The leading basketball scorer in Tucson history isn’t Sean Elliott or Adia Barnes or Julie Brase, as is widely assumed.
It is Ed Nymeyer.
Elliott scored 2,555 points at Arizona, Barnes 2,237 for the UA women’s team and Brase 2,913 at Catalina Foothills High School, but, holy smokes, Ed Nymeyer has got to be at, what, 10,000 points and counting?
Last Friday, Nymeyer excused himself from a conversation because he was due to take the court at the Liggins Rec Center near Grant Road, just as he does at mid-day every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
“I’m 83, pushing 84,” he says with a laugh. “I can still shoot, but I can’t get open the way I used to.”
When Nymeyer played his last game as an Arizona Wildcat at Bear Down Gym, Feb. 26, 1958 — a victory over Cal State-Los Angeles in which he scored 21 points — he was said to be the leading scorer in UA history with 1,225 points.
A headline in the next day’s Star said:
Ed Nymeyer
Tops Record
To celebrate the occasion, Nymeyer wore an Arizona-red cap during warmups. Be true to your school, right? The game was halted about five minutes before halftime as Nymeyer scored on a long jumper — probably a 3-pointer in today’s game — to pass Lincoln Richmond’s 1,186 points in Arizona’s record books.
A lot of people stopped counting Nymeyer’s points after that game, but he was just getting started. For the next six decades he kept hitting that deadly jumper in the once-strongly contested city league games at the YMCA, and in the once-thriving basketball leagues of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons). He now continues it at the Liggins Rec Center, where you can play all day for $1.50.
Nymeyer gets his money’s worth.
“It’s kind of sad that I don’t see anyone I remember from college or high school basketball at the gym any more,” he says. “But i have no plans to stop.”
About 20 years after he established Arizona’s career scoring record — while Nymeyer was forging one of the most compelling coaching records in Tucson history — someone in the UA sports information department began researching records from the 1940s.
He discovered that Richmond — who played five years, two of them truncated seasons during World War II — had scored another 60 points in games against cobbled together teams from Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, the Marana Army Officers and the Ryan Field Rockets, and applied them to his career totals.
Thus, the 1958 headline “Ed Nymeyer Tops Record” was sort of nullified.
Either way, Nymeyer remains No. 32 in UA career scoring, ahead of NBA players Luke Walton, Jud Buechler, Mike Bibby and Gilbert Arenas.
If it bothers Nymeyer, you’d never know it.
“If I had known I needed 22 more points to pass Linc Richmond, I would’ve found a way to get those 22 points,” he says, laughing. ‘’But my scrapbook still says I’m the leading scorer.”
I bring this to your attention because Ed Nymeyer and his 1958 teammate, Ernie McCray, were bypassed when 17 former Arizona basketball players and coaches were inducted into the Pac-12 Hall of Honor from 2002-19.
At about the time it became obvious that Nymeyer, McCray and another long-ago UA basketball player or two such as Al Fleming and Roger Johnson were deserving of entry into the Pac-12 Hall of Honor, the league altered the selection format.
Because schools with thin basketball histories such as Washington State, ASU, Stanford and Colorado seemed to have exhausted their list of worthy Hall of Honor basketball candidates, the Pac-12 last year opened the process of all athletes, all sports.
Arizona’s first non-basketball inductee was Meg Ritchie-Stone, a well-deserving track and field All-American from the early 1980s.
And now, unfortunately, those from the Nymeyer-McCray days will be further back-logged because Arizona has a waiting list of big-names to honor from Chuck Cecil and Terry Francona to Nymeyer’s grand-daughter, Lacey Nymeyer John, the 2008 NCAA Woman of the Year and Olympic swimming silver medalist.
Not that Ed Nymeyer is worried about it. He has been inducted into so many Halls of Fame that it’s hard to keep them straight:
The Arizona High School Coaches Hall of Fame
The Pima County Sports Hall of Fame
The Flowing Wells High School Hall of Fame
The UA Sports Hall of Fame
Did I leave any out?
Nymeyer did a lot more than score 1,225 points for Arizona. He coached Flowing Wells High School to the 1964 and 1968 boys basketball state championships. And then, for an encore, he coached the Flowing Wells girls volleyball team to the 1991 state championship. He was named Tucson’s coach of the year in volleyball and basketball during 35 years at Flowing Wells, winning more than 300 games in both sports, a virtually untouchable record.
And did you know he was also a golf letterman at Arizona, an athlete of such range that he finished second in the 1954 state championships in the low hurdles?
To make Nymeyer’s story more compelling, he did all of this after growing up in small-town Globe, the son of what he calls an “entrepreneur,” owner of a Curio shop, from which he inherited his height. (Nymyer is 6 feet 3, inches, although during his UA days his nickname was “Pudge.”)
“We were about the only people in Globe who weren’t miners,” he says.
Do you realize how good a high school basketball player in Globe has to be — had to be in 1953 — to get recruited by a major college? Nymeyer initially signed to play for Utah’s Hall of Fame coach Jack Gardner at a time Gardner coached the Utes to two Final Fours, an Elite Eight and three Sweet 16s.
“I also got offers from ASU, Arizona and BYU, but coming from Globe I didn’t know how good I was,” Nymeyer remembers. “I was fearful. Utah had all of these famous players — Art Bunte, Morris Buckwalter, Gary Bergen — and I kept thinking ‘geez, how can I compete with those guys?’ ‘’
Nymeyer backed out of his commitment to play for Utah and it became the best decision of his life.
He soon discovered he was good enough to play for the Utes. In the third game of his UA varsity career, Nymeyer was held scoreless in the worst loss in Arizona history, 119-45, against the Utes in Salt Lake City.
“It was the only time in my life I didn’t score,” Nymeyer says now.
A year later, back in Salt Lake City, Nymeyer scored 23 against the Utes.
He hasn’t slowed down since.
