10

BOB HUGGINS ERA (1989-2005)

THERE’S A NEW SHERIFF IN TOWN

The new coach called a 3 p.m. meeting with his players. It was held in Laurence Hall because the new basketball office in Shoemaker Center wasn’t ready.

Bob Huggins waited while some guys sauntered in around 3:15. Others strolled in at 3:30.

“Then he just went off,” Keith Starks said.

The Bearcats were not just introduced to their new leader, they were treated to a display of, uh, colorful language and verbal assaults the likes of which they were unaccustomed to.

“If this is how you think it’s going to be, pack up your stuff and go back to where you came from,” Huggins shouted. “I will win with walk-ons.”

It was April 1989.

“You can’t run a business that way,” Huggins recalled, almost 15 years later. “You can’t have people sitting around waiting for other people to show up. We start meetings on time. We start practices on time. We leave on time. It could’ve been the first day, it could’ve been the 10th day, the message wasn’t going to change: Be where you’re supposed to be.”

A 37-year-old Bob Huggins (left) and Dick Vitale take part in the show during UC’s Midnight Madness festivities in October 1990. (Photo by David Baxter/University of Cincinnati)

He wasn’t just talking about basketball; he was talking about life.

Some guys took him seriously, some guys didn’t.

Lou Banks and Elnardo Givens didn’t. Banks eventually came around; Givens, UC’s only point guard and the team MVP the previous season, didn’t. He was kicked off the team in September 1989 for missing classes.

“That got everyone’s attention,” Starks said. He told teammates: “This guy’s for real. He’s not going to take any crap from anybody.”

The players didn’t exactly go out of their way to see Huggins that summer. Quite simply, some were a little afraid.

Huggins asked players what were the problems with the program. Of all things, they mentioned the old uniforms and mismatched warmups. “That was easy to fix,” Huggins said. He asked them to design new uniforms. He ordered new practice gear. He wanted a fresh start. UC had not been to the NCAA Tournament since 1977—12 long years.

Starks, Banks, Levertis Robinson and Andre Tate were the only returning scholarship players. Michael Joiner and Tarrice Gibson, Huggins’s first high school recruits, were freshmen.

“Our first day of practice was hell,” Starks said. “We had never practiced that hard, ever. Guys were throwing up, falling down.

“This is what you have to do to win,” Huggins told them.

“We had heard certain stories about Coach Huggins,” Robinson said. “We had heard he was tough, which is true, but the toughness was not as it was categorized. He was a very level-headed coach and he was passionate about the game. He pretty much let us be young men. The enthusiasm that he had is what really set the tone for me.”

“He honestly believed we could win a national championship his first year there,” Starks said. “And he made us believe it.”

HE SAID IT AND HE MEANT IT

Huggins did believe UC could win a national championship. “If I didn’t, I don’t know who would,” he said.

And he wasn’t afraid to let the world know what he expected. In the press conference when he was introduced as UC’s new coach, Huggins made it clear that his goals were annual Final Four appearances and an NCAA title.

“We want to win right now,” he said the day his hiring was announced. “I don’t want to cheat people. If you say you’re on a five-year plan, you’re basically asking for an excuse to lose.”

He never regretted setting the bar so high.

“That’s what you play for,” Huggins said. “I thought coming in here the Metro (Conference) was a great league. At that time it was. Louisville had won a national championship (in 1986). If you could get to the top of the league and compete with Louisville, you should be able to compete on a national level.

“Some coaching friends said, ‘You shouldn’t say things like that, people will expect it. Guys get fired for saying things like that.’

“I think the biggest thing we had to change was the work ethic. They didn’t really have a strength program, so to speak. They just didn’t put the time in for whatever reason. The guys who were here, I thought, were really good. I loved coaching them. There just weren’t many of them.”

Didn’t matter.

UC upset 20th-ranked Minnesota 66-64 in Huggins’s first game and went on to a 20-14 season, including a 1990 National Invitation Tournament bid. In Huggins’s third season, Cincinnati was back in the Final Four, just as he had predicted.

LAST-SECOND LOU

He had a broken bone in his left hand. He missed practice the day before the game because he went to see a doctor.

Junior Lou Banks’s response was to go out and have a career night against Dayton on December 17, 1989. He scored 31 points, added seven rebounds and made the game-winning shot with two seconds remaining in a 90-88 victory.

“I wasn’t so much in pain that night,” Banks said. “They had it taped up pretty good. I hit it a couple times, but it wasn’t throbbing pain.

“That was one of the first times I had a great game in Shoemaker. All my other good games came on other courts.”

Banks came to UC’s rescue several times during the 1989-90 season. In addition to the Flyers, he had last-second shots to beat Florida State and Creighton, and he made two free throws against DePaul to send that game into overtime.

“I was the captain,” he said. “It was my team, so I wanted the ball at the critical times and they wanted to give it to me.”

His best game probably came his senior year, when the Bearcats upset No. 11 Southern Mississippi 86-72 at Shoemaker Center. Banks finished with 23 points, nine rebounds and a career-high nine assists. He had averaged just 11.7 points in the previous nine games.

IN FOR THE LONG HAUL

Tarrice Gibson was not the first player to sign with UC after Huggins became coach; that was Michael Joiner (May 1989). But Gibson, who signed a month after Joiner, was Huggins’s first four-year player.

Gibson is from Dothan, Alabama, in the southeast corner of the state (population 60,000). Dothan is known as the “Peanut Capital of the World.” Gibson really wanted to go to Georgetown—a basketball power in the 1980s under coach John Thompson—but the Hoyas instead signed another guard. Gibson felt that other schools backed off him because they thought he was headed to Georgetown.

