MORGANTOWN — “And they said I couldn’t sell fish.”
That was the take from Bob Huggins Friday afternoon, just hours before his annual fish fry event raised somewhere in the neighborhood of $2.5 million for cancer research, the WVU Cancer Institute and the Remember the Miners organization.
In truth, a lot of things have been said about Huggins over the years; some of them positive, a few that weren’t.
Such is the life for any major Division I men’s basketball coach, or in Huggins’ case, maybe a soon to be Naismith Hall of Fame coach.
That was the word passed down later on Friday, that Huggins had made the first-round of cuts and became a finalist for the 2022 class. The inductees will be announced during the Final Four.
Take the two key elements from those last two paragraphs — Hall of Fame, Final Four — and you’ll find a starting point for those who have doubted Huggins, both as a coach and as a person, over the years.
If they said the man couldn’t sell fish, they obviously didn’t see a future Hall-of-Fame candidate or Final-Four coach back in those early days at Walsh College.
Back then, it was simply a matter of whether or not Huggins could win or recruit or run a program the right way.
Well, he found a way to win at Walsh and at Akron and rebuilt Cincinnati from the ashes of a once-proud program and made it nationally relevant again.
Along the way, there were so many more doubts. Cincinnati fell under NCAA probation under Huggins’ watch, although he was never charged with anything personally.
Then came the zero graduation rate stuff at Cincinnati and the national media made a field day out of questioning the character behind the athletes Huggins was recruiting, and all of it shaped a persona of a man who seemed to fit right into the textbook profile of it all with his fiery demeanor on the court.
A man like that can’t coach a team to the Final Four or be a Hall-of-Famer, or at least that was once the general consensus.
It’s here we flash back to Friday afternoon. Huggins is face-to-face with the local media on the eve of the Mountaineers’ showdown against No. 6 Kansas, one the Jayhawks held on for a 71-58 victory inside the Coliseum.
He is joking around about the fish fry and taking in the comments about how he’d never catch that many fish.
What he’s really doing, though, is opening up his heart to a matter of importance that goes well beyond winning or losing on a basketball court.
He may very soon be enshrined in the Hall of Fame, but whether or not it happens is really no more than a nice passing thought to Huggins, at least that’s what he says publicly.
Being able to fund and build a cancer hospital right here in Morgantown is much further up on his priority list.
Huggins’ role in making that dream a reality has been to raise more than $16 million with his annual fundraisers.
“If I can leave this state with anything in a positive way that will remain relevant to helping the people of West Virginia, I sure want to do that,” Huggins said. “I’ve been blessed to be in the position I’m in to be able to do that, so I feel like I have to do my part.”
He has gone above and beyond in doing his part in that aspect, and, no, that does not erase the results that have come with this up-and-down season.
It probably does not erase what many thought of him during his Cincinnati days, but it certainly enhances the 15 years his WVU basketball teams have been among the best academically in the entire country in terms of APR scores and graduation rates.
Through all of that is but a glimpse of what Huggins has meant to this state and WVU, as well as who he is as a person.
He’s certainly taken the path less traveled and that path has led him and the teams he’s coached to results that were said to him couldn’t be reached.
It could likely see him enshrined in the Hall of Fame this year.
Can’t sell fish? At this point, Huggins could probably sell Bitcoin to Bill Gates.
It’s brought up that instead of fish, he could have done steak dinners, or barbecues or clam bakes.
“Everybody has barbecues. I don’t want to be like everybody else,” Huggins fires back. “You haven’t figured that out yet?”
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