SYRACUSE, N.Y. —
Bob Huggins tells the story of the day he was in the Pittsburgh Airport, heading for a flight when he was stricken with a near-fatal heart attack.
“I’m laying there,” Huggins begins. “They scoop me up off the sidewalk and put me in the ambulance and I’m kind of in and out of consciousness. They’re pumping morphine in me.
“I kind of came to and I said to the guy in the ambulance, ‘what’s the ETA?’ He got on the thing and said, ’22 minutes’. I said, ‘Man, I’m not going to make 22 minutes.’”
The EMT worker taps Huggins on the leg and says assuredly, “I haven’t lost a patient.”
Huggins looks up from the gurney and replied, “I’m not some old lady, man. I don’t have 22 minutes.”
The guy gets on the radio and says “Abort, abort, abort.” They head to a different hospital.
Now the EMT worker taps Huggins on the leg again.
“Coach,” he said, “don’t worry. I’m John Calipari’s nephew and I’m not going to let you die until Cal beats you at least once.”
Huggins laughs at the story now, probably even laughed then as he laid on what he thought would be his death bed.
It’s just one of many stories that Huggins and Calipari share when they aren’t coaching, as they will be doing at 7 p.m. tonight when Calipari’s No. 1-seeded Kentucky team meets Huggins’ No. 2-seeded West Virginia team in the East Regional of the NCAA Tournament with the winner going to the Final Four and the loser going home.
These are two veteran coaches, star-quality coaches, similar in their coaching philosophies, different in the personalities. Huggins is quieter, more introspective, less outgoing.
Calipari seems to enjoy the fame and fortune he has earned more than Huggins. He isn’t out there selling himself.
He talked about how a TV show wanted to bring him and how he turned it down.
“I don’t want to be on TV. I mean, I don’t. I’ve been accused of not liking you people,” he said, talking to the reporters gathered at the Carrier Dome. “That’s not true. Some of you I don’t like I’m being honest. Some of you are — I’m not going to say the word. But most of you I do like.”
We could give you some quotes from Calipari on his feelings about his fame, but better we will let you in on a page of the Kentucky media guide that lists his social media platforms:
• On March 11, Coach Calipari announced his partnership with Lexy.com.
• The Coach Cal Application for the iPhone and iPod Touch was launched Feb. 3 and sold more than 6,000 the first month.
• CoachCal.com — the official site of Coach John Calipari.
• Calipari currently has 1.3 million followers on Twitter.
• Calipari has 130,000 Facebook fans.
• Calipari and the team helped raise over $1.3 million during the ‘Hoops for Haiti’ Telethon.
• Calipari’s book, “Bounce Back”, has sold over 50,000 copies.
• His weekly radio shows airs internationally on Sirius XM satellite radio.
• Calipari’s postgame radio show is broadcast across Kentucky.
You’ll pardon me if I twitter at the thought of Huggins on Twitter.
If the two are different in their personas, they are tight in their relationship that goes far, far back.
“He played at West Virginia with Joe Fryz, who was my high school teammate,” Calipari recalled. “So I went to watch Joe Fryz play and that’s the first time I saw him. I saw him play against Pittsburgh and Duquesne.”
When Huggins landed his first head coaching job at Walsh, Calipari was working the Five Star Camp nearby and went to see him.
“I know you don’t know me, but I watch you,” Calipari said and a friendship took root.
They both have ridden the coaching roller coaster.
“The good news for both of us is we have been fired. There’s nothing you can say to us we haven’t heard, nothing you can write about us that hasn’t been written.”
“John and I are going to be good friends for the rest of our lives. He’s a good guy, a great coach. Hopefully, when he goes into the Hall of Fame, I can sit there and watch him go in.”
What makes their friendship unique is that is built through basketball but not on basketball.
“We get together all the time and we don’t talk about basketball very much,” Huggins said. “John is a good guy, a guy who is there when you need him. Everyone wants to be around you when everything is going good. But when they aren’t going good, that’s when you find out about people, find out who your friends are.
“When I was fired there probably wasn’t any three-day period when Cal didn’t call. And Skip Prosser called every other day. Then you know who the people are that really care about you.”
That is not to say that when these two get on the basketball court, be it Huggins at Cincinnati and Calipari at UMass or Memphis or being it Huggins at West Virginia and Calipari at Kentucky that they don’t call on every bit of competitor that is inside them.
That’s the way they are made, it’s why Huggins is still here, perhaps. Calipari knows how close Huggins was to dying from the heart attack, for he remembers the first day he went to visit him in the hospital.
“I went in and I saw the paddle burns [on his chest]. I just told him, you know, ‘You’re getting that second life here.’ It was scary, to be honest with you. I went out and just let him know that you know what, ‘I’m here for you.’”
E-mail Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com.