Florida State offered him a chance to walk on. But Gibson verbally committed to Howard Community College in Big Spring, Texas.

Cincinnati entered the picture late in Gibson’s senior year, 1989. His recruiting trip to Cincinnati was his first airplane ride, and assistant coach John Loyer and Keith Starks met Gibson at the airport.

“As soon as I met Keith, Lou (Banks), and Andre (Tate), I was sold,” Gibson said. “The first time I saw Lou, he said, ‘We’ve got to put some muscles on you, little fella.’ They called me ’Bama. I went back home, and a week later I signed.”

The Howard coaches told him: If you have the chance to play at UC, go for it.

“What Lou, Andre, Keith and Levertis (Robinson) did in 1989 was the best thing that ever could’ve happened to me,” Gibson said. “You’ve got Lou the hardass, Andre the consummate professional, Levertis the minister of defense, and Keith the workhorse. They taught me everything they knew. Andre’s leadership, Lou’s tenacity, Keith’s will not to give up. Levertis was mild tempered; nothing ever rattled Levertis.

“They laid the foundation for the family.”

FAMILY MATTERS

Gibson arrived in Cincinnati with some clothes in a brown paper bag on September 16, 1989. He remembers the date. He owned next to nothing.

Loyer picked him up at the airport and dropped him off on campus. Tate was going to his mailbox in the dorm. “’Dre, I’ve got your new teammate right here,” Loyer said. “Take care of him.”

Tate and a female friend took Gibson to K-Mart and bought him sheets, a pillow and blanket. Banks took him to a bank and gave him $10 to open an account. “I didn’t have a dime to my name,” Gibson said.

All of this is why, 25 years after he came to town, Gibson lives in Cincinnati, keeps in touch with numerous former players from the Huggins era and offers advice to new players who need it.

“That’s what we do as a family, we try to go above and beyond the call of duty for each other,” Gibson said. “I talk to every teammate that I had at the University of Cincinnati more than I talk to my biological brother and sisters. My four years at UC were the best years of my entire life.”

Tarrice Gibson brought tremendous energy and aggressive play off the bench as the Bearcats’ top reserve during the team’s run to the 1992 NCAA Final Four. Gibson currently ranks eighth at UC with 150 career steals. (Photo by University of Cincinnati/Sports Information)

WHAT’S IN A NAME?

UC fans probably know Gibson by the name “Tarrance”—which he insists is not his name. He should know, right?

Gibson said a guidance counselor from Northview High School misspelled his name on a form that went to UC. Then UC referred to him as Tarrance in all publications for the next four years.

“It never bothered me,” he said. “I thought it was cool that they were renaming me. But it bothered my grandma. I went to (sports information director) Tom Hathaway once and told him, ‘That’s not the spelling and my grandma doesn’t like it.’ Tom told me that I needed to bring my birth certificate to show him the spelling of my name. I thought, you think I’m going to lie about my name? I said, ‘Forget it.’”

To be fair, Gibson signed his name as “Tarrance,” was referred to that way by almost everyone and never complained to UC officials until just before his senior season—too late to make changes in various publications. He finds the confusion somewhat amusing.

Now, he said, he signs all business papers “Tarrice.” He is known in Cincinnati by Tarrance, Tarrice and T-Rat, his nickname. “I answer to every one of them,” he said.

BREAKTHROUGH RECRUIT

Perhaps the most important recruit in the Huggins’s era was Herb Jones, a two-time junior college All-American at Butler County (Kansas) Community College.

“He was a great player,” Huggins said. “I thought what we had to do was win, and I thought Herbert was probably the best guy out there that we could get to win.”

UC was the first school trying hard to sign him, and that was important to Jones. When Oklahoma coach Billy Tubbs made a late run for Jones, showing him Final Four and conference championship rings, Jones remained loyal to Cincinnati.

“Huggs came out (to Kansas) and was showing me the system,” Jones said. “I thought I’d fit in. I don’t really know how I was sold. All my friends were saying, ‘Why do you want to go to Cincinnati? You can go anywhere.’”

The six-foot-four Jones was relatively quiet. He stayed to himself at first more than he hung out with teammates. He mostly went to class, practice and the cafeteria. But on the court, it didn’t take long for him to make an impression.

“Herb was the real deal,” Starks said. “No one could stop him. Nobody was as strong as him on the block. He was quick off the floor. We always thought Levertis could jump high. They had classic battles. If Herb was 6-10, he would’ve been (national) player of the year (in 1992).”

“I had never seen anybody that small be able to play down low the way he did and score in all kinds of ways,” Anthony Buford said. “There’s no question he didn’t get his due nationally. I think he got his due on our team.”

And within the program.

UC coaches would use the fact that they signed the National Junior College Player of the Year to help land more top junior college players in the next recruiting class.

“If you would ask Huggs: ‘Who’s the guy who turned the program around?’ He’d tell you Herb,” former assistant coach Steve Moeller said. “He was the first high-profile guy.”

“I didn’t really think of it like that at that time,” Jones said, “but that’s what people said later, that I broke the recruiting barrier.”

Jones was an Associated Press honorable mention All-American in 1992. UC’s previous AP honorable mention All-American was Robert Miller in 1978.

