Sunday, November 14, 1999Huggins has calm inside the storm
Coach doesn't always fit image of courtside screamer
BY PAUL DAUGHERTY
The Cincinnati Enquirer
The Sleepy Hollow Inn is a dive in the best sense, its sensibilities scrubbed clean by a million late nights of tobacco smoke, spilled beer and good, coarse conversation.
• Age: 46
• Family: Wife, June; daughters Jenna, 17, and Jacqueline, 14.
• Hobbies: Golf. He's a 20-handicap. He says. Smoking expensive cigars. Talking basketball.
• Firmly believes: The Mob, not Lee Harvey Oswald, killed John and Bobby Kennedy. There is no swaying him on this point.
• Could have been: A trial lawyer. “I think I'd have been pretty good at that,” he says. He has a master's in health administration and graduated magna cum laude from West Virginia.
• Could not have been: An NBA player. The Philadelphia 76ers cut him in training camp.There is no cigar bar at the Hollow, but there are cigars, no martinis, but lots of spirits, no servers, just tenders and maids. The jukebox plays Sinatra, Bennett and the Mills Brothers. Christmas lights twinkle all year. The owner, a guy named Dick, is often behind the long, scarred bar, telling bad jokes.
There is lots of dark, 1950s basement paneling at the Hollow. If you're looking for pretense, you've made a wrong turn.
Bob Huggins is at the bar, tending to a few light beers. The Hollow is his kind of place. Says his friend, Northwestern basketball coach Kevin O'Neill, “Bob's definition of a really good time is a table in the corner of a dimly lit bar, smoking cigars with friends, talking basketball, closing the place down, then getting up in what's left of the morning to work his butt off.”
Mr. Huggins lives just up the street, in the same upper-middle class Clermont County neighborhood he found more than 10 years ago, when he became the University of Cincinnati's 24th basketball coach.
Things have changed a lot since Mr. Huggins assumed control of UC's then-forlorn basketball program. The year before he arrived in Clifton, the Bearcats were 15-12. In Mr. Huggins' first season, they went 20-14. Only once in the last decade has UC won fewer than 20 games.
UC has been to the NCAA tournament eight years in a row, once to the Final Four and three times to the Final Eight. Success like that tends to change a person.
But Mr. Huggins is the same. He has the same friends. He has the same phone number. It's in the book.
His two daughters go to public school. One of his good friends is a local grade school gym teacher he met while the guy was refereeing Mr. Huggins' older daughter's basketball games. Imagine that: Huggs, good buddies with a ref.
He goes to the Sleepy Hollow. Friends say it's the only place in town he insists on paying the check.
“Good people here,” Mr. Huggins says. “I can be just a regular person in here.” He pauses, pulls on the light beer. “I am a regular person.”
He is who he is, by god. Mr. Huggins is too candid, too combative, too ready to kick your butt. He does not turn the other cheek. “You fire at him, he'll fire back at you” is how his friend and mentor Chuck Machock puts it.
Mr. Huggins goes against every flow he doesn't agree with, consequences be damned. It's hurt him in public. Hurt him? It's killed him. Quickly: When I say Bob Huggins, you think ... what?
Screaming tyrant. Arms flailing like the Scarecrow, mouth agape and roaring. Bully, ref-baiter, bigmouth. “The maniac on the sidelines,” Mr. O'Neill says.
Mr. Huggins wears black. His players look more like fullbacks than point guards. He recruits tough kids, players who can handle an elbow in the back or a forearm to the head. Players who can handle him.
It's a good, clear image, and not one Mr. Huggins discourages. Maybe that's why it likely will last as long as he coaches.
It has worn on him. The criticism, the stereotype, the 20-month NCAA investigation that, to the average fan, affirmed it all.
Says his friend Doug Jauch: “I was on a plane this week where the guy behind me was yelling and screaming about how Bob was a maniac on the bench, about how Bob only recruits criminals. I bit my tongue.”
A winner
Mr. Huggins has coached more games and won more games than any UC coach. Only Ed Jucker has a better winning percentage, but Mr. Jucker coached only five years. Mr. Huggins' consistent success ranks him with any coach in Cincinnati sports history, in any sport. Mr. Jucker, Sparky Anderson, Paul Brown. None won more consistently, for as long, as Mr. Huggins.This year, the Bearcats were ranked No. 2 in the country in preseason polls. Mr. Huggins may have his best team. And with No. 1 Connecticut's loss Thursday to Iowa, UC may be on the verge of the top ranking.
Yet Huggins is perceived less as a winner than as a sideline nutjob. His candor has cost him. You could even say it has pushed him to the brink of quitting.
“I could quit right now and feel good about it,” Mr. Huggins says. “No question. Why not? I want to be the best at what I do. But when it's done, it's done.”
“He's not lying to you,” Mr. Machock says. “Five years ago, I'd say he'd never do that. Now? Absolutely. I don't think he wants to accept again the kind of stuff he went through two years ago,” meaning the NCAA probe that resulted in probation for the basketball team and scars for Mr. Huggins' reputation.
“He takes his reputation as being an honest person very seriously,” says former St. Louis University coach Charlie Spoonhour, a close Huggins confidante.
“It disillusioned me very, very much,” Mr. Huggins says.
There is another side to Mr. Huggins. It may be hard to believe. But it's not hard to find. You only have to ask. And drink a beer. And smoke a cigar.
I tell Mr. Spoonhour that after 10 years, I'm bored with the Bad Bob image. “I want to write about the Huggins you know,” I say. That Huggins takes the public Huggins and turns him upside down.
