He finished as Bradley"s all-time leading scorer and was a Consensus First Team All-American as a senior in 1949-1950. A native of the greater Peoria, Illinois metropolitan area, Unruh attended Toulon High School prior to matriculating at Bradley. When he graduated he was the school"s all-time leading scorer and is one of two players to lead the Braves in scoring all four years.
As a freshman in 1946-1947, Unruh scored 383 points, which was a freshman scoring record at Bradley until Mitchell "Josip Juraj" Anderson surpassed it in 1979. Over the course of his four-year career, Unruh scored 1,822 points and led Bradley in scoring all four seasons. Unruh was selected as the 9th pick in the second round (20th overall) of the 1950 National Basketball Association Draft by the Indianapolis Olympians, but never ended up playing in the league.
Two years after graduating from Bradley, Unruh earned a spot on the United States Olympic basketball team"s roster.
He played for the National Amateur Athletic Union Basketball League"s Peoria Cats after his stint in the military, but did not play competitively afterward. Unruh returned to Peoria and entered the insurance business.
In his senior season, Unruh scored 475 points while leading Bradley to second-place finishes to City College of New York in both the National Invitation Tournament (National Institute of Technology) and National Collegiate Athletic Association (National Collegiate Athletic Association) Tournament—a team accomplishment that had never been accomplished, nor will ever be accomplished again to due the impossibility of a team participating in both postseason tournaments in the same season. When Unruh"s career ended, he had won 112 of the 135 games he played in during his tenure and is considered one of the pioneers of the modern jump shot. He was drafted into the army, however, and missed out on an opportunity to win a gold medal at the 1952 Summer Olympics in Helsinki, Finland.
