Written by Dana O’Neil at ESPN.com
Bob Huggins is a few Eagle Rare bourbons in at a small hotel bar when, from underneath his nylon pullover, a light blinks on his wrist.
It’s his Fitbit.
It occurs to you in that moment, in the Doubletree hotel bar in Charlottesville, Virginia, that a blinking Fitbit on the bourbon-sipping Huggins is the perfect metaphor for the West Virginia Mountaineers coach.
Because Huggins is a living, breathing contradiction. Only partially because he is still living and breathing.
By his own admission he has died twice, his genetically impaired heart calling uncle on his exercise-averse, hard-living lifestyle. Ten days ago, Huggins collapsed to his knees in the first half of the Mountaineers’ game against Texas, his internal defibrillator sending him a shock — and perhaps a reminder — after an irregular heartbeat. By the way, he coached the second half.
Huggins refuses to slow down, professionally or socially.
He is a gruff, hard-cursing taskmaster whose verbal dressing-downs could wilt a redwood. The F-word is not part of his vocabulary. It is his vocabulary.
Yet ask him about his mother, dead 14 years now, and he practically melts.
He’s a renegade who refuses to dress the part. He long ago ditched the requisite suit and tie most every other coach favors, preferring his comfy pullover. Rather than stalk the sideline in anger, he sits slump-shouldered on a stool to better aid his aching hips.
Yet people are fiercely loyal to, if not downright protective of, him. They insist that the man painted the villain is actually just the opposite.
Most of all, Huggins is a basketball survivor, a man who has amended his style of play to suit his players; he just won’t amend himself. He lost a long battle of wills with the administration after 16 years, a Final Four and two Elite Eights at Cincinnati. He didn’t fade away. Instead he lived to coach another day, his stature never diminishing, perhaps instead growing.
So what’s the secret to his survival?
Despite all those contradictions, Huggins just might be the simplest man to understand in all of college basketball.
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