Bob Hugginss flaws caught up to his greatness as a basketball coach
Several years ago, during an interview with Bob Huggins, I asked, “How come you aren’t in the Hall of Fame?”
Huggins’s numbers at Walsh, Akron, Cincinnati, Kansas State and West Virginia clearly made him worthy, but he hadn’t gotten the phone call from Springfield, Mass.
“It’s probably because you’ve been my biggest supporter,” Huggins answered with a laugh.
Huggins was finally inducted in 2022, no doubt because the voters overlooked my support of him. I tell that story to make it clear where I am coming from in writing about his resignation as West Virginia’s coach Saturday night.
Huggins is a great coach and someone I have liked since I first met him in 1989. He also had to resign so his alma mater wasn’t forced to fire him.
Huggins, who will turn 70 in September, was arrested in Pittsburgh on Friday night. According to the police report, he registered a 0.21 percent blood alcohol level on a breath test — well over the legal limit of 0.08 percent — and could not tell police where he was. His car was stopped in the road and had a shredded tire.
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It was Huggins’s second arrest on a DUI charge; the first came in 2004 when he was at Cincinnati. More important, it came less than two months after he twice used a gay slur to criticize Xavier, the Bearcats’ archrival. He also threw in a shot at Catholics — a rare two-for-one idiotic comment.
Huggins survived that for one reason: He’s an icon in West Virginia. He graduated from high school in Morgantown; he played at West Virginia, averaging 13.2 points as a senior; and he returned in 2007 to coach the Mountaineers, taking them to the Final Four in 2010.
Perhaps the most memorable moment of Huggins’s career came in the Mountaineers’ Final Four loss to Duke. Late in that matchup, with the Blue Devils in control — they would go on to win, 78-57 — West Virginia senior Da’Sean Butler, the team’s best player and leading scorer, went down with torn ligaments in his knee.
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As Butler writhed in pain, Huggins lay on top of him, comforting him and saying over and over, “It’s all right; it’s going to be all right.” The scene was completely the opposite of the image most people had of Huggins as a gruff taskmaster.
Huggins is the son of a high school coach and knew he wanted to be a coach even when he was playing in college. He became a head coach at Walsh at 27 and was hired three years later at Akron. In 1989, he took over a once-great Cincinnati program that had fallen on hard times, to put it mildly. The Bearcats had gone to five consecutive Final Fours from 1959 to 1963, winning the national title twice. But when Huggins arrived, they hadn’t reached the NCAA tournament since 1977.
I met him during his first season at the old Rainbow Classic in Honolulu. I had no idea who Huggins was, but I was impressed with the way his team played defense, and I sat down with him after the Bearcats beat Rutgers in the third-place game.
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He was smart and dryly funny — extremely quotable and likable. I was fortunate to get to know him before he became a star after taking Cincinnati to the Final Four in 1992. A year later, the Bearcats made it to the Elite Eight before losing in overtime to North Carolina, the eventual national champion.
Huggins’s best team was probably the 1999-2000 squad led by national player of the year Kenyon Martin. Those Bearcats finished the regular season 28-2 and were ranked No. 1 going into the Conference USA tournament. Three minutes into their opening game against St. Louis, Martin suffered a broken leg. Cincinnati lost that game and, without Martin, lost to Tulsa in the second round of the NCAA tournament.
Huggins was always a controversial figure, even while winning, winning and winning. His graduation rate at Cincinnati was reported to be 28 percent, and after a season when no one graduated, he defended himself by pointing out that he had been hired to win games and that recruiting at Cincinnati was never easy.
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He suffered a major heart attack in 2002 at 49 but never missed a practice. Almost two years later came the DUI, which gave school president Nancy Zimpher, who had publicly criticized Huggins’s academic record, the opening to force him out in 2005. He sat out a year, thanks to a $3 million buyout, and came back to coach one year at Kansas State before being hired by West Virginia.
Like a lot of Hall of Famers, Huggins did run into trouble with the NCAA — once. In 1998, Cincinnati was given two years of probation for “lack of institutional control,” although it was not banned from postseason play and the report said Huggins had not been involved in any of the violations. At West Virginia, Huggins’s graduation rate had been excellent, including 100 percent for that Final Four team.
But just when it seemed he would retire as a revered icon, his horrific remarks on the radio and the DUI charge changed everything. He survived the homophobic remarks with what amounted to a wrist slap: a three-game suspension, a pay cut of $1 million per year on his $4.2 million annual contract and the loss of an automatic rollover each year.
Even so, he was still coaching. Now he leaves in disgrace.
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That saddens me. I’m certainly not going to defend his homophobic remarks on any level or his drinking so much while driving that his blood alcohol level was dangerously high, especially for a man who has had health problems. But I still like Bob Huggins and wish him only the best in retirement. I enjoyed covering him and always enjoyed talking to him.
When I think of Huggins, I think of something the great CBS political commentator Eric Sevareid said about Lyndon B. Johnson on the day he died: “A great man with great flaws.”
Comparing a basketball coach to a president may sound foolish, but Huggins was certainly a great coach who had great flaws.
And I’m glad he got into the Hall of Fame — despite my support.
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