The one word you never imagined associating with Bob Huggins is pity. The man who grew up in a trailer with six siblings in small town Eastern Ohio wouldn’t have asked for it. The basketball coach who won 935 games by pushing his players past their breaking point wouldn’t have allowed it.
But now, as a 69-year old man who no longer has the job he loved or the program built in his image, there is nothing else to feel. With each passing day, each missive from one of his many lawyers and each statement that refuses to acknowledge the obvious, the ending of one of college basketball’s great careers has become irretrievably sad.
Nobody’s interests are being served by Huggins’ attempt to win back his job at West Virginia, which has manifested over the last few days in a bizarre claim that he did not resign June 17 after being arrested for drunk driving and a new statement indicating that he is in a rehab facility and wants to come back once his treatment is compete.
This does not seem like a ploy to extract more money from West Virginia but rather a destructive delusion that is poisoning any chance he had of being honored the way his career deserves. And it doesn’t seem like anyone in Huggins’ circle is willing to tell him the truth that he should have already accepted weeks ago: It’s over.
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“Now that I have obtained counsel to review the Employment Agreement and have seen WVU’s comments about my current status, it is clear that WVU did not handle the situation appropriately,” Huggins wrote in a statement attributed to him Monday night. “More importantly, the basketball program is in need and I have a strong desire to conclude my career as the Head Basketball Coach for the program that I love. I hope to meet with WVU in the near future to resolve this situation.”
There’s nothing funny about this.
For Huggins, it portends a life full of bitterness during a time in which people want to celebrate him for his positive traits and not his flaws. For the school he claims to care about, it suggests a destructive, larger-than-life presence lurking in the shadows that will make it harder for interim coach Josh Eilert and whoever gets the job permanently after him to do their jobs.
And the only place Huggins should lay blame is the person staring at him in the mirror every day.
Nobody told Huggins to go on a notoriously irreverent Cincinnati radio show May 8 and make homophobic comments that put him on the razor’s edge of losing his job.
And nobody told him last month to get behind the wheel of a car with a blood alcohol content nearly three times the legal limit and drive around Pittsburgh to the point that he couldn’t even remember where he was or how he got there.
At that point, it didn’t really matter what you wanted to call it – a firing, a resignation, a retirement – Huggins was done. And all the evidence suggests that he knew it. In correspondence sent by the school to Huggins’ attorney on Monday, it outlined all of the reasons why Huggins’ resignation statement was valid, including the fact that it had all been orchestrated between the two parties to email it from his wife’s account because, “Mr. Huggins does not use email” and because his longstanding lawyer was “having IT issues at his firm and could not access his email reliably.”
The university also specified the various meetings Huggins had on campus on June 17 and 18, including with the team and with athletics director Wren Baker while cleaning out his office.
Now Huggins is using a new lawyer in an attempt to backtrack and declare himself fit to coach again. Not only is it bizarre, it’s pointless.
West Virginia is not going to bring Huggins back under any circumstances, and particularly not at the point of a legal bayonet. But by insisting otherwise and essentially trying to pretend like nothing in the last month happened the way it happened, Huggins is actively undercutting Eilert, his longtime loyal assistant, and making it hard for the current players and the entire program to move forward.
It’s narcissistic, it’s selfish and it’s extremely sad.
Hopefully Huggins has a lot of life left to live, but these developments don’t suggest he’s going to spend it in a healthy, happy place.
Getting help for a longstanding alcohol issue is the most important first step, and everyone should wish him the best in that endeavor. But an obsession with getting his old job back, or living in a state of denial about why he lost it in the first place, won’t do anything to keep him on the right path.
Huggins had a wonderful coaching career that imploded in an ugly way, but he wasn’t going to be ex-communicated from West Virginia forever. At some point, there would have been a warm and deserving embrace that was worthy of all he did for the state and the school.
But now he’s trying to burn it all to the ground in attempt to win back something that is gone forever. Unless somebody can convince him of that, the ending of his story seems destined to be a sad one.
