A native of San Francisco, California, Bob Portman enters the Missouri Valley Conference Hall of Fame as an Institutional Great selection.
The Institutional Great category of the Hall of Fame recognizes coaches, student-athletes and administrators who represented a current league school, when their institution was not a member of the Missouri Valley Conference.
He becomes the fifth Bluejay men’s basketball student-athlete -- Bob Gibson (2005), Bob Harstad (2008), Kyle Korver (2010) and Paul Silas (2012) -- selected for the MVC Hall of Fame.
Portman stands fourth on the all-time Creighton scoring list with 1,876 points.
His career per-game scoring average is a school-record 24.68 points per game.
One of just three Creighton players to score 700 or more points (738 in 1967-68) in a season, Portman also collected 979 career rebounds (fourth in CU history), averaging 12.9 per contest.
He once scored a school-record 51 points against Wisconsin-Milwaukee when he also set school records on 19-of-23 shooting at the foul line.
He owns two of the top three and four of the top 10 single-game scoring performances in school history.
Named First Team All-American by Basketball Weekly and the Helms Foundation, Portman was an honorable mention All-American by Associated Press, United Press International and The Sporting News in 1968.
He is one of four Creighton men’s basketball student-athletes to have their jersey number retired.
Portman was selected by the Denver Rockets in the 1969 American Basketball Association Draft, and was the seventh overall pick in the 1969 NBA Draft by the San Francisco Warriors.
He never played in the ABA but played four seasons with the Warriors and retired from the league in 1973, after scoring 1,254 career points.
He now lives in Hillsborough, North Carolina.