CHANGE OF ADDRESS

Following Anthony Buford’s second season at the University of Akron, his coach, Bob Huggins, accepted the head coaching position at the University of Cincinnati. After Huggins took the job, he returned to Akron to meet with each player. Right away, Buford wanted to know whether there was a spot for him at UC.

“He was who I trusted,” Buford said. “The only reason I went to play basketball at Akron was because of Bob Huggins.”

Privately, Huggins told people he wanted Buford with him in Cincinnati. But he didn’t want it to appear as if he was raiding the Akron program. He encouraged Buford to stay put, saying he didn’t know what the situation at UC would be like. Buford was on pace to become Akron’s No. 2 all-time scorer; he would have 1,400 points after three seasons.

The players lobbied for assistant coach Steve Moeller, who ended up joining Huggins at UC, to get the Akron job. But instead the school chose Coleman Crawford, who had worked under Huggins, then spent a year as an assistant at Tennessee.

Suffice it to say, Buford did not get along with Crawford for a variety of reasons. Buford would tell Huggins how unhappy he was, but Huggins couldn’t say anything in response. When his junior season ended, Buford told Huggins: “I’m not playing my senior year at Akron. I am transferring down there (to UC) whether you like it or not.”

Every award Buford earned from his last season at Akron he threw in the trash.

Akron’s spring classes ended in May. Buford headed right for Cincinnati. He would have to sit out one year, then would have only one season of eligibility to play for the Bearcats.

That was fine with him.

THE EXAMPLE

Buford had surgery on his right knee in late March 1990, after Akron’s season ended. When he arrived in Cincinnati two months later, he could only walk around. No running. No basketball.

His first day on campus, he met some of the players for the first time. Tate, who had just completed his college career, immediately said, “Let’s play one on one.”

“I can’t,” Buford said.

But as soon as he did start working out and playing pick-up games, the holdover Bearcats began testing the new guy.

“I finally realized what was going on,” Buford said. “When he first came to UC, all Huggs talked about was how tough his former players were. He used me a whole lot as an example. So these guys had heard a lot about me, and now here I am in the flesh and they all wanted to find out firsthand. They were going at me like you can’t imagine.

“I’m kind of in the mindset that I’ve played three years of college basketball and I don’t have to prove anything to anybody. And I know physically I’m not ready. But they did not like me. You could hear them on the side, saying, ‘He ain’t all that. Huggs is full of it.’”

Tate, Robinson and Starks—all recruited to UC by Tony Yates—were the main culprits.

“When Buford got there, everybody did want a piece of him,” Tate said. “Huggs had built him up to be a tough guy. We had heard so much about him. And we didn’t back down from anybody.”

“We were a very tight group,” Robinson said. “Buford was kind of like an outsider.”

Finally, one day, Buford served notice: “Do what you need to do right now because this doesn’t mean anything. When the season starts and I’m healthy, I’m going to kill all of you.”

The response: Yeah, whatever.

Buford knew Huggins’s offense better than anyone on the team. Tate, a graduate assistant that season, also knew the offense well and practiced sometimes with the Bearcats. Together, they posed problems for the starters.

It wasn’t until later that Buford would become friendly with some of the players.

He even got into fights with Robinson during practice. One day, while going for a loose ball, Buford caught Robinson with an elbow. Robinson, a second-degree black belt in Tae Kwon Do, responded with a quick punch to Buford’s jaw.

“I started to retaliate, then I realized who it was,” Buford said. “Being a little bit smart, I decided not to take it any further.”

“That’s what happens in the heat of battle,” Robinson said. “The way our practices went, you couldn’t expect anything but that.”

THE CALIFORNIA KIDS

Southern California, 1990.

“I didn’t know anything about Cincinnati,” Corie Blount said. “I didn’t even know they had a basketball program.”

“All I knew was WKRP,” Terry Nelson said. “I didn’t even know Oscar Robertson went here.”

“I knew about the Big O, but that was a long time ago,” Erik Martin said. “I knew Cincinnati didn’t do anything in the last decade that would jog my memory.”

Such was the mindset of three junior-college recruits being pursued by the University of Cincinnati.

The main targets were Nelson from Long Beach College and Blount from Rancho Santiago. Moeller had recruited the state of California as an assistant at Rice and Texas earlier in his career. In July 1990, he went to the West Coast to see Nelson and Blount.

It was during that trip, at a summer-league game at Cerritos College, that Nelson had what is probably the best game of his life. “I was like 16 of 17 from the field,” Nelson said. “I scored 34 points, had a couple dunks. Moe went back and told Huggs: ‘This guy’s a player. He can score, he’s tough, he can rebound and he can defend.’”

It was also during that trip, at an open gym at Rancho Santiago, that coach Dana Pagett told Moeller: “I’ve got a guy who’s better than Corie.” The player was Erik Martin, who had left TCU after the 1989-90 season and was to play for Rancho Santiago.

Moeller recruited all three. Junior college players typically didn’t sign letters of intent until the spring, but the Cincinnati coaches—in just their second year in Clifton—wanted to secure these three in November.

Nelson and Blount, who knew each other from summertime games, took their recruiting visits together in October. Nelson, who had signed with Cal State-Fullerton out of high school, wanted to leave California. He was the easiest to sell.

“I told Corie the first night in Cincinnati I was coming,” Nelson said. “I said I know what I want. If you come, we’ve got a chance to go to the Final Four. I just liked the chemistry of the guys. We had a good time. I fell in love. I knew this was a place I could settle down and do some fishing. I told Huggs the next day. I don’t think he took me seriously.”

Blount still wanted to take a trip to Tennessee. He was also considering UNLV and Utah.

