Greg Hansen: Hoops official Bob Scofield a tough sucker with a thankless job

Throughout the summer, Star columnist Greg Hansen is profiling 10 Tucsonans making a difference. Up today: Bob Scofield, Tucson's hard-working basketball official.

Here is Bob Scofield’s work schedule from hell, November through March: Fly to every conceivable airport in Montana, Idaho, Colorado, Utah, North Dakota, Washington and Oregon.

Travel delays? Snow-covered highways? Bring it.

You do this to officiate 91 college basketball games in 130 days, a referee’s version of “Planes, Trains and Automobiles,” all serenaded by people calling you bad names.

When it’s over, after officiating your 20th NCAA Tournament, you decompress, fly to Italy with your wife and book an excursion along the Amalfi Coast. The boat stops next to 30-foot high cliffs.

So much for kicking back.

“There were a bunch of young guys saying, ‘Come on, old man; jump,’” Scofield remembers.

This is nothing compared to officiating a Sweet 16 basketball game with 15,000 people judging every whistle you blow.

So you climb the cliff, take off your shirt, peer into the Tyrrhenian Sea and … it’s go time.

Bob Scofield is no old man. The calendar says 60, but you can’t do what he does and have a Pac-12 basketball coach shout, “Hey, old man, you blew that call!”

He is, instead, a tough sonofagun, the son of a New Jersey policeman who has become something of a godfather to Tucson’s basketball officiating community.

For 25 years, Scofield has been much more than a basketball ref. If you know someone in Tucson who officiates high school or junior-college basketball, at any level, he or she probably attended one of Scofield’s training camps, often held in conjunction with longtime Tucson Pac-12 referee Chris Rastatter.

“I think so highly of what Bob’s doing that I’m going to send my son to his camp next summer,” Pima College coach Brian Peabody said. “I have Bob speak to my Pima teams every year about player-ref relationships. It has helped dramatically. Very rarely do we get caught up in the officiating.”

Last week, Scofield held a two-day camp at Pima College for 42 referees. For 12 hours a day, they officiated high school summer games. Scofield is not an easy grader. If you don’t do it right, you will have difficulty getting an assignment for a Class 2A junior varsity game in Tombstone.

“Of the 42 we had, about three passed the eye-test,” says Scofield, who grew up in Denville, New Jersey, about 20 miles from New York City and moved to Tucson in 1988.

“I take this with total seriousness. There is a shortage of capable officials in Southern Arizona. I want these guys to work hard enough to get a break like I got and work their way up the system. There just aren’t a lot of diamonds in the rough right now.”

This is a break:

Scofield broke into the Southern Arizona officiating system in the early 1990s. He started at the bottom even though he had long-ago refereed college games involving Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference schools like Siena, Marist and Iona.

“I’m working a JV game in Nogales when Mike Hart spots me and asks what I’m doing working a JV game?” Scofield remembers. “He calls Boyd Baker, who was the king of the officiating system in Southern Arizona and the next thing you know I’m doing all the big games: Salpointe, Canyon del Oro, and those Cholla and Sunnyside games when they had state championship teams with Chuck Overton and Jermaine Watts.”

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Mike Hart was one of the leading officials in Southern Arizona history, brother to Pima County Sports Hall of Fame athletes/officials Bobby and Larry Hart.

His word was gold.

“You could see Bob had the right stuff,” Hart said. “He’s a pro.”

Soon, Scofield was working the 1996 state championship game that featured future Arizona All-American Mike Bibby of Phoenix’s Shadow Mountain High School. It was one of five state championship games Scofield officiated.

By then, Scofield had worked about 250 top high school games and advanced to call ACCAC games, from Yuma and Thatcher to Pima College. He was all over the map, but he was also on the map.

Then came another career-turning break.

In 1996, one of the Big Sky Conference’s leading officials slipped on the ice leaving Washington State’s Beasley Coliseum. He tore an ACL and was out for the season.

The Big Sky phoned Scofield and gave him the injured referee’s schedule.

“They threw me into the fire,” Scofield said. “That was my break.”

By 2008, Scofield became the first referee to officiate a men’s and women’s NCAA Tournament game in the same season — the UCLA-Mississippi Valley State men’s game in Los Angeles and the Georgia-Iona women’s game in Norfolk, Virginia, in the same week. By 2016 he was selected to work the women’s Final Four.

Scofield grew up a baseball player at Morris Knolls High School in New Jersey. He got a job with the postal service, and when he followed his wife to Tucson, to the UA, he continued what would be a 30-year career as a mail carrier before retiring a few years ago to concentrate strictly on officiating.

First game officiated: Marshtown High School in New Jersey, 1981. Pay? $25. Now a Pac-12 official can make as much as $4,000 per game.

It seems impossible to be a full-time mail carrier and Pac-12 basketball referee simultaneously, but Scofield did it for almost 20 years. It’s crazy.

His schedule continues to be slightly manic: From November through February, Scofield is often out of town five days a week, working three to five games from North Dakota to San Diego.

Then he really gets busy.

“After the season ends I do at least eight weekends at camps and seminars before August. You’ve always got to keep getting better.” He has worked Lute Olson camps, scrimmages and Red-Blue games. He has assigned refs to Sean Miller, Joan Bonvicini and Niya Butts’ camps at McKale Center.

It doesn’t mean he escapes the heat.

Last week Scofield was officiating girls summer league games in Tucson when the mother of a high school player had words with him.

“It’s not unexpected,” he says. “The parents think it’s easy. I mean, did you watch the NBA Finals? Those refs are the best in the world, and look how tough it was for them.

“I’ve been doing this for almost 40 years, and I’m still trying to get it right.”