Manhattan ? Alumni from the Kansas State veterinary school who expected to see the in-your-face, intimidating, hollering figure they had seen on television, never caught even a glimpse of such a man during a luncheon at the student union.
Bob Huggins, K-State’s new basketball coach, has one volume for games and practices, an entirely different one everywhere else. Either way, his audiences tend to hear every word. Sometimes, they even listen a little too closely.
Leaning forward at the podium and speaking softly into the microphone, Huggins shared one of his favorite game tales from his 16 seasons coaching at Cincinnati, where he averaged 23.5 victories per season, made three Elite Eight appearances and one Final Four, and repeatedly was under fire for his players’ poor graduation rates and some of his players’ arrest records. Huggins’ stay at Cincinnati ended last August. After a clash with the new school president in the wake of Huggins’ drunk-driving conviction, the coach accepted a $3 million buyout and sat out last season. He left behind a city he loved, a city that loved him back.
He’s on his way to winning over a smaller city by telling stories and landing big-time recruits, stories such as the ones he told the gathered alumni from the veterinary school.
DePaul was ahead by 17 points with four minutes remaining, Huggins started. He called a timeout, even though he didn’t know what he was going to tell his team. He was inspired by the chest-bumping DePaul players and turned to his best player, Kenyon Martin.
“Look at those guys,” Huggins said to Martin. “They think the game is over. Kenyon, do you think the game is over?”
Martin responded, “No, coach, the game’s not over.”
Huggins already had hooked the crowd with the start of the story.
“Then I didn’t know what else to say, so I did what I always do in that situation,” he said. “I think about my father. I remembered my father telling my next-door neighbor, who couldn’t shoot, that he could only shoot layups and foul shots, and if he missed another layup he could only shoot foul shots. So I told all the players that for the rest of the game Kenyon had to touch the ball every time down the court, and if anybody shoots before Kenyon touches it, you’ll never play for me again.”
Martin played “the best four minutes of his life,” and Cincinnati tied the score with 17 seconds left, at which time Huggins called a timeout to set up a defensive strategy. Martin blocked a shot, and the loose ball was picked up and passed forward to DerMarr Johnson, who had a wide-open shot from 12 feet with the clock winding down.
“He’s standing there holding the ball, holding the ball, and I’m yelling, ‘Shoot it! Shoot it!’ Finally, he shoots, it goes in, we win by two points,” Huggins told the audience. “Kenyon, DerMarr and I had to go to midcourt for a TV interview with Dick Vitale. On my way over, I put my arm around DJ and say, ‘DerMarr, that’s great you just won the game for us, but what were you doing holding the ball there?’ He said, ‘Coach, I want to play. I wasn’t sure if Kenyon had touched the ball yet.'”
The audience roared, as it did at a couple of ensuing stories, one of which Huggins later acknowledged was apocryphal. The Johnson tale?
“I swear to God he said he couldn’t remember whether Kenyon had touched it yet,” Huggins said during a lengthy interview from his spacious office inside Bramlage Coliseum. “I loved coaching DerMarr. He did whatever you asked him to do.”
Most of Huggins’ players have done the same, in practice and in games, throughout the years, and they have done so quickly. He learned to teach basketball at a young age, working at his father Charlie’s “Eastern Ohio Basketball Camp,” the first overnight basketball camp in the history of the Buckeye State.
“My dad, at that time, was a coaching legend in Ohio,” Huggins said. “He had one station. On the court beside me was Ed McCluskey, who won nine state championships in the state of Pennsylvania and still is a legend in Pennsylvania. And I had the third station. I was a freshman in high school.”
That’s where K-State’s new coach “learned how to talk to people, how to teach. They would sit there in awe of my dad, and they would sit there in awe of Ed McCluskey, so I had to keep them interested somehow.”
Charlie Huggins lives on the 36-acre site of the camp, which has housing for more than 500 campers. His sons Harry and Larry run the camp now. In the early years, Harry and Larry were campers while Bob instructed.
“It was either that or digging ditches, and I guess the alternative didn’t sound too good,” Larry Huggins said of his older brother Bob. “I guess my dad was too cheap and didn’t want to pay anybody else. No, Bobby’s great at what he does. He’s got one of the greatest minds in the game.”
That mind enabled Bob Huggins to earn Academic All-American honors twice at West Virginia, from which he graduated magna cum laude in 1977. He earned a masters in health administration there in 1978.
At Cincinnati, Huggins had an uncanny knack for getting junior college players up to speed right away. Many JC players elsewhere tended to struggle in their first season at the Division I level, then blossom as seniors.
“I treat them differently,” Huggins said. “A lot of people treat them like freshmen. and a lot of people are content to have freshmen kind of learn and catch up. My feeling with junior college guys is the junior college guys we recruit, we expect them to go in and play. And so I demanded a lot more of them. They kind of got a crash course more than what freshmen would get. I was harder on them, but I made them learn at a lot faster rate than what maybe a normal guy would.”
