Michael Jordan asked him how to get better at basketball. At 82, Gibbons’ legacy remains
Before all of the high school recruiting websites, before social media, before the biggest high school basketball stars had their college commitments live-streamed around the world, there was Bob Gibbons.
For 45 years, Gibbons was a one-man basketball scouting band, going to work each day with his pencil, his paper and his extraordinary eye for talent. Gibbons never played basketball himself past the high school level. He never moved his scouting service out of little old Lenoir, N.C. He never needed much except a reliable car, a flexible family and somebody to tell him what time the next game tipped off.
Now 82, Gibbons has been nominated for the first time this year for the Naismith Memorial Hall of Fame as a contributor. The 2022 Hall of Fame class will be announced April 2 during Final Four weekend. And no matter whether he gets in, there’s no question that Gibbons contributed to the sport he loved.
“I always wanted to try to find out who was going to be the next Ralph Sampson, or James Worthy, or Michael Jordan,” Gibbons said. “And I would look everywhere.”
Gibbons has slowed down. His mind remains sharp, but he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease six years ago. That causes him balance issues, and he uses a walker to get around. He once flew and drove tens of thousands of miles a year across America to evaluate thousands of high school prospects. Now he no longer drives at all, leaving that to his wife Pat. His world has narrowed mostly to his hometown of Lenoir, where his father Robert served as the mayor for 24 years. Now his brother, Joe Gibbons, is in his 11th year as the mayor of Lenoir, a town of 18,352 that is 75 miles northwest of Charlotte.
Politics never much interested Bob Gibbons. His dad wanted him to go to N.C. State to study electrical engineering. Instead he enrolled at UNC, catching a break when then-basketball coach Frank McGuire took him under his wing in 1958 because the two shared the same barber. But Gibbons always took pains not to show favoritism to his alma mater, and in that way showed some political acumen.
“He had to get along with coaches, players, everybody,” Joe Gibbons said of his brother. “Duke maybe wasn’t his favorite place in the world, since he went to UNC. But he made sure to treat the Duke coaches and prospective recruits exactly the same way as the ones going to UNC or N.C. State or anywhere else.”
Over the years, Gibbons became known for his unbiased reports on potential college basketball players. Buzz Peterson broke into scouting by working part-time for Gibbons 35 years ago. Later, as a college head coach, he would eye Gibbons’ ratings for potential prospects. And now, as the Charlotte Hornets’ assistant general manager, Peterson still incorporates some of what Gibbons taught him.
“Even after all the technology came in, Bob preferred paper and pencil,” Peterson said. “He was still old school. And I still take notes that way myself sometimes now that I’m scouting college players (for the Hornets). And I also learned from him that once the ball went up, you kept your mouth shut. There was no talking during the time the ball was in play. Bob was working.”
Hoop dreams
Gibbons became so well-known as an independent scout that in the 1990s, he appeared on “60 Minutes” and in the movie “Hoop Dreams.” In the latter, a 1994 documentary about two budding high school basketball stars, one of the movie’s main characters gets enthused about how closely Gibbons was paying attention during one of his games.
“Bob Gibbons (saw) me play my best game out here,” said the prospect, Arthur Agee. “Sixteen points, 12 assists?! Bob Gibbons was over there like ... ” Here Agee mimicked someone furiously taking notes, to the laughter of his teammates.
Such was the reach of Gibbons’ No. 2 pencil that the rest of the players nodded and laughed. They knew exactly what Agee was talking about.
Each year Gibbons ranked the top 300-800 players in America for the 6,000 or so basketball fans who paid for his quarterly newsletter (the number increased as the years went on). He also sent more detailed reports to the hundreds of colleges that subscribed to his scouting service for a higher fee.
Gibbons helped his reputation as a fine evaluator early in his career, when he rated a skinny freshman from Wilmington, N.C., named Michael Jordan as the No. 1 player in the 1981 recruiting class, over the far more publicized Patrick Ewing. Gibbons had Ewing at No. 3. In between the two future hall of farmers was a shooting guard named Aubrey Sherrod at No. 2 who never played a minute in the NBA, which speaks to the vagaries of trying to forecast the career prospects of 17-year-olds.
Still, Gibbons did it better than most. He wasn’t the only basketball scout trying to produce accurate reports, but most of the others concentrated their work in a particular region. Gibbons scouted nationally.
“In the summers, we didn’t see him,” said Beth Gibbons, one of Bob Gibbons’ four children. “He’d be gone for weeks at a time.”
When Peterson worked for Gibbons, though, it wasn’t all basketball. “I always drove when we went places,” Peterson said. “We’d go to Pennsylvania or Virginia and stop at every Civil War site in between here and there. He loved Civil War history.”
Until he was in his 30s, Gibbons didn’t know what he wanted to do. He had graduated from undergrad and business school at UNC. After earning his MBA in 1962, he tried accounting, insurance and the family electric business for close to 15 years.
None of it moved him. But he did like going to high school basketball games in his spare time, and he went to so many that sometimes people would ask him about how good a player was, or where that player might go to college.
As a hobby, Gibbons began ranking the players for his “All Star Sports” basketball recruiting newsletter, monetizing his expertise with a red, white and blue newsletter that originally sold for $5 apiece to fans. His first wife, JoAnn, brought her typewriter home from work to type his notes, then ran off copies and mailed them out.
A few years later, Gibbons started the scouting service for colleges. The two parallel “All Star Sports” businesses were successful enough that Gibbons was able to quit selling insurance and scout full-time.
“I’ve dedicated most of my life to trying to do what I encouraged young players to do, and that’s to be the best you can be,” Gibbons said. “When I evaluated players, I not only wanted to see their basketball skills. I wanted to see if they were good teammates.”
Gibbons once drove down to see an unheralded big man in Mauldin, S.C. When he watched Kevin Garnett, he was smitten, and helped Garnett wangle an invitation to a prestigious basketball camp. Garnett eventually was enshrined in the hall of fame, too.
Gibbons knows his own hall of fame candidacy — he was nominated by his daughter Claire — will be a difficult climb. He was never a basketball star himself and his name recognition doesn’t extend much past the insular world of coaches, scouts and basketball junkies. Still, he can hope.
“It would be the highest honor possible,” he said.
‘I surely miss that office’
Gibbons recently cleaned out his office in Lenoir. He had to close up “All Star Sports” due to complications from Parkinson’s, a neurodegenerative disorder that affects the brain. The basement in his home contains all sorts of memorabilia that used to be in the office — photos of Gibbons with John Wooden, with Mike Krzyzewski, with a teenager named Kobe Bryant in 1996.
“I surely miss that office,” Gibbons said.
He misses the road sometimes, too, and his many old friends who have now died, and the gyms that smelled of sweat and filled up with the sounds of basketballs thumping and shoes squeaking on hardwood floors.
Gibbons can still see all of that sometimes, though. Just a glance at an old photo or newsletter takes him back to a place like Appalachian State’s basketball camp in 1979, when coach Bobby Cremins told him he better drive up there fast. It was in Boone where Gibbons first laid eyes on the teenager from Wilmington who would change the basketball world.
“Michael Jordan asked me that day: ‘What can I do, Mr. Gibbons, to become a better player?’” Gibbons recalled, smiling at the memory.
And then Gibbons is off again, onto another story about a time when all you really needed to do your job was a sharpened pencil, some blank paper and the open road. It wasn’t always an easy life. But it sure beat selling insurance.
This story was originally published March 25, 2022 at 9:59 AM.