After Nelson and Blount returned from UC with good reports, Martin decided he wanted to take a visit to Cincinnati, too. However, he did not want to sign until the spring. His father Edward even told the UC coaches that.

Well, Huggins responded, then Erik has eliminated himself because we need commitments now. Moeller repeated that message to the family.

Eventually, Martin’s father called to say his son had changed his mind. Sorry, Huggins said. “The only way I’ll bring him in on an official visit is if he comes in here and likes it, he signs without going anywhere else.”

Which, of course, is what happened. Then Martin went to work on Blount. “Just imagine, the three of us can go there and turn it around,” he’d say.

Blount took a recruiting trip to Utah. Finally, he, too, committed to the Bearcats.

“I told all my friends I was going to Cincinnati with Erik and Terry,” Blount said. “My friends didn’t even know where Cincinnati was. They were saying, ‘That ain’t no basketball school.’”

The three California Kids signed in November 1990.

They came to Cincinnati together the following summer, driving in a rented Plymouth Sundance. It took them four days to cross the country.

“We were the California Connection,” Blount said. “We felt the hype when we started playing in the summer league (at Purcell Marian High School). Then Nick (Van Exel) came later. . . . It took off from there.”

SETTING A TONE

Early in the summer of ’91, some Bearcats played pick-up games at Shoemaker Center—and some did not. Herb Jones played over at Xavier. Some guys rarely played at all.

Huggins returned from a trip out of town and heard all this. He summoned the team to a racquetball court on Shoemaker Center’s lower level, then turned out the lights.

He proceeded to blast each and every player, including Buford.

Said Blount: “I’m looking at Erik and he’s looking at me, like, man, it’s true what they say, this dude is crazy. That did it. We were playing together in the gym all the time after that.”

It was during that meeting, Nelson said, that he told everyone he thought his junior college team was successful because the players did everything together.

“If we went to the store, we went together,” Nelson said. “Our motto was togetherness. They looked at me like I was crazy and started laughing and making jokes out of it. They thought it was funny, but it soon became our theme. Everything we did from that point, we did together.”

“COACH” BUFORD

Herb Jones, Tarrice Gibson, Allen Jackson and Anthony Buford were already in town. Nick Van Exel arrived from Trinity Valley Junior College in Texas. The California Kids—Corie Blount, Terry Nelson and Erik Martin—came from the West Coast.

This collection of players from all over the country started bonding months before the magical 1991-92 season was to start.

Buford watched the talent and felt, if the chemistry was right, if everyone was “on the same page,” if the guys could handle Huggins, there was potential for something special.

So he started coaching. He’d warn his teammates old and new about what they would experience with Huggins, how at times he’d be uptight, how there were times the players would not be able to do anything right. “He’s going to cuss you out and say crazy things,” Buford said. “Don’t pay attention to how it’s being delivered, just listen to the message.”

Buford would gather guys in his apartment and ball up pieces of paper and try to explain the offenses, the defensive presses. Whatever he could show them about Huggins’s system, he did.

“Our group trusted each other,” Nelson said. “When Anthony said something to me, I didn’t get defensive thinking that he was trying to coach me. I just thought he was helping me. I figured whatever he could teach me would get me to play sooner. Everybody wanted to win.”

There was tremendous basketball IQ among the group. They really understood the game. By the time preseason practices started, the coaches were able to move through plays quicker and work on more advanced offenses and defenses.

“They were ahead,” Huggins said. “I don’t know how much ahead. The important thing is we had guys that were leading and guys that were helping. I think their understanding of what was supposed to happen was a lot better.”

SHORT RESISTENCE

Blount did not want to lift weights when he got to UC, and he did anything he could to get out of it. “You recruited me to play basketball, you didn’t recruit me to be a body builder,” he would tell Huggins.

After he missed a few weightlifting sessions, there was a knock on his apartment door at 4:30 a.m. It was Huggins.

“Get your ass up,” he said.

He took Blount to the Armory Fieldhouse and had him running. Several miles.

“I did that about three times,” Blount recalled, “and then I said, ‘All right, I’m going to start lifting.’”

STARTING OFF WITH A THUD

Not many Division I teams lose preseason exhibition games. But that’s what happened to kick off the 1991-92 season.

Athletes in Action 82, UC 79.

’Nuf said.

The Bearcats blew a 20-point first-half lead, which prompted Huggins to tell the media afterward: “If I were playing miniature golf with my mother, I’d want to bury her. You can’t stop. You’ve got to keep playing. . . . We’re not very good right now. But we will be good. This is a great lesson for us.”

After listening to a Huggins tirade in the locker room for a half hour after the game, many of the players stayed put for another two or three hours. It was that night the Bearcats put their team goals in writing:

•   Work hard every day in practice

•   Leave the attitude at the door

•   Finish 23-4

•   Win the Great Midwest Conference regular-season title

•   Win the GMC tournament title

•   Go to the Elite Eight of the NCAA Tournament

This was a program that had not gone to the NCAA Tournament in 15 years.

HIT ME WITH YOUR BEST SHOT

Before Martin begins, he cautions: “Huggs is going to try to change the way this story goes.”

Now you know it’s going to be good.

It was early in the 1991-92 season, and—this is important to know—Martin felt he was in Huggins’s doghouse. So naturally, he was mad at Huggins, too.