Huggins already has signed three players to play for him next season and is going after three of the nation’s top four high school players from the Class of 2007 (O.J. Mayo, Bill Walker, Michael Beasley), according to rivals.com’s rankings. While out of work, Huggins wasn’t bound by the same restrictions as active coaches in terms of evaluating and talking to recruits, and he took advantage, laying the groundwork for whatever would be his next destination.
“Bobby doesn’t believe in long-time turnarounds,” Larry Huggins said.
At Cincinnati, Bob Huggins inherited a team that had won 11 games two years earlier. He took the Bearcats to the Final Four in his third season.
Rivals.com rates Kansas University target Derrick Rose, a guard out of Chicago, as the No. 3 prospect in the Class of ’07, so it’s conceivable the top four players in the nation could sign with schools in the state of Kansas. Think the ESPN Gameday crew might stop by Lawrence and/or Manhattan?
How good can the Wildcats become under Huggins?
“Really good,” the coach said.
Pretty fast?
“I think so,” he said, unemotionally.
And then what? Will Manhattan be enough?
“I’m from a town of 500 people,” said Huggins, who grew up in Gnadenhutten, an eastern-Ohio town on the Tuscarawas River. “People think I’m a city guy or something. I’m not a city guy. In Cincinnati, I went to the same places, ate at the same places. It’s kind of embarrassing to say, but I went to the arts one time. I watched a play once with my wife. I guess it’s comforting to say you live in a city that has all this and all that, but in reality, I coach basketball. That’s what I do.”
He rejects any notion that he is more than that. He doesn’t want to be labeled a sociologist, a Father Flannigan, a champion of the underdog. He’s a basketball coach. To reach the level of success he wants to reach, he has to have talented basketball players. He’s not at Duke, where the talent acquisition game is more about selecting than wooing. Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski can afford to bypass an academic or behavioral risk because another high school All-American is waiting in line to replace him.
At Cincinnati, Huggins didn’t have that luxury. And he doesn’t have it at Kansas State. That doesn’t mean he will try to spin himself as champion of the downtrodden, a facilitator for the underprivileged youth who can use basketball to make a better life for himself.
“Basketball was my ticket to a good life, and I happened to be a good student,” Huggins said. “I know a lot of people that basketball was their ticket to a great life. The fallacy is I didn’t take very many kids that had problems. I think what happened was people tried to be nice. People tried to say, ‘He’s giving these poor, underprivileged kids a chance.’ If you look at my teams, I had a few, but I didn’t have what everybody thought I had. It seems people think that was my whole team. It wasn’t. I had a lot of kids from really good backgrounds.”
And some kids from shaky ones who had the opportunity to use basketball as a ticket to a great life. Many did. Others didn’t. Martin and Dontonio Wingfield were the two most talented players Huggins coached at Cincinnati. Martin is making millions in the NBA. Wingfield was an NBA bust who had a habit of getting himself into trouble. The coach stays in touch with both.
“Dontonio was the most talented, by far,” Huggins said. “He did amazing things. His first game, he got 36 points. Had 19-rebound games, back-to-back.”
Whatever became of Dontonio Wingfield?
“He was in a car wreck and walks with a walker,” Huggins said. “Sad. Great talent.”
On staying in touch with former players, Huggins said, “It’s important they know you’ll be there for them if they need you.”
Nick Van Exel has made millions playing in the NBA.
“We would talk maybe once every two years, and then when I had my heart attack (in 2002), Nick called me every day,” Huggins said. “The day I went back to coaching, he said, ‘OK, I’m not calling any more. You don’t need me now.’ And he stopped calling.”
He’s there for his players, whenever they need him, but mostly he’s there to make them better basketball players in a way his father used to do it at Indian Valley South High in Gnadenhutten.
“My dad’s really smart,” Huggins said. “He’s really, really smart. He’s really smart, and he’s really thorough. He’s probably the most thorough basketball coach I’ve ever been around. He was a lot harder on guys than I am. Oh, he was demanding, incredibly demanding.”
A yeller, a screamer?
“He was a bit vociferous,” Huggins said with a hint of a smile.
And so is his son, the celebrity basketball coach born Sept. 21, 1953. Yet, the son speaks so much softer away from the bench.
“I just think you’re supposed to bring a passion to what you do, and I want our guys to play hard,” he said.
They’ll play hard, force turnovers, protect the basketball, sometimes take wild shots and then gain immediate redemption by crashing the offensive boards, same as his teams at Walsh College, Akron University and Cincinnati did.
Huggins sounds confident he can attract talent to Manhattan.
“We had four kids in, and they all loved it,” he said. “It’s a great college town, great atmosphere, great people, unbelievable people. We’ve got a great president and a great athletic director. They want to win. They want to do right by the kids.”
They want K-State to become a big-time basketball program again. They hired a man who has been there, done that, and they didn’t let any baggage scare them off.
They hired a basketball coach.