(1933-2017)
Inducted into the Jewish Sports Hall of Fame, 1992
A Hartford native, Yellin was a letterman at Weaver High School on both the basketball and tennis teams. AS a senior, he established a city-wide record for points scored in basketball, averaging 18 points a game. In tennis, his team won state championships in the two years that he played.
At Yale College, he established an all-time freshman basketball scoring record, earning 36 points in a game against New York University. He earned three varsity letters in basketball, one of only two students in his class to do so. In 1953, the basketball team toured South and Central America, playing 30 games in 55 days. Yellin was the highest scorer for Yale on this tour – and it was reported that at 6’5” tall, he was the tallest person in Ecuador at that time. Playing before more than 14,000 fans in Buenos Aires, the Yale team upset the Argentinian Olympic basketball team which had finished third in the Olympic games in Helsinki the year before – one of Yale’s greatest basketball victories. Yellin played man-to-man against the Argentinian star Oscar Furlong and outscored him.
Yellin graduated with high honors form Yale and entered the Law School, after which he returned to Hartford and practiced law for 30 years. He was a research assistant to the State of Connecticut Legislative Council and the business editor of the Connecticut Bar Journal. He chaired the State Junior Bar Association Committee to aid in the revision of the index to the General Statutes.
Yellin brought professional basketball to Hartford in the late 1960’s as majority owner of the Hartford Capitols basketball team, a member of the Eastern Basketball Association. He authored three books in collaboration with K. C. Jones on how to teach children to play basketball and was honored by being inducted into the New England Basketball Hall of Fame. In the community, he chaired the Farmington Town Conservation Commission and for 26 years the Greater Hartford Cancer Society golf tournament.
In 2015, UConn Health and the UConn Foundation awarded him and his wife Laura the Carole and Ray Neag Medal of Honor, which recognizes those individuals whose outstanding contributions to the field of medicine and UConn Health.