MORGANTOWN — Bob Huggins’ induction into the Naismith Memorial Hall of Fame on Saturday is by no means an end to his coaching journey.
As long as there is a national championship still to win, the WVU men’s hoops coach says there is still more to accomplish.
It is the one honor that’s eluded Huggins in his 40 years as a head coach, the missing piece to a resumé that otherwise checks off all the boxes.
The dream — if the Mountaineers were to ever be the last team standing in April under Huggins’ watch — is to take the national championship trophy on a bus tour around the state.
“We’d let the people come out and touch it and be proud of their team and their state,” Huggins said. “We haven’t done that, yet. I think it would be the neatest thing in the world.”
That would be the ultimate ending for Huggins, or any coach for that matter.
Naismith Memorial Hall of Fame enshrinement
WHEN: 7 p.m. Saturday
WHERE: Springfield, Mass.
TV: NBA TV (Comcast 287, HD 1218; DirecTV 216; DISH 156)
His beginning in the coaching game was less celebrated. At one point in his life, Huggins wasn’t the focus of TV cameras during games or postgame interviews after them.
“Honestly, I think in the beginning, we had him sitting back in some room doing a lot of writing,” said former WVU head coach Joedy Gardner, who was the first to hire Huggins as a graduate assistant in 1977. “I was a coach that was very visual and wanted everything spelled out.
“We would have every practice written out on what we wanted to accomplish each day, and I think Bob probably was in charge of writing it all out.”
Huggins had just graduated magna cum laude from WVU a few months earlier and his next steps into athletics was a tryout with the Philadelphia 76ers that didn’t work out.
As Huggins has told the story, he came back to WVU to work on a master’s degree and enrolled at the last minute.
He needed a job and Gardner was quick to hire him as a graduate assistant.
“I think we maybe wanted him more than he wanted to be with us,” Gardner said. “To me, I knew he had been engrained in basketball going back to his time with his dad and their basketball camps. I knew what he was capable of.”
Gardner had coached Huggins for three seasons at WVU, and says his coaching style leaned on discipline and toughness, something he saw in Huggins.
“I guess the best story was in Bob’s junior year,” Gardner said. “We were working on a new 1-1-3 defense and we had Bob in the middle of the paint and told him not to let anyone through.
“Well, Earnie Hall tried to dribble through there one day in practice and Bob just cold-cocked him.”
Gardner said he yelled at Huggins, asking him what he was trying to accomplish?
“He turns and smiles,” Gardner said. “ ‘Just a little psychological warfare, coach.’ ”
That type of toughness, grit and determination is what Gardner wanted on his coaching staff. He got it with Huggins, who still carries those same qualities with him almost 45 years later.
“To me, it was obvious he was going to be a good coach,” Gardner said. “He was a coach on the floor when he played and always had good leadership abilities. If you just talk to him for five minutes, you can see the passion he has for the game. He was that way as a player and he’s that way as a coach.”
Gardner, now 87 and retired living in Peoria, Ariz., did not have his contract renewed after the 1977-78 season.
Gale Catlett was brought in as his replacement, while Gardner moved on to become the head coach at Northern Arizona.
Catlett didn’t retain Huggins as an assistant, but Gardner said he did everything he could to get Huggins to go with him to Arizona.
“I definitely wanted to keep him,” Gardner said. “I knew he wouldn’t be interested. He had just married June and I knew he didn’t want to pack up and go to that part of the country. Arizona was probably a whole different planet to him back then.”
Instead, Huggins took an assistant coaching position at Ohio State.
Minus one year spent in Orlando as an assistant at UCF, Huggins spent his next 26 years in the state of Ohio, building his Hall-of-Fame credentials with the Buckeyes, Walsh College, Akron and Cincinnati.
He guided the Bearcats to the 1992 Final Four.
None of it surprised Gardner, the man who gave Huggins his first job as a coach.
“I guess I had a pretty good eye for evaluation,” Gardner joked. “Even if we couldn’t have brought him in that first year, he still would have become a great basketball coach, that was obvious.
“I’m just so happy for him. I wish I could be there to see him go into the Hall of Fame. It’s been a long time coming for him.”
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