For legends like Bob Huggins, it rarely ends well

Homophobic remarks from the West Virginia men's basketball coach have tarnished a reputation he worked years to repair. But his career doesn't have to end in embarrassment.

When audio emerged of Bob Huggins dropping a homophobic slur multiple times while on a Cincinnati radio station, and with Ludacris’ “Southern Hospitality” oddly blaring in the background, there was some hesitation.

Was it actually Huggins, the longtime West Virginia men’s basketball coach? Or in what would have been a fittingly 2023 type of story, was it an imitator who went on the air and made the comments? The questions came from a place of due diligence and caution, but also a certain sense of disbelief. Surely someone who has spent the past 40 years speaking publicly – and graduated magna cum laude and owns a master’s degree, to boot – couldn’t be that dumb, right?

It turns out that, yes, he could be. Indeed, it was Huggins, dropping one of the most vile, hate-soaked words in the English language for anyone to hear.

While Huggins’ carelessness is damning enough, it’s ultimately not the most glaring problem. He not only used a word that wouldn’t have been acceptable in 2013 or 2003, let alone 2023, but the comfort and ease with which he did it was striking. That he did so on a radio show hosted by a man who, among other things, twice referred to Barack Obama as “Barack Hussein Obama” at a 2008 rally, said Black fathers normally “quickly have a baby and leave” and said poor people "lack values, ethics and morals” makes things even worse.

After days of uncertainty about Huggins’ future, West Virginia responded by docking the coach’s salary by $1 million, suspending him for three games next season, forcing him to undergo sensitivity training and making his contract a year-by-year pact.

It was a sudden, unexpected step back for someone who has grown into one of college basketball’s most beloved figures. During his 16 years at Cincinnati, he was largely reviled and demonized while overseeing a program with an abysmal graduation rate and players who struggled to stay out of trouble off the court, including, most famously, Art Long, who punched a police horse four times in its neck in 1995. Huggins himself wasn’t immune, either, as he was arrested for a DUI in 2004, which ultimately led to his firing from the university.

Shortly after getting to West Virginia, his alma mater, in 2007, public perception of him began to change – and do so organically, without any kind of concerted public relations campaign. 

At the 2010 Final Four, he rushed out on the court to console star forward Da’Sean Butler as he writhed in pain on the court with a torn ACL in what was one of the most genuinely touching player-coach interactions in the history of major college sports. As sensibilities evolved on the rules and values of college sports, some of Huggins’ supposed transgressions at Cincinnati no longer seemed quite so bad. His quick wit and dry sense of humor earned him admirers in the media and allowed many of his quotes to go viral. He had been around long enough to go from villain to kindly old stalwart, the man who would invariably finish first in any poll of what coach people would most want to have a beer with.

Now, with a single ill-conceived interview, at least some of that hard-earned goodwill has been undone. While they may be dwarfed by his 916 career wins, two Final Fours and enshrinement in the Basketball Hall of Fame, his bigoted remarks will always be a part of his story.

With his contract now running year to year, he becomes that much more expendable. West Virginia’s fortunes have waned in recent years, with only one NCAA Tournament win in the past five seasons. Huggins is a legend in the state and an icon at the school, but another subpar season or two could something homophobia couldn’t – end his career.

While Huggins’ exact predicament is unique in college basketball history, the general narrative arc isn’t. No matter how many games or championships a coach wins and regardless of how many buildings they name after him or statues they erect in his honor, their careers seldom end in glory or anything resembling it. Sometimes, it’s not even on their own terms.

Most famously, Bob Knight was fired from Indiana in 2000 after he violated a zero-tolerance policy instituted by the university following the release of a tape showing him grabbing a player by the neck. Arizona’s Lute Olson took a leave of absence from the program for the 2007-08 season after filing for divorce and despite planning to return the following season, health-related issues prompted him to retire, capping off an awkward back-and-forth in which the Wildcats were left in limbo. Though he coached Division I basketball for 15 more seasons, Lefty Driesell never returned to the major-conference level after being forced to resign from Maryland following an investigation into the program following the cocaine overdose of Terrapins star Len Bias that revealed, among other things, the staggeringly poor academic performance of players and how Driesell told players to remove drugs from Bias’ room in the hours after his death. Wisconsin’s Bo Ryan resigned abruptly in Dec. 2015, just 12 games into the Badgers’ season, and though a university investigation concluded he did not misuse school resources in the process, Ryan’s decision came 10 months after a woman alleged the two had an affair.

Those inglorious endings extend to more strictly on-court matters. Let’s go over a small sampling involving coaches with either multiple national titles or a top-40 ranking in career wins…

Mike Krzyzewski (five championships, No. 1 in career wins): Coach K’s Duke team made the Final Four in his final season in 2021-22, but once there, they lost to archrival North Carolina in the first-ever national semifinal meeting between the two schools. The Tar Heels came into the game seeded six spots lower than the Blue Devils.

