By Bob Hertzel
MORGANTOWN — Once upon a time when Bob Huggins was the Bearcat stage of his life, he had a player whom he called “Turnover and Re-Turnover.”
“It was,” he said, “50-50 if he was going to turn the ball over. But if he did, he’d go down and steal it right back.”
It wasn’t necessarily out of any great defensive ability that he was able to do that.
It was out of fear.
“He knew if he didn’t get the ball back he was coming out,” Huggins said.
See Bob Huggins learned the greatest lesson that any coach can learn and he did so long, long ago.
“The bench,” he said, “is the greatest motivator you have as a coach.”
You can put players on the treadmill, which he does, and you can get in their face and shout until their face turns blue, but in the end the only thing they really hear is that they aren’t playing.
Don’t believe it.
Ask Cam Thoroughman, the man who puts the blue collar in West Virginia’s gold and blue, what he was thinking midway through the second half when the Mountaineers were protecting a 12-point lead in a game they would win, 76-66, over Ole Miss as the ball slipped out of his hands and was stolen away.
The moment the ball got loose and began moving in the other direction, Thoroughman admits he thought about Huggins telling him about the player he nicknamed “Turnover and Re-Turnover”.
“I knew if he made that basket I was coming out,” Thoroughman said.
Now the thing is, the Mississippi player had a jump out of the gate on Thoroughman and clear sailing to the hoop. Huggins already was wheeling around on his heels to get someone to get into the game and replace Thoroughman.
There is, however, a law of physics that states that no matter how fast a human being can run, he cannot outrun fear, and so it was that Thoroughman looked like Usain Bolt as he flashed down the court, caught up with the unsuspecting opponent as he elevated to put the ball in the basket.
With one mighty swipe of his hand, Thoroughman separated him from the ball. It was a clean block, the kind of block and play that Thoroughman specializes in.
You look at the senior from Portsmouth, Ohio, and you see nothing particularly spectacular, even on the floor. As hard as it is to imagine, he came to WVU as 2-guard, a shooter in the John Beilein system, but an injured knee robbed him of much of his athleticism.
While you can see the scar on his knee, you cannot see what is inside him, and what drives him.
“I’ve been through so much,” he said. “What I can do is hustle. That’s what I’m good at.”
And so it is that he normally is instant energy for the Mountaineers, and there were moments during this game in which he was truly inspirational with his play.
But there came a point when he delivered his greatest inspiration by not playing.
For that you must go to the early moments of the second half, moments when his senior partner, Wellington Smith, had made a bad play, just as he had done a few times in the first half, limiting his play.
Huggins said Smith looked tired, and Smith admitted later that he was.
So it was that Huggins sent Thoroughman over to the scorer’s table to report in for Smith.
Smith saw him go there.
“I knew I was coming out,” he said.
There was that great motivator again, the bench, and Smith wanted no part of it.
“Coach is so serious about not turning the ball over, not blocking out and letting your man get a rebound,” Smith said. “I was like, I’m out of there.”
Before Huggins could apply the hook in this game that WVU led but 29-28, the ball found its way into Smith’s hands. Open, he banged home a 3. Moments later, Smith hit yet another 3.
“Magical,” was the term he used about what was transpiring.
Next came a blocked shot by Smith, then there was a basket by Da’Sean Butler, two by Ole Miss and then, boom, boom. Casey Mitchell fed an open Smith twice and he hit two more 3-point shots.
He’d scored 12 of 14 points for WVU, the lead was at nine, and this man whose career high in 3s had been but two still had another trey left in him.
Magical, indeed.
By the time the night ended, Smith had a career high 19 points, hitting 7 of 9 shots, 5 of 6 from 3 and adding to it six rebounds, three blocked shots and, yes, two turnovers.
Late in the game, when the decision was cinched, Smith added a fifth foul to his statistical line.
This time, though, as he went to the bench, he had nothing to fear, except the roof caving in from the standing ovation he received.
E-mail Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com.
