By Bob Hertzel
For the Times West Virginian
MORGANTOWN —
Bob Huggins may have been the man of the hour at the celebrity roast they held at the Waterfront Place Hotel on Saturday night, but in the end this was not really about him at all.
No matter how many barbs were thrown his way, and only Gen. George Custer had more arrows shot in his direction than did the West Virginia University basketball coach, the real star of the show was there in spirit only.
This, you see, was about Norma Mae Huggins, Bob’s mother who died after a long battle with colon cancer in 2003 and in whose name Huggins set up the Norma Mae Huggins Research Endowment Fund at the Mary Babb Randolph Cancer Center.
You go on line and you can find thousands of stories on Huggins and half again as many on his father, Charlie, who was one of the most successful high school basketball coaches in the state of Ohio. Norma Mae Huggins existed mostly in the background, away from the glare of the television lights.
“My mom might have been the greatest coach’s wife that ever was,” Huggins said before the roast got under way.
His mind drifted back to his childhood, to a carefree time after the family had moved from Morgantown, where he was born, to Midvale, Ohio, a place Huggins always describes as a town of “500 people, one stoplight and nine bars.”
That, however, does not describe the area that sits about 100 miles southeast of Cleveland. It doesn’t mention the gas station where he stops to pick up worms to go fishing at the lake by the cabin that he loves. It doesn’t describe the type of people, either, especially the person he claims gave him a ride one day in a pickup truck.
“I got in a truck with this guy one time and looked and he didn’t have a rear-view mirror. I said, ‘Hey, you don’t have a rear-view mirror.’ He looked at me and said, ‘I don’t back up. We’re going forward, son.’ And that’s kind of how I’ve lived my life.”
They were simple people, good people around there, led by his mother, “the greatest coach’s wife.”
“I can remember my dad stopping by another coach’s house and saying, ‘Stay in the car,’” Huggins began. “There’s seven of us in a car – now we didn’t have a station wagon, we had a car – and my poor mom is in there with seven kids.
“Can you imagine?” he continued. “I’ve got two kids, and they’re 23 and 27, and I don’t want to be in there with them.”
In 1969, Huggins’ father started a basketball camp. It became quite the thing.
In 1993 Michael Graham of the Cincinnati Post, writing for Cincinnati Magazine, went to the Huggins spread, and described it as a 19.5 acre site with two gyms, 7 outdoor courts, two cafeterias, a swimming pool and a Jacuzzi. “Welcome to Pine Wood” read the sign.
“She cooked every meal until the year she passed away — every single meal, three meals a day,” Huggins said. “And when he started the camp it ran from Sunday at noon and you finished about 8 o’clock at night on the following Saturday from June through July. Then she went to cleaning the dorms, mowing the grass … she just … my dad would never have made it without her.
“She laid my dad’s clothes out for him every day. He was a mess the way it was; you can imagine what he would have dressed like without her. She did everything.”
Later in life she began having back problems, but she wouldn’t stop doing what she did, wouldn’t go to the doctor. One of Huggins’ brothers got her to go to a chiropractor, but that didn’t help so that she finally had to concede to seeing a doctor.
“She had this for a long time. My mom was the toughest lady. She thought she had a bad back. She had colon cancer instead,” Huggins said.
It was too late to do much.
“They eventually told us, probably two weeks before she passed, that she wasn’t going to make it through the night. They told us to go in and tell her goodbye,” Huggins said. “We went in and it was ‘It’s OK, Mom. We’re OK.’ But she wouldn’t die. She hung on until her 52nd wedding anniversary. She died the morning of her 52nd wedding anniversary. They kept saying she’s dead and she just wouldn’t die.”
Huggins had been really close to his mother.
“As a kid, I was around my mother more. My dad coached since pretty much when I got old enough to know what was going on. He was gone in the morning before I got up, and I was in bed by the time he got home. I’d go to practice with him on Saturday when I was young, and I saw him on Sunday,” he said.
And so, in her passing, he set up this research fund and now they were taking shots at Huggins to help finance it. You kind figure that somehow, somewhere, when the jokes got the funniest, she was laughing somewhere.
“Raising four boys, I can only imagine the special place in heaven she has,” said Duquesne Coach Ron Everhart of Fairmont, one of the roasters.
E-mail Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com.
