Nation's top prep scout loves what he calls his 'hobby'

Bob Gibbons celebrates his 58th birthday on Monday here the same way he usually celebrates his birthday ... watching summer basketball games.

And the Lenoir, N.C., native, widely acknowledged as the nation's top prep basketball talent scout, probably wouldn't have it any other way.

"I enjoy coming to Las Vegas," Gibbons, in town this week scouting the 224-team Big Time Tournament, said. "It's a great city. And I love this event. It's a great opportunity to see some of the top players in the nation competing against each other."

Living out of a suitcase is nothing new for Gibbons, whose All Star Sports publications are considered the bible for prep basketball recruiting fanatics. He also runs a scouting service subscribed to by most Division I schools.

Of the 31 days this month, Gibbons will spend 28 of them on the road in places like Teaneck, N.J., Carson, Calif., Augusta, Ga., and Murfreesboro, Tenn., evaluating players. He'll spend parts of three days at his home in Lenoir typing up newsletters and scouting reports.

"You see more players this month than during the rest of the year," Gibbons said during a break Thursday at the Big Time Tournament at Durango High School. "And because a lot of the players are on traveling (all-star) teams, you get to see some better matchups than during the regular season."

This is the 21st year of scouting for Gibbons, a University of North Carolina business graduate who had his own insurance agency when he decided to put out a recruiting publication on the side.

"It started out as a little part-time hobby," Gibbons recalled. "No one was really doing a good job nationally of identifying who the top players were. I started it more for the fans who wondered, 'Who are these guys that are going to UCLA or North Carolina, anyway?'/thinspace"

In his spare time, Gibbons assembled a list of what he thought were the nation's top 300 prospects.

"In 1977, I ran an ad in Basketball Weekly for a report of the top 300 players for five dollars," Gibbons said. "The ad ran just once and I got about 800 responses. That convinced me that there was a market out there for something like that."

Gibbons now has more than 4,000 subscribers to his newsletter, which comes out 15 times each year for $35. He quit his job in the insurance business in the 1980s to concentrate on his "hobby" full time.

Unlike many recruiting publications, Gibbons' entertaining newsletters are a lot more than just names, college possibilities and signings. Perhaps as talented a writer as an evaluator, he isn't afraid to give his opinion of what he perceives to be some of the ills of college basketball and recruiting. He has chastised some of the biggest names in the sport.

None were any bigger than Georgetown's 6-9, 350-pound head coach John Thompson in 1985. And a few zingers from Gibbons in his newsletter set the stage for a legendary confrontation between the two in the hallway outside Princeton University's Dillon Gymnasium before a session of the Nike All-American Camp.

To set the stage: Kentucky coach Joe B. Hall had resigned before the Final Four that year. When Thompson's name was tossed out by some basketball people as a possible successor, a Louisville writer wrote, "that there's a better chance of a Martian being in the White House before a black would occupy a seat that Adolph Rupp sat in."

An angry Thompson objected to the story at a Final Four press conference. Gibbons, upset that Thompson would use the article to try to motivate his all-black squad, wrote, "there's a better chance of a Martian being in the White House than a white player being on Georgetown's basketball team."

A few months later at the Nike Camp, Gibbons felt a tap on his shoulder from one of the few major college coaches who doesn't subscribe to his service.

"I think it was a set-up," Gibbons said. "There was John Thompson. He told me, 'I didn't like what you wrote.' I told him, 'I didn't like what you said at the press conference at the Final Four.' Then he called me a blankity-blank pimp for living off of all these kids. I said, 'Well, coach, how do you make your living?' Then he said a few things about my ancestry."

Gibbons had stood his ground against the biggest and most intimidating coach in college basketball.

Thompson and Nike Camp director George Raveling continue to be the targets of Gibbons' barbs for what he perceives to be their behind-the-scenes tag-team effort to steer prospective recruits to Georgetown.

However, anybody sitting next to Gibbons at any of this weekend's games will discover that he has many more friends in college basketball than enemies. During one game alone Thursday, more than two dozen college coaches stopped by to chat with the man former UNLV recruit Lloyd Daniels simply referred to as, "Mr. Bob" because he couldn't remember his last name.

"I really feel blessed that I have a job like this that I love to do," Gibbons said. "I spend a lot of nights in a lot of hot, stuffy gyms each year. I evaluate about 5,000 players a year. But I love it."

By the way, Mr. Bob, did you notice that there is a black (Tubby Smith) in Adolph Rupp's old chair? And Georgetown has since had white basketball players on its roster.

"Well, I think someone should check Mr. Clinton's heritage," Gibbons says with a smile. "Maybe there was a Martian in the White House before those two things occurred."

With that, Gibbons was off to another gym and another game.

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