The first official practice, Martin knew he wasn’t in the best shape. Still, he felt everyone was struggling. But when Huggins called the players in for a huddle, he got all over Martin. “He pretty much cursed me out for about five minutes. I had a real bad practice that day. Everything was new as far as drills and all that. I kept thinking, why is he picking on me? Corie and Nick didn’t have a great practice, either. It wasn’t so much that he was singling me out, but he felt like I had more in me than I was giving that day.”

During practice another day, a Bearcat drove for a layup and the defender didn’t bother to take a charge. That, of course, enraged Huggins.

“That’s it,” the coach shouted. “We’re going to do the charge drill. I’m going to take the charge. Now who wants to go first?”

Martin was prepared to flatten any teammate who did not let him get to the front of the line. “I was going first,” Martin said. “I was going to run over Huggs.”

He took one dribble. Two dribbles. Then Martin picked up the ball, put his head down and started running at Huggins “like a football player.”

“And Huggs turns,” Martin said with a grin. “He takes the charge, but he’ll swear to this day he stood in there. He turned his body, man. He knew I was going to plow through him. I knocked him down, ripped his pants a little. Then he got up and said, ‘That’s the way you take a charge. Now go shoot free throws.’ He stopped the drill right there. At first, he was going to take a charge on everyone on the team. After he got up, he went and talked to the trainer.”

“He thinks that’s really funny,” Huggins said. Then turning serious, he added, “But I think that’s good. Then they understand that I’ve never asked them to do anything I would not do.”

HIGHS AND LOWS

If Michigan State had recruited Buford out of Flint (Michigan) Central High School, he would’ve seriously considered joining the Spartans. But Buford heard that then-coach Jud Heathcote told people he was too small.

So when it was time for the Bearcats to play at Michigan State on December 21, 1991, Buford was “all jacked up.” Close to 20 friends and family members were in the stands. The Spartans were ranked No. 12 in the nation. Both teams were unbeaten. “Don’t hurt us too bad,” Heathcote said to Buford before the game.

“He really had no idea what was coming,” Buford said. “I was hot when I stepped off the plane, and it never stopped.”

It was the eighth game of Buford’s UC career, and it was one of his best. He scored 29 points on eight-of-14 shooting. The Bearcats were ahead by 18 with 12:30 remaining.

Everything was going so well. Until the end.

UC led by just two points in the final seconds. Buford ran to double-team one of the Spartans and left his man wide open. The pass went to MSU reserve guard Kris Weshinskey in the corner, and he nailed a three-pointer with 4.6 seconds left. “That mistake probably cost us the game,” Buford said.

The Bearcats had one final possession. Buford had the ball, got inside the foul line, a mere 12 feet from the basket, launched the kind of jump shot he had practiced all the time in high school and . . . the ball hit the rim and bounced away.

Michigan State 90, UC 89.

“We got exactly the shot we wanted,” Huggins said afterward.

“I went through a range of emotions,” Buford said. “I felt so good at the beginning of the game and so bad at the end.”

It was after that game that Huggins took off his Rolex watch and hurled it at a blackboard in the locker room, breaking the blackboard and watch. Little diamonds fell onto the floor. Nobody moved, then he said: “I hope you all have a miserable Christmas.”

WHO’S GOT MY BACK?

After two days off, the team returned for a Christmas Day practice that lasted five hours.

A few days later, during another intense practice, Huggins got upset with Gibson and told him to get off the court.

“No,” Gibson said. “This is my team.”

He gave the ball to A.D. Jackson and told him to start running a play. “A.D., pick up the ball,” Huggins said. “Tarrance, get off the floor.”

Gibson wouldn’t leave. Huggins was getting angrier. Jackson didn’t know what to do. Martin whispered to Blount: “If he gets into it with Tarrance, we’re going to jump him.”

“We weren’t really going to do it, but we were getting our nerve up to say something to him,” Blount said.

“C’mon A.D., let’s go,” Gibson yelled.

“OK, I’m going to say it one more time,” Huggins shouted, “If Tarrance doesn’t get off the floor, we’re going to put the balls away and we’re going to run for the next three hours.”

Herb Jones looked at Huggins, then at Gibson. “Tarrance, you’ve got to get off the floor, man! You’ve got to go.”

“We weren’t about to run for anybody,” Blount said.

Gibson left the court, and the players started laughing.

QUICK EXIT

Nelson felt like he had some good practices leading up to UC’s January 8 game at Tennessee, whose star player was Allan Houston. Early in the game, Nelson told some teammates: “I can feel it; I’m going to have a great game today.” He was thinking four or five charges, seven or eight rebounds.

Huggins called his name, and Nelson jumped off the bench and pulled off his warmups. He always wore elbow pads, which were pulled down when he was on the bench. Nelson was going to inbound the ball and figured he’d do that, then pull up his elbow pads.

Well, his teammate took the pass and threw the ball right back to him. The Tennessee defender was hand-checking Nelson, pushing at his hip, and Nelson’s foot moved. He was called for traveling.

Huggins immediately yanked Nelson after a three-second appearance.

“I didn’t even have time to pull my elbow pad up,” Nelson said. “Corie was coming to get me and he’s cracking up laughing. That’s all I played the whole game.”

His name didn’t even show up in the official box score in the newspaper the next day.

THE GUARANTEE

UC had just beaten Alabama-Birmingham 76-52 on January 25, 1992, at Shoemaker Center, and Nelson was in the hallway outside the media room with former Cincinnati Post reporter Bill Koch, who was asking about the Bearcats’ next game—against Xavier.

“How do you think you guys are going to do in the Crosstown Shootout?” Koch asked.

