT would be laughable. But it was a different universe in 1971, when the two tournaments were closer in prestige and all of the NIT games were played in New York City’s fabled Madison Square Garden.

Hyder let the team decide. They picked the NIT.

Yunkus voted to go to the NCAAs but doesn’t second-guess the decision to go north. “We thought we could win the NIT. There was some talk about the NCAA putting us in the same bracket as UCLA and we had seen all we needed to see of them the year before. If we had played them 10 times, they would have beaten us 10 times.”

Yunkus and Thorne both note that playing in New York enabled their family and friends to see the games in person at a time when few games were televised. Yunkus says, “We had 12 days in New York City and they treated us royally. It was a great experience.”

Tech opened NIT play with a 70-67 win over LaSalle and followed with a 78-70 win over Michigan.

This left the Yellow Jackets with a semifinal matchup against St. Bonaventure, a team that had edged Tech earlier in the season in the Gator Bowl Tournament.

The Bonnies smothered Yunkus inside and he was cold from the perimeter. Tech jumped to a 16-9 lead early but couldn’t hold it. St. Bonaventure had a chance to win with no time on the clock in regulation and the score tied at 59 but Paul Hoffman missed two foul shots.

Each team scored eight points in the first overtime, with Yunkus getting half of Tech’s. The Yellow Jackets pulled away in the second overtime, winning 76-71. Yunkus scored 19 points but made only 6-22 field goals. Thorne led the victors with 27 points.

North Carolina defeated Duke in the other semifinal, the only time those rivals have ever met past the ACC Tournament.

Georgia Tech and North Carolina had played each other often enough for Dean Smith to have figured out that Yunkus could beat his team if he let him. He wasn’t going to let Yunkus deny his team an NIT title.

Yunkus spent the entire game with Carolina defenders draped all over him. “They had a guy behind me, a guy in front of me, and sometimes a guy beside me. When I got outside, I was frustrated and hurried shots. They were ready for us.”

Tech trailed virtually the entire game but still hung tough. The Jackets trailed only 64-59, with 5:43 left, when, as Thorne says, “We just ran out of gas. The tank was empty.”

North Carolina pulled away for an 84-66 win. Yunkus made only 4-of-16 field goals and ended with 10 points and 4 rebounds.

Yunkus finished the 1971 season averaging 25.5 points and 11.1 rebounds and again was named to numerous All-America teams.

The Cincinnati Royals selected Yunkus in the third round of the 1971 NBA draft but traded him to the Atlanta Hawks. Atlanta wanted him to go to Italy for more seasoning.

“In some ways it was an attractive offer,” he says. “Italian teams only played once a week in those days and the Italian team offered to pay my living expenses. But I always enjoyed the college atmosphere, playing for the fans, playing for the name on the front of the uniform. The pros weren’t like that. It just wasn’t fun anymore. The four years at Georgia Tech were the best years of my life and I wasn’t going to get that on the road in the NBA.”

It wasn’t like Yunkus didn’t have options. A three-time Academic All-American, he graduated from Tech with a 3.6 in Management.

Thorne says of his friend’s decision not to play professional basketball, “I wasn’t surprised at all. The NBA was different then. It just wasn’t a good fit.” Thorne also was an exceptional student and says “we were at Tech to get an education. Basketball was a way to do that, not an end to itself.”

Yunkus went back to Benton, where he helped his father run a Terminex franchise. In 1989 he got into financial management and now works at an Edward Jones office four blocks from his house. Yunkus married his high school sweetheart Donna in 1972 and they have two children and four grandchildren.

Kenny Anderson broke Yunkus’ Georgia Tech single-game record back in 1990 but Yunkus still has a prominent place in his alma mater’s record book, starting with his career scoring average of 26.6 points per game. He has three of the top five scoring-average seasons in Tech history and three of the top six rebound-average seasons.

Incredibly, his 2,232 career points have withstood the onslaught of freshmen eligibility, three-point shots, and shot clocks. Matt Harpring with 2,225 and Mark Price with 2,193 came closest. His #40 jersey is retired and he is a member of the Georgia Tech Hall of Fame.

Yunkus says he’s “amazed that the record still stands. I’ve been ready for someone to break it for some time.” He thought Price would break it in the 1986 NCAA Tournament and had been contacted about being in the house for any ceremonies. But Tech lost earlier than expected and the record held.

Jim Thorne still lives in Atlanta, where he’s retired from a career in financial services, much spent with Merrill-Lynch. “When people find out I played basketball at Tech,” he says, “they want to know when I played. When I tell them, they all remember Rich and that’s what they want to talk about. All those years and they still remember. That’s the sign of a champion.”

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