“OK,” Mr. Spoonhour says. “But the average guy is going to think it's something by Ludlum.”
Fiction.
But it's there, at the Sleepy Hollow, where Mr. Huggins unspools himself like a well-cast trout line. We're talking about perceptions. Mr. Huggins has decided after a decade, he doesn't care anymore.
“Anybody who is true to himself doesn't regret who he is,” he says. “He might regret what he does sometimes. But not who he is.”
Says Mr. O'Neill, “Bob cares more than anything about waking up in the morning, looking in the mirror and feeling good about who he is. But I will say this: He is a tough son of a bitch. If you're going to be in a bar fight, you want him on your side.”
He has spent many nights in places like the Hollow with Messrs. O'Neill and Spoonhour and Machock. And with Mr. Jauch and Jim Collins, neighborhood guys who endure his stories and the clouds of smoke from his cigars.
“What kind of cigars does he smoke?”
“The free kind,” Mr. Spoonhour says.
A coach's thoughts
In the winter, he'll sit in Mr. Jauch's Milford driveway, huddled with Mr. Jauch and Mr. Collins around one of those portable fireplaces, and talk for hours. “Driveway sits”, they call them. Their three families spend a week each summer at Mr. Huggins' condo in New Smyrna Beach. This doesn't sound like the aloof scowler we've come to expect.“That's the side of him that people don't see, the guy that laughs,” Mr. Spoonhour says.
Says Mr. O'Neill: “Every time we have an all-nighter, our conversation regresses to the same three or four different things: The sanctimonious frauds in this business is one. Then, if you were ranking coaches according to who's toughest, who'd win a bar fight, that's two. And three, it's Huggs saying how he's got to get out of this business.”
Mr. Huggins thinks often about three. He lives by what his father Charlie, himself a legendary Ohio high school coach, told him: Don't take a job you're afraid to lose.
“If you do, you'll live by other people's principles and values,” Mr. Huggins says. “I've talked to a lot of coaches that got fired. Their biggest regret was not that they didn't win more games. It was that they didn't do things the way they wanted to.
“The whole deal is to walk away on your own terms. I don't want to be one of those guys forced to walk away. I'll be around as long as I want to be around.”
And how long might that be? How long can Mr. Huggins' Type A-plus personality stand the incessant fire of Top 25 Division I coaching? How much more can his rabbit ears burn from public criticism? When does his my-way candor and no-bull demeanor finally force him to chuck it all for golf in the Bahamas?
“He always tells me he could quit today,” says Mr. O'Neill. “I tell him he's full of it. He may have an existence outside of coaching. But what Bob is as a coach, he is as a person. He needs that competition.”
Maybe. Mr. Huggins tells a story about Terry Bowden, the former Auburn coach, son of Florida State's grand old man, Bobby Bowden. “Terry had it all detailed about how many wins he needed to pass Bear Bryant. I said, "Who remembers? Who cares? They don't put that on your tombstone.'
“The reason I'll get out is, the majority of the job isn't about coaching,” Mr. Huggins says. “It's about covering your behind. Writing memos, dealing with people who don't know what's going on.” He tells the story of a longtime coach who decided to leave the business after having to write a detailed report on why he spent $12 buying ice cream for his players when the team was in an airport, its flight delayed.
Chuck Machock says, “That's what will make him leave. Something between the NCAA, the (UC) administration and him.”
For now, Mr. Huggins gets along well with UC Athletic Director Bob Goin. He is enjoying this year's team, not only for its talent, but also its effort. He has had chances to leave UC, but has resisted. Again, his father's influence.
“He always said the big time is where you're happy,” says Mr. Huggins. “I'm happy. My kids are happy. My oldest daughter started first grade here. I love the city. I love Ohio. I love this place.”
The Hollow closes about midnight, unless Mr. Huggins is there. In that case, it closes whenever he decides to leave. The bartender locks the door, then unlocks it when you're ready to go.
Mr. Huggins isn't ready. It's a Monday night gone to Tuesday morning. Al and Boomer have long vanished from the little TV in the corner. No 80-inch screens at the Hollow. It wouldn't be right.
A good time
Jimmy Collins comes down near midnight, to swap lies and plot the next Driveway Sit. Mr. Huggins surveys the after-midnight scene. “This,” he says, “is a good time.”He could quit coaching, sure. He could build the basketball gyms for city kids he wants to build. He could form the leagues, name them after well-known Bearcats, just the way he wants: The Nick Van Exel League, the Danny Fortson League.
“We'd tie it to education. They may not be the greatest students, but they would try. If we could change some kids, get them out of where they are to do something with their lives, it's a wonderful thing,” says Mr. Huggins.
Mr. Huggins could do that, and eventually he will. But quit coaching? Now?
Who would listen to his stories then? Who'd drink his beers and smoke his cigars? Would they let him close the Sleepy Hollow with Jimmy Collins and Charlie Spoonhour and Kevin O'Neill?
A man is rich who has lots of good friends. He is richer still if they know who he really is, and accept him for that.
“The friends of his that I've met are guys that have their feet firmly on the ground,” says Mr. Spoonhour. “I've never seen Bobby or anybody with him put on airs.
“He's funny. He tells good stories. He knows who he is. He's grounded.”
Ludlum?
Perhaps. People will believe what they will. Mr. Huggins is a maniac. Sometimes. Other times, he's not. A man should be allowed more than one face.
“The worst thing in the world is when people say they don't know who you are,” Mr. Huggins decides.
Knowing Mr. Huggins is easy enough. What you see is what you get. On the court and off.
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