“Xavier doesn’t have a chance,” Nelson said. “We should blow them out.”

The next day, Nelson’s phone started ringing around 7:30 a.m. A few radio stations wanted him to do live interviews. He was half asleep, answering questions about Xavier and making jokes. He loved the attention.

Of course, he had not seen a newspaper yet.

The phone rang again. Nelson was thinking it was another interview request.

“Get your ass in my office in five minutes.” It was Huggins calling from his cell phone.

When Nelson arrived, Huggins was sitting behind his desk with his glasses on. “Any time he has his glasses on, that means he’s been up all night watching tape,” Nelson said.

“How does a guy, who averages three points and two rebounds, have the nerve to make predictions that we’re going to blow somebody out?” Huggins asked.

He held up the newspaper. Nelson’s mouth dropped open. He started making excuses, claiming the interview was off the record. It wasn’t, of course.

“Why would you even say something so stupid?” Huggins said. “Now you’re going to give them bulletin board material. You’re going to fire them up. I don’t even think we’re good enough to beat these guys.”

Reporters in town were waiting for the Bearcats before practice. Van Exel started talking about how UC was going to win because Xavier’s Aaron Williams and the other post players were soft.

About 30 minutes into practice, Blount twisted his ankle and was carried off the floor.

“There goes our 6-10 post guy getting carted off like a slab of meat and you’re saying their post guys are soft!” Huggins yelled.

“You’re paranoid,” Van Exel shouted back.

Huggins kicked Van Exel out of practice.

Van Exel didn’t start the game the next night. Xavier full-court pressed, which worked to UC’s advantage. The Bearcats won 93-75.

Afterward, Huggins put him arm around Nelson and said, “Now, why don’t you retire undefeated with your predictions?”

IS THE FIX IN?

Huggins rarely got on Herb Jones. Jones was a quiet player who let his game do the talking. He worked on his game constantly and is perhaps one of the most underrated players in school history even though he was an honorable mention All-American in 1992.

UC took a 19-3 record into a February 20, 1992, game against DePaul at The Shoe. The Bearcats had won eight in a row. This night, however, they struggled—and nobody more than Jones, who finished four of 13 from the field with just nine points.

Huggins was ranting and raving in the locker room afterward. Jones sat with his head down.

“I don’t know what to think about you,” Huggins shouted at Jones. “Are you point shaving, Herb?”

Jones slowly raised his head and looked stunned. “What?” he said.

“It takes a lot to really make me mad,” Jones said. “I was fuming mad. I was mad when he said it to me, and I was mad at myself, too. That was probably the worst game of my life. To this day, I don’t know why I played so bad. From time to time, I think about that game. That was a real low moment for me.”

Several of the players remained in the locker room until 2 a.m. talking. Whatever they said struck a cord. The Bearcats won their next 10 games and didn’t lose again until the NCAA Tournament semifinals.

TAKE THAT

Two nights after the DePaul loss, Jones put on a display at South Alabama that even had his teammates shaking their heads.

He scored 17 consecutive points during a four-minute stretch of a 104-78 victory. He finished with 27 points on nine-of-13 shooting to go with eight rebounds.

“I was telling myself I had to play better,” Jones said. “I had to do more things to help the team win. I guess I was in a zone. I didn’t even know it.”

“That was something I couldn’t believe,” Buford said. “Herb loved playing on the road. He loved those hostile situations. He loved raising up and hitting that three and watching everybody go silent.”

YOU’VE GOT TO BE KIDDING?

UC was warming up before its March 7, 1992 game at Memphis when Jones followed a ball that had rolled off the court beyond the baseline. The crowd was close to the court, and when Jones picked up the ball, he came face to face with a rowdy Tigers fan.

“He looked at me, and I said, ‘How you doing?’” Jones said.

The man responded by screaming: “F—you. We hate you. You guys are always beating us.”

Jones couldn’t help it. He started laughing.

As it turns out, the man was right. UC beat Memphis that day 69-59 and would later defeat the Tigers—led by Anfernee Hardaway—in the Great Midwest Tournament and the NCAA Tournament.

A TEXAS (EL PASO) STANDOFF

UC was two victories from the Final Four and meeting Texas-El Paso in the Midwest Regional semifinals in Kansas City. UTEP was unranked; the Bearcats were No. 12 in the country. But the game turned out to be a nail-biter.

Nick Van Exel averaged 12.3 points and 18.3 points during his two seasons at UC. He was third-team Associated Press All-America as a senior in 1993, and was a second-round draft pick of the Los Angeles Lakers. Van Exel played 13 years in the NBA for six teams. He was an All-Star in 1998 and had a career-high 23 assists against Vancouver in January 1997. He finished his NBA career with 12,658 points and 5,777 assists. (Photo by Lisa Ventre/University of Cincinnati)

This didn’t help.

Van Exel had picked up a loose ball and fired a pass to a wide-open Jeff Scott, who missed the ball right by the UC basket. It went out of bounds. Huggins started yelling at Van Exel: “Don’t pass him the ball anymore. He doesn’t want the ball.” Van Exel was shouting back: “He was wide open. Shut up.” Huggins yanked Van Exel from the game and sat him on the bench.

With two free throws on its next possession, UTEP pulled within 60-57 with 7:44 left.

Blount was getting nervous. “It’s getting close again. Let Nick back in the game,” he told Huggins.

“(Forget) that!” Van Exel said. “I’m transferring! I’m going to New Mexico State next year.”

