Just a year out from being inducted into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame, Bob Huggins’ coaching career came to a screeching halt. The media firestorm, as usual, produced some creative truths, half-truths, and outright lies about what went down after Coach Huggins was arrested for a DUI in June of 2023.
We’ve worked with Huggs and his family since the early days of Artisan Grange® because of shared West Virginia ties and the worthwhile cause of the Norma Mae Huggins Endowment Fund for cancer research. When the news broke of Huggs’ transgression in Pittsburgh, we watched on, like many others, with disappointment and sympathy.
If he’s said it once, Bob Huggins has said some variation of “West Virginia is home – I was raised on Dug Hill” a thousand times. Even in light of the turmoil, his loyalty to the state and the flagship university is something he never thought would be thrown into question. But, oh boy, it was – like a game day beach ball, his relationship with West Virginia was up in the air, and everybody had their hands on it.
Bob Huggins has never been a public relations dream. His halftime interviews were entertaining but hardly polished, and he’s been rubbing elbows with controversy since well before social media was even a thing. It would be difficult to find a player Huggins coached that would describe him as mysterious. On and off court, he said what he thought, good or bad.
Criticism and disappointment around Huggins in the summer of 2023 were, no doubt, warranted. But the added fun of the era of cancel culture made for a perfect storm of painting Huggs, once the pride of West Virginia basketball, as the enemy of the state and the university.
Like many in the retweeted wasteland of cancellation where the sign reads, “abandon all hope, ye who enter here,” Bob Huggins was expected to go quietly. He made mistakes – how could he possibly feel entitled to a defense? How could he possibly expect all the people online to step down, if only for a moment, from the moral high ground to the land of the lowly, error-prone humans?
Many people, once shameless barnacles on the Hall of Famer’s ship, declare Huggins a traitor for turning on WVU. “It’s a shame,” they say, “he should have handled it better; he should have gone quietly.” We don’t like imperfection, and as advanced as we want to see ourselves, we’re still just mammals with an instinct to survive. As soon as Huggins became a wounded pack member, it was time to drop him like the dead weight he was.
For those touching grass in West Virginia, the sentiment was, and still is, much different. The Huggins drama illuminated the stark contrast between the state and some of the institutions wearing the seal. “Yeah, he messed up. Who doesn’t? He's done a lot of good here, too,” said one Delbarton resident. While the rallying cry to “ready your stones” echoed from the peaks of West Virginia, the real ones in the hollers resisted… as if to remind us all that the house is still glass, and that pretty glass will still break.
A lot has changed for Bob Huggins since June of 2023. He now has far fewer “friends,” but the remaining ones are real. He hasn’t had a drink since the day of his arrest. He has been on the basketball court once - to accompany two WVU players, at their request, on senior night.
So, yeah, he’s a changed man in some respects. But he’s still not good at pretending.
“I messed up,” he said, “I’ll never deny that. But that doesn’t mean I quit. I’ve spent my life telling kids to press — and keep pressing — through adversity. Correct what you can correct. Don’t stop playing defense just because they’re bigger; that’s just lazy.”
Despite all the urging, he still won’t say exactly what they want him to say.
Even though he’s still a basketball coach from the inside out, he spends his time these days trying to figure out the next play for the people in the state he loves unconditionally, the vast majority of whom never wavered in returning the favor. We’re proud to work with him at Artisan Grange® because, for us, that’s a real story.
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