Jim Boeheim (one championship, No, 2 in career wins): Hours after Syracuse finished off a 17-15 season and the 47th-year head coach said his fate was up to the university, the school announced Boeheim wouldn’t return. That it came on the sleepy first day of a conference tournament in a city (Greensboro, N.C.) the coach famously belittled made it all the more unusual and, frankly, kind of funny. The Orange went just 69-56 in his final four seasons.

Jim Calhoun (three national championships, No. 3 in career wins): The longtime UConn coach was cited in 2011 by an NCAA investigation for failing to create an atmosphere of compliance and, as a result, was suspended the first three Big East games of the 2011-12 season. That season, the defending national champion Huskies struggled, going from the preseason No. 4 team to a No. 9 seed that lost by double digits in the first round of the NCAA Tournament in what would be their coach’s final game.

Henry Iba (two national championships, No. 20 in career wins): Iba’s Oklahoma State teams went 47-80 in his final five seasons and made the NCAA Tournament just once in his final 12 seasons.

John Chaney (No. 25 in career wins): The highly decorated Temple coach retired in 2006, following the fifth-straight season that the Owls missed the NCAA Tournament, an event of which they were a part 17 of the previous 18 seasons. In 2005, in what would be his second-to-last season, he ordered one of his bench players to commit hard fouls against Saint Joseph’s in response to what he thought were missed calls. One opponent suffered a broken arm and after the game, Chaney admitted his strategy, noting "I'm going to send in what we used to do years ago, send in the goons."

Denny Crum (two national championships, No. 38 in career wins): After finishing below .500 just once in his first 26 years at Louisville, two of Crum’s final four Louisville teams ended with a losing record. On the way to a 12-19 finish in 2000-01, Crum was effectively forced to resign by athletic director Tom Jurich, accepting a $7 million buyout.

For Huggins, a better path exists.

Laughable as certain aspects of West Virginia’s punishment were – how will the Mountaineers ever manage to beat Missouri State, Monmouth and Jacksonville State without Huggins roaming the sideline? – there’s some promise of genuine reform in it. The $1 million he’ll lose in salary will be diverted to the university’s LGBTQ+ Center, West Virginia’s Carruth Center for Counseling and Psychological Services and "other state and national organizations that support marginalized communities." Additionally, Huggins will be required to meet with LGBTQ+ leaders from across the state with guidance from the leadership of West Virginia’s LGBTQ+ Center. He’ll also meet with leadership from the Carruth Center to "better understand the mental health crisis facing our college students, particularly those in marginalized communities."

Those efforts can’t be dismissed outright as a publicity stunt. The LGBTQ+ community is under increasing threat, including in West Virginia, where earlier this year, Gov. Jim Justice signed a bill banning gender-affirming care and passed a religious freedom measure that critics have described as “a license to discriminate.” While firing Huggins would have undoubtedly been justified and perhaps cathartic, whatever public shame came from it may have only done so much to change him or, worse, he could have been defiant, labeling himself as a victim of a punitive, over-sensitive society and finding solace in the words of the fools, bigots and trolls who insisted he did nothing wrong. By educating him and giving him direct exposure to people who his words deeply hurt, he can gain empathy and knowledge.

In the aftermath of the infamous radio hit, Cyd Zeigler of Outsports wrote that Huggins’ comments were the worst he had heard in American sports since former NBA all-star Tim Hardaway said “I hate gay people” in 2007.

In Hardaway, there’s a hopeful example of what’s possible and what might come next.

Following his remarks, the former Golden State Warriors and Miami Heat standout was banned from the NBA’s all-star festivities that week and was dismissed from his role in the Continental Basketball Association. Rather than feel aggrieved, he became an outspoken advocate for the gay community. He has worked with the Trevor Project, a non-profit group dedicated to preventing suicide among LGBTQ+ youth. He provided the first signature on a petition to legalize same-sex marriage in Florida. In 2011, he attended a rally in El Paso, Texas, where he was once a star at UTEP in the 1980s, to support the city’s mayor amid a recall vote after he allowed domestic partnership rights for gay couples. Two years later, when Jason Collins became the first openly gay active player in the NBA, one of the early phone calls he received was from Hardaway. 

“I’ve turned a wrong into a right,” Hardaway said in an interview with HoopsHype in 2019. “I’m trying to do what’s right, supporting gay people and transgender people. I want people to understand [what they go through] and understand them as people.

“Life is too short to be out here hating one another and trying to hurt one another. I understand that.”

As Hardaway showed, there’s redemption and forgiveness to be earned through sincere change. Expressing contrition is not an admission of defeat or sign of capitulation. If anything, it’s a signal of strength, that someone is confident and self-aware enough to recognize that they have made a mistake and have room to grow from it.

Whether Huggins is able to reconcile with that fact will help determine whether his final acts of public life will be defined by venom or compassion. The direction he goes truly is up to him and only him.

(Photos: Associated Press, IndyStar)