“That’s right,” Huggins yelled. “He doesn’t want to play. He wants to transfer. He can get out of here right now.”

Assistant coach John Loyer kept saying, “I think you need to put Nick back in the game.”

“No,” Huggins said. “He’s not ready.”

“I don’t care if I go back in the game anyway,” Van Exel said.

It was 62-59 with 4:12 remaining. Herb Jones was fouled and went to the line.

Blount, the mediator, was pleading with both parties. “Nick, come on, you’ve got to get back out there. Will you shut up? . . . Huggs, man, talk to him.”

“Do you want to play?” Huggins asked Van Exel.

Van Exel didn’t say a word. “Let’s just go win the game and we’ll discuss this afterwards,” Huggins said.

Jones missed his first free throw. Van Exel checked back into the game for A.D. Jackson. Jones made his second foul shot to make it 63-59.

UTEP would pull within two points twice in the final minute but couldn’t catch the Bearcats.

“We wouldn’t have won that game without Nick,” Nelson said.

CELEBRITIES UNCENSORED

Gibson wanted a way to remember the experience of going to the NCAA Tournament, so he asked a friend and former roommate from Cleveland whether he could borrow his video camera to record a sendoff at Shoemaker Center.

The friend didn’t see the video camera again until that summer.

“It never left my hand,” Gibson said. “I had that camera the entire tournament.”

In the final minutes of UC’s Midwest Regional final victory over Memphis in Kansas City, Gibson asked a student manager to go to the locker room to get the camera.

“I wanted to film the moment,” Gibson said. “He brought it back with about 50 seconds left. I went up to Huggs after the game was over and said, ‘How do you feel about going to the Final Four?’”

“It’s a long way from Dothan, ain’t it, Tarrance?” Huggins responded with a smile.

Gibson interviewed media members and teammates and kept that up all the way through the Final Four in Minneapolis.

TRASH TALK 101

As national media members descended upon Cincinnati to learn about the upstart Bearcats, six-foot-five Terry Nelson kept getting questions about how he was going to guard 6-9 Chris Webber, Michigan’s star player who was also 20-some pounds heavier.

“My goal is not to let him dunk on me,” Nelson said. “I don’t know how long it’ll last. On the break, that’s a different story. But, in the halfcourt, if he gets a rebound, he’ll be laying on the floor before he dunks on me.”

Nelson and Webber had never met—until right before the NCAA semifinals.

The UC players were shooting free throws and Webber came right up next to Nelson on the foul line. “Aren’t you the one who said you’re going to take me out? That I’m not dunking on you?”

“That’s right,” Nelson said.

“Man, don’t you know this is your last game?” Webber said.

“No, this is your last game,” Nelson replied.

The banter continued and included other players.

Webber kind of smirked and went back to the other side of the court.

Once the game started, Webber struck first with a half-hook shot over Nelson for the first points. Buford missed a three-pointer on UC’s next possession. Webber rebounded it, then tried to dribble. Nelson stole the ball just above the top of the three-point arc and went in for an uncontested dunk. The game was tied 2-2.

As he ran back down the court, Nelson bumped Webber and said, “Now it’s your turn.”

“He said, ‘Oh, you got me that time,’” Nelson said. “We talked the entire game. Normally, any team that talked trash to us, we got them out of their game. They were the only team that talked trash and won.”

Afterward, Webber—who finished with 16 points and 11 rebounds—gave Nelson a hug and said, “You all are fun. Nobody ever talks trash to us. You’re a good team. I like you all; let’s go hang out.”

Michigan won 76-72 before 50,379 at the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome in Minneapolis.

Nelson never saw Webber again.

GONE WITH THE WIND

Some of the Bearcats who played on the Final Four team will always feel they were treated as second-class citizens in Minneapolis. By fans. By some national media. By tournament organizers.

“We were treated just like garbage there,” Buford said. “We just felt really, really disrespected.”

“It’s just not right,” Huggins said.

The other teams all brought great story lines. There was Indiana and Bob Knight. Duke and Mike Krzyzewski, a former Knight assistant who had perhaps the top program in the country. Michigan and its Fab Five freshmen (Chris Webber, Jalen Rose, Jimmy King, Ray Jackson, Juwan Howard).

UC sports information director Tom Hathaway told Buford about a production meeting with TV representatives who talked about how they were going to present the teams during the telecast. They had met with officials from Duke, Indiana and Michigan—the other teams in the Final Four—to get their OK, but when it came to Cincinnati, Hathaway was told how it was going to be.

“They basically said, ‘We’re going to show some stuff about Oscar Robertson and we’re not going to have much on your team,’” Buford remembers being told. “Hathaway said he was kind of in shock.”

All of which is why Buford ending up throwing away the ring he received from the NCAA for being in the Final Four. He said it was silver with a black face that said “NCAA” on it. UC was on the team bus headed back to the airport in Minneapolis. Buford doesn’t remember when, but he recalls slipping the ring off his finger and pitching it out of the bus.

“It was a bad vibe,” Buford said. “And I felt like my memory of playing in the Final Four is all I need. The ring I got from UC I keep.”

STAND BY YOUR MAN

In September 1992, roughly six months after UC’s Final Four run, the Bearcats were gearing up for another shot at a national title. Six of the top eight players were returning.

Things were looking good—until the day Huggins called Corie Blount into his office to explain that he was being declared ineligible to play his final year at Cincinnati by the NCAA.

