MORGANTOWN —
This is about friendship.
We’re not talking about the Laverne and Shirley, “Schlemiel, Schlimazel, Hasenpfeffer Incorporated!” friendship.
This is the kind of friendship you can’t make up.
It’s the kind of friendship you learn you have only when think you have no friends at all, when you are facing incomprehensible odds and you life is on the line.
That’s how it was for Charlie Spoonhour, who had little going in his favor except for a few close friends in the basketball coaching community, headed by West Virginia University’s Bob Huggins and Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski.
The story begins early this year when Spoonhour, who is 71, experienced difficulty breathing.
As always, Spoonhour made light of it at first. Talking to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in June, he admitted having trouble breathing and coughing.
“I’m trying to quit that,” he joked. “The coughing, not breathing.”
It was about this time that he called Huggins.
“The first time he called me he said he was sick,” Huggins recalled. “He thought it was pneumonia.”
Spoonhour was as close to Huggins as you can be among competitors, and it figured to be that way. Neither man ever missed a trick on the basketball court, and they enjoyed life away from it.
Spoonhour had coached at Southwest Missouri State, St. Louis and UNLV, stepping down 21 games into his third season citing health reasons. He began doing some TV commentary.
He was a good coach, one who would win 373 games in 19 years as Division I coach, very defensive minded, as is Huggins.
When they came to form the Great Midwest Conference in 1991, Huggins, coaching Cincinnati, and Spoonhour at St. Louis were at the forefront and welded a friendship that would last through the years. The competed hard and played hard, enjoying each other’s company.
Spoonhour went to a couple of doctors but was getting no better. Huggins told him to see some specialists, which he did, heading off to the Cleveland Clinic.
The diagnosis was not good.
Huggins said he was told that Spoonhour had mesothelioma, which is supposed to be caused by asbestos, but he could not understand how that could be because Spoonhour had no history of working around asbestos.
In reality, Spoonhour had idiopathic (which means origin unknown) pulmonary fibrosis, a hardening and thickening of the lungs, which is similar to mesothelioma but is not a cancer. Nonetheless, there is no known cure.
Huggins, like so many in the coaching fraternity, were as devastated as Spoonhour by the report and they decided they would try to find some way to help.
“Tim Floyd and I and a couple of others guys began calling around,” Huggins said.
One person came to Huggins’ mind, Coach K.
It was obvious that those two are close at the Final Four, the way they embraced and talked prior to their national semifinal meeting, the one that sent Huggins and his team home.
“Mike knows everyone,” Huggins said. “He was great.”
Indeed, Coach K worked his magic at Duke, which has one of the nation’s top medical centers. He had Spoonhour come in to be examined, it was determined he would be a candidate for a lung transplant and he was put on the list.
A week ago Saturday the surgery was performed.
His wife, Vicki, said he was “very weak” upon coming out of surgery. On Friday, a breathing tube was removed and Spoonhour was released from the ICU unit.
“This is great progress,” Spoonhour’s wife told the Las Vegas Review Journal. “It’s good news so far.
Spoonhour is not out of the woods yet, by any means, but it seems that the transplant was a success and now he just have to take his time getting things together.
“The doctors are very happy. The surgery could not have gone better,” Vicki Spoonhour said. “He’s on oxygen all the time. It’s just a matter of small steps. What the doctors would like would be for him to be able to walk a mile before we get out of here.”
On Friday he was up and did a little walking. Plans are for him to stay for two weeks, then spend two months at Duke undergoing physical therapy.
Rest assured, that this is man who never will take the air he breathes for granted again, not one who will ever forget what men like Huggins and Floyd and Krzyzewski did for him.
E-mail Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com.
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