COLUMN: Huggins not about to fail

By Bob Hertzel

WASHINGTON, D.C. — If his father had been a general instead of a basketball coach, they’d probably be talking English in Vietnam right now.

Such is the nature of Bob Huggins.

He decided to follow his father, Charlie, into basketball, where he could channel his burning competitive nature into an area where he would be defending a motion offense rather than his nation’s honor.

First, there was a playing career at West Virginia University, where his leadership qualities were such that he was named the team captain and where his competitive nature carried him to graduate magna cum laude in 1977.

Not bad for a kid born in Morgantown and raised in Gnadenhutten, Ohio, a town so small that Huggins describes it today as having “500 people, two stoplights and nine bars,” which may explain in some small way where his reputation for living as hard as his teams play began.

Gale Catlett, whose personality and Huggins’ never could have co-existed, turned him loose as a graduate assistant, leading him first to Walsh and then to Akron, where he “didn’t have a clue,” by his own admission.

Clue or no clue, Huggins was not about to fail, for basketball in those days wasn’t a game; it was life.

And that really hasn’t changed.

The other day, in a press conference, Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski referred to him as “a survivor,” a reference most people took to mean his ability to survive in the basketball world despite being run out of his job at the University of Cincinnati.

When asked if he saw himself as a survivor, Huggins took the question in quite another light, one that we all have tended to forget in this first season at West Virginia.

“Have you ever been shocked back to life three times?” he asked.

Dealing with Huggins today, it is difficult to imagine that basketball, which is his life, was almost his death. He was on a recruiting trip and at the Pittsburgh International Airport when stricken with a massive heart attack, one that required he be defibrillated three times before his condition stabilized.

If we had sort of shuffled that to the back of our minds, so, too, has Huggins.

“I don’t think about it because, if you think about it, it has a tendency to bother you,” he said, displaying his dry humor.

The day still is vivid in his mind, however, less because of the seriousness of the situation than because it wound up having a rather humorous basketball tie-in.

“When I was in the ambulance the guy who was in there was (Memphis Coach John) Calipari’s cousin,” Huggins said. “John grew up in Coraopolis. It’s the gospel truth. There were a couple of things that went on, but basically what he said is ‘We’re not going to let you die until John beats you at least once.’”

It is a funny story, the kind Huggins likes to tell in his low-key, straight-faced manner.

The Bob Huggins the public sees in person and the Bob Huggins who coaches are two terribly different people. When he’s making a speech or at a press conference, you find yourself inching forward, trying to hear what he has to say.

His players, however, have no trouble hearing him when he’s making a point, even if it’s in an arena with 20,000 fans roaring at the top of their lungs.

Or in a locker room, where they admit he scares them with his rhetoric, scares them into playing basketball the way he wants it to be played, as he did at halftime Saturday as the Mountaineers came from behind to beat Duke and advance to the NCAA’s Sweet 16.

There is another side of Huggins that has remained hidden from the public view, a side that he believes has been twisted and distorted. His reputation has been of a man who operations on the shadowy side of college basketball, so much so that some were saying that Saturday’s matchup with Duke was good vs. evil, the good being Duke’s Coach K and the evil Bob Huggins.

His players in Cincinnati certainly did little to diminish such a reputation, with there being arrests and incidents aplenty and a record of failing to graduate players that was nearly unmatched in the sport.

But Huggins says that’s not the reality of the situation at all.

He talks about 1992 when he went to the Final Four at Cincinnati. Duke, Indiana and Michigan were there with Cincinnati.

“All blue bloods,” Huggins said. “And I had whatever I had, 10 junior college guys. What nobody really cared to find out was that they were double transfers. They were guys who started someplace else and the coach got fired or left or whatever and so they went somewhere else.

“And even though my guys were the most articulate guys in the whole tournament, they were funny, absolutely terrific, people still wrote that we didn’t do it right.

“Now, Corey Blount just got his degree after 12 years in the NBA, because it’s important to him. But people don’t care about that because the convenient thing is to look at the numbers and not look at people and what people have accomplished, of what people do.

“So I’m in my hotel room and Corey calls me two nights ago and said, ‘Coach, I just finished my last class.’

“I said, ‘Are you going to walk?’

“He said, ‘Absolutely. I’m going to walk.’

“And I said, ‘I’ll be there.’

“That’s what people don’t get.”

E-mail Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com.