Blount had started his career at Rancho Santiago Junior College in 1988-89. He played four games his first season, then broke a bone in his foot that wouldn’t heal. He sat out the rest of that season, then played in 1989-90 and 1990-91. The NCAA considered 1988-89 a full season because it did not recognize medical redshirt years at the junior-college level until January 1992. So when Blount finished one year at UC, he was out of eligibility. UC officials appealed to the NCAA, the governing body of college athletics.

“Huggs said he was behind me 100 percent,” Blount said. “Based on the season I already had, of course, I wanted to play, but I wasn’t really disappointed. Huggs said I could stay at UC and get my degree. I didn’t really have the NBA in my mind back then. I never really could see that I would be a draft pick. I figured I’d have to try out to play somewhere.”

In October, the NCAA rejected Blount’s appeal and a UC compromise that Blount sit out four games of his senior season. “. . . We will not stop trying to right this wrong,” UC Athletic Director Rick Taylor told The Cincinnati Enquirer.

The NCAA did allow Blount to have the opportunity to appeal to an administrative review panel at the NCAA convention in January 1993. While Blount’s lawyer hinted at suing the NCAA, he ultimately decided to wait for the review panel to hear the case.

“I really didn’t know whether I was going to play again, but I knew I had a good chance,” Blount said. “It would’ve been a shock if they would’ve said, ‘No, you can’t play at all this year.’

“Rick (Taylor) was a hard little guy, but he would call me in his office, and I can honestly say he was telling me, ‘We’re going to do everything we possibly can to help you resolve this problem.’ I had a lot of people always telling me, ‘Don’t worry about it.’ That’s what made it easier for me.”

Meanwhile, the six-foot-10 Blount stayed in school and continued to work out on his own. When the Bearcats were on the road, Chuck Machock would work with Blount on post moves. Blount tried to stay in shape in case a new ruling occurred.

That’s what happened.

On January 15, 1993, the day the team was leaving for a game against DePaul in Chicago, Huggins told Blount to come along just in case his eligibility was restored.

In Chicago, the Bearcats had a team meeting to talk about what they wanted their record to be the rest of the way after Blount returned. He was in a hotel room with Van Exel and Martin when Huggins called Blount to his room. “Well, big fella, you’re back,” Huggins said with a smile, then he gave Blount a hug.

Blount played 28 minutes the next night, coming off the bench for eight points, seven rebounds and five assists. UC won 70-64.

EVERYONE WAS WATCHING

The summer after he left UC, Erik Martin was playing in an NBA summer league game when another player approached him. “Hey man, who’s the crazy guy who took his jersey off?” the guy wanted to know.

“That was me, but I ain’t crazy,” Martin told him. “You just have to know Huggs.”

The years may pass, but Martin can’t escape the moment on national television when he left the Bearcats’ bench in the middle of a game and stripped off his jersey on the way to the locker room. “I try to forget that, but you’d be surprised how many people still say, ‘Aren’t you the guy who took your jersey off?’”

Be assured, Martin has a sense of humor about it.

So, what did happen?

Cincinnati was playing host to DePaul at Shoemaker Center on January 30, 1993, for a noon game. Martin hated early games. So he was already groggy and in a bad mood when the game started.

But here is what he remembers:

Nick Van Exel threw a pass and a DePaul player tipped it out of bounds. Martin saw the tip and pulled back his hands, letting the ball go. The officials didn’t see the deflection and gave DePaul the ball.

“So Huggs took me out,” Martin said. “He’s screaming, and we’re going at each other. Let’s just say I said something to him, and he said, ‘Go to the locker room!’

“Usually when Huggs said that, you just leave it at that and sit there. That day I got up. I took off my jersey and threw it down. I can remember a fan asking, ‘Hey Erik, where ya going?’ I just kept walking.”

Martin said he went straight into the locker room, got undressed and took a shower. A student manager came in to tell Martin that assistant Steve Moeller said: “Don’t go anywhere.”

Moeller walked in at the next timeout.

“Where are you going?” he said.

“Back to the dorm,” Martin told him.

“No you’re not. You’re crazy. If you do that, you’re off the team,” Moeller said.

Soon, another assistant coach, Larry Harrison, came in and echoed that message.

Martin got dressed, sat and waited for halftime. He went into the coaches’ locker room and apologized to Huggins. There was a misunderstanding about what Martin had said. Huggins acknowledged that, hugged him and followed him into the locker room. UC was ahead 40-25.

“If coach Mo hadn’t come in, in five minutes I probably would’ve already been at the dorm,” Martin said. “When Huggs came in, he said something to me, but to be honest he didn’t dwell on that situation at all. He just said, ‘You’re going to start the second half.’

“My mom and (family) wanted to know what happened. I told people, reporters, fans, that stuff happens in practice all the time. They just happened to have the camera on me as I was walking out of the gym.

“I try not to regret anything I’ve done in life, but if I had a chance to do that over again, I wouldn’t have done it like that. But I’m an emotional person, so if that’s what came out that day, that’s what was supposed to come out.”

YOU OWE ME

UC was in the 1993 East Regional semifinals of the NCAA Tournament against Virginia at the Meadowlands in East Rutherford, N.J. Blount is a California guy who had never been to New York City.

The players were allowed to check out New York during the day, but Blount wanted to see more. Problem was, that night the team had an 11 p.m. curfew because there was a game the next day.

Teammate Mike Harris was from Brooklyn, N.Y., and he took Blount and Darrick Ford home to meet his family. Afterward, the three ran around New York for a while having fun. All of a sudden, they looked at a clock. It was 2 a.m.

The players hurried back to the hotel