I always suspected that Bob Huggins was more like legendary coach/color commentator Al McGuire than any coach before or after Al.
McGuire’s charm and humor, dispensed with a New York accent, were louder, more obvious. It wasn’t until I visited Huggins, 61, in Manhattan shortly after he took the Kansas State job that I learned from Huggins that McGuire took an interest in his coaching career when he was at Akron. Little toy soldiers from Al’s collection began showing up in Huggins’ mail. McGuire must have seen a lot of himself in Huggins, including the Father Flanagan aspect of preferring to coach athletes from rough backgrounds.
“My rule was, I wouldn’t recruit a kid if he had grass in front of his house,” McGuire said. “That’s not my world. My world was a cracked sidewalk.”
At Cincinnati, one of Huggins’ centers, Arthur Long, once was arrested for punching a horse.
“The majority of guys I had at Cincinnati were those kind of guys,” he said of kids who had it rough coming up. “They don’t call home and say, ‘Mommy, come and get me.’
“You don’t have dad calling and telling me how to coach,” Huggins said in a conversation during Big 12 Media Day in October. “It’s you and them, which is really a great thing. Some of the other stuff is a little hard to deal with at times. It’s so much different from having kids that come from two loving parents that really get wrapped up in their kids. Different problems.”
Some of those problems at Cincinnati involved players getting arrested. That and Huggins’ own arrest for driving under the influence, a charge to which he pleaded no contest, led to the end of his 16-year tenure at Cincinnati.
After one year at Kansas State, where he instantly upgraded recruiting and put the school back on the national map, Huggins returned to his alma mater, West Virginia, where he is in his eighth season. Without any effort on his part, his image has improved, perhaps changed by the picture of him on the ground, his hands folded on top of De’Sean Butler’s head, embracing his player, as if trying to transfer the pain from an ACL injury to his aging body. It happened in the 2010 Final Four.
Many NBA executives look at Big 12 coaches such as Iowa State’s Fred Hoiberg and Kansas University’s Bill Self and like how their abilities translate to the pro game. West Virginia’s Bob Huggins once was that guy.
Huggins turned down a monumental raise to stay at Cincinnati when the Miami Heat tried to hire him in June of 1995.
Nick Van Exel, then with the Los Angeles Lakers, and a few of his other former players met with him at the time. Huggins’ memory of part of the conversation:
Huggins: “Can I do this?”
Van Exel: “That’s not the issue. You’ve got to calm down some when you coach that many games, but you’re smart enough to figure that out.”
Huggins: “Will they listen to me?”
Van Exel: “Look, the guys in the NBA who are successful are the guys the players don’t screw with. You won’t have a problem with that.”
(Huggins explained the type coaches Van Exel meant: “Like a Jerry Sloan at that time. Like a Phil Jackson, like a Pat Riley, guys who just didn’t put up with the nonsense.”)
Van Exel: “My question is, what happens to guys like us because without you we wouldn’t be where we are, and how much is enough anyway?”
Huggins said he’ll never forget that exchange.
“In the back of my mind I’m thinking, That’s easy for you to say,” he said. “You just signed a contract for $120 million. But what he said was, and the more I thought about it, why do I do this (coach)? I didn’t do this to make money. I didn’t do this to be on TV. I did it because I enjoy it.
“I was going to do something else. My dad tried to talk me out of being a coach because he was a coach. I was going to be an attorney. I was going to be a physical therapist. I was going to be a lot of stuff. The truth of the matter is, I stayed too long with the Philadelphia 76ers. They should have cut me long before they did. By the time I got back, I couldn’t do what I wanted to do. So my coach said, ‘Why don’t you be a GA (at West Virginia)?’
“So then I started doing it, and I liked it.”
During that conversation with Van Exel 20 years ago, something the high-scoring guard said resonated with Huggins: “In the NBA, coach, you don’t have this.”
He pointed to Huggins and back at himself.
“You go to practice when practice is over, and they leave,” Van Exel told him. “They call their girlfriend, or they call their wife, or they call their agent, or they call whomever, and they’re gone. Guys get in trouble, that’s on them. You can’t help guys the way you enjoy helping guys.”
The other players chimed in with similar sentiments, Huggins said. He recalled the Heat were going to guarantee him about $6 million and that his salary was in the neighborhood of $450,000 at Cincinnati.
“I picked up the phone, and I called my attorney, and he said, ‘Have you lost your mind?’ I just said, ‘I can’t do it.’ Every job that came up after that it was the same thing,” Huggins said. “I couldn’t do it.”
Even when he’s hollering at a player or a referee or can’t believe what one of his players just did, he seems like a man who is happy he stayed in the college game.
