Tall Boy

He was bounced from his high-school team because "his feet didn't match." Now he is the glamor boy of college basketball. George ("Scaffold") Mikan stands 6 ft. 9 in his socks, weighs 227 lbs., sleeps in an 8-by-6 bed and looks like a gangling Harold Lloyd, even to the horn-rimmed spectacles. To keep his elongated bones together, De Paul University's mild-mannered Mikan makes away with a daily breakfast of oatmeal, a half dozen eggs, ham, angel cake, three cups of coffee, a cod-liver pill.

His lumbering height and near-sighted eyes almost ruined George's basketball career before it began. He got a cold shoulder from Notre Dame's basketball men, might never have made the grade at De Paul in normal times. But Coach Ray Meyer was hard pressed for a center. Meyer drove his clumsy recruit through dozens of daily dozens, interspersed with rope-skipping, shadow-boxing and whatever else might develop coordination until Mikan cried: "What do you want, Coach, my blood?" Slowly Mikan's muscles learned to obey. The onetime marble-shooting champion of Will County, Ill. eventually got the hang of shooting baskets with a marble champion's sharp accuracy, upped his per-game scoring average from 14 points in 1943 to a dazzling 23 points this year.

Last week, De Paul's tall boy gave a basketmaking exhibition in Manhattan's Madison Square Garden. He couldn't have picked a more spectacular time or place. With 18,253 admiring fans looking on, he piled up 21 field goals with his lazy lay-up shot, added eleven free throws for a total of 53--exactly as many as the whole opposing Rhode Island State team made. He smashed the National Invitation Tournament individual scoring record, rang up eight more points than had ever before been scored by a player in Madison Square Garden.

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