In the Mood

UC's Bob Huggins is a coach for all seasons, and through it all, he keeps locals in a good mood by consistently winning

The basketball media convened for a meeting with the basketball coach, who is reputed, fairly or not, as a hot-headed exploiter of under-privileged athletes. Over the years, the coach has been spotted on the sideline screaming, sometimes maniacally, at his players, who often aren't around for more than a couple years. Then, the NCAA puts out statistics that say few of his players graduate.

Bob Huggins

These are facts and images that dog Bob Huggins, the University of Cincinnati basketball coach who's been named, for the second straight year, the Best Coach in town by CityBeat readers. The facts and images rest uneasily on Huggins, just as they co-mingle uneasily with each other.

The images are framed by selective television shots, and the facts are framed by one way among many to measure graduation. Throw in the exploits of some players who ran afoul of the law in Huggins' early UC years, then add his 301-96 record in 12 seasons.

A picture emerges of Huggins as a coach willing to win at all costs. The images become facts, the facts become images and they tell a story. But it surely isn't the whole story.

There are, after all, competing facts and images, different slants on the same coach. Nationally, to be sure, the competing facts and images struggle against first impressions. The prevailing image, for example, being a televised image, seems to be the only one that matters. Perhaps, in a day before television, Huggins would be viewed differently, for he would be taken at his words, the way he says them, slowly droning, often giving away his own torture.

He'll often point out that he finds something wrong when he prefaces a sentence by saying, "It's hard for me to understand," then delving into some detail about the mysteries of his universe. Not that he doesn't have his moments of temper off the court, but he's often been known to be pretty quiet. Calm? Who knows? But quiet.

"People tend to see Coach as a mean guy," said UC guard Steve Logan. "Before I signed here, I had the same feeling that he was really mad. But he's totally different off the court."

So Huggins sits in front of the basketball media, answering questions in his slow drone, and the televised images so overpower the quiet man right in front of the media that he ends up taking questions like "Are you always a raving maniac?" at the very moment he speaks barely above a whisper.

For all we know, Huggins, the personality, isn't all that complex. He's a college basketball coach who's comfortable in Cincinnati. Like most of us, he communicates as he believes the situation requires.

In a loud, crowded arena, in the heat of the moment and the excitement of the game, he's certainly not the only coach in America who's raised his voice. And in a quiet room of reporters with a microphone in front of him, such as the one he faced in Anaheim last Wednesday, the day before the Bearcats ended their season, he spoke softly, beginning almost every answer with a sigh.

"I'm not the same off the floor as I am on the floor," he told journalists in Anaheim. "I couldn't be. I couldn't be like that for 24 hours."

Huggins doesn't fight the image of a screamer. But the facts about graduation rates released by the NCAA, which suggest he just uses kids for basketball, is a different story.

The question was put to Huggins in Anaheim: What about those figures released by the NCAA that say UC graduated only 8 percent of its freshmen players from 1990 through 1993?

"I'm more into people than statistics," said Huggins. "You'd be hard pressed to find any of my guys who said he felt cheated, or any of my guys who said we don't care, or any of my guys who said we didn't welcome them back with open arms when they got done playing and came back."

The image that he cheats the players, that he doesn't care about them or that he doesn't welcome them back with open arms - that's the image he fights. The image that his program cheats, that it's an outlaw program - that's the image he fights as well.

In January, Huggins said 17 of his UC players had graduated, about half the players who have completed their playing eligibility under his watch. That doesn't qualify UC's basketball program as a degree factory, but it's a lot better than 8 percent. And it's every bit as true of a picture, in its way, as the figures gathered by the Department of Education and distributed by the NCAA.

Those figures don't credit UC for players who come in from junior college. And it's not like Huggins discarded players like Danny Fortson and DerMarr Johnson, who came in as freshmen and left early for the NBA. Losing players like these to the NBA isn't the best outcome for Huggins, in particular, or college basketball, in general, but it makes sense for the players.

"It gets frustrating after a while," Huggins said. "We have guys who go to Europe to play, come back and finish. I have two guys coming back after eight or nine years in Europe. They can play in Europe for $100,000 per year, tax free. I can't get them a job like that. For me to say, 'Stay here and finish your degree right now because it makes me look better,' is ridiculous. It's self-serving."

Some years ago, Huggins took chances with kids of questionable civility, and it marked him with a reputation as a bottom feeder. How long it will take him to outrun that, no one knows.

But there are always risks with young people, especially adventurous young people with a nonconformist streak and a little star power. Some learn, some don't. If Huggins has ever short-changed a player, however, none of his former players has ever come out and said so. Indeed, many have expressed genuine affection.

Huggins isn't in the business of training robots and, by the NCAA's reckoning, he hasn't always run a tight ship. Last August, UC came off two years of probation after an investigation found players to have received improper benefits.

The basketball programs at Kansas, UCLA, Kentucky and several others also have been found on the wrong side of the NCAA, but those programs have been able to isolate their indiscretions, whereas UC hasn't. That's because UC has all the other facts and images, all the other baggage, to go with it.

It's not hard to understand Huggins' appeal in Cincinnati. It has nothing to do with image, because he's beyond image here and almost beyond facts.

Cincinnatians know he has many faces. He's gone from nice ties to mock turtlenecks to nice suits. He goes from screaming to quiet. He's gone from pressing to laying back on defense. He's had teams falter after opening the season with top ranking. And he's had teams of little promise that came along late in the year.

He has expressed great pride in some teams and great disappointment in others.

Locally, Huggins is simply the best coach in town, the coach who has been the most successful for the longest. Since he came to Cincinnati in 1988, Lou Piniella won the World Series with the Reds one year, but no team in town has gone as far or as often as the Bearcats.

Whatever the team, however he dresses, whatever his program's standing in the NCAA, whatever the team's national image, Huggins has put the Bearcats into the NCAA Tournament 10 straight times. Some of the teams have been more likeable than others. They all have their own identities, but they all play to the same standard. Which is why, perhaps, this year's team played its best basketball down the stretch, just after it had been booed at home during a loss to Louisville.

"They didn't want to be the group that didn't live up to what everybody else has done here," said Huggins.

This year, in character, Huggins drove a lightly regarded team to the Sweet 16 after four consecutive seasons in which teams of greater promise dropped out of the tournament in the second round. The Bearcats lost to Stanford last Thursday night, but few were disappointed. Huggins is at his best with teams like this.

Sometimes it's seemed like Huggins and UC were stuck with each other. Then, at times like these, the worry arises that Huggins won't be around much longer.

Three years ago, when the Ohio State job opened, UC was under NCAA investigation and Huggins didn't get a whiff. Then, last summer, he relieved the city's basketball fans by turning down a lucrative offer to coach the NBA's Los Angeles Clippers.

No one knows for sure if Huggins will stay around for a for years, if he'll move on to the NBA or if he'll retire from coaching.

All the sports fans really know in Cincinnati is that Huggins has operated the most consistently successful athletic program in town. The other facts and images might be good for national storytelling, but the wins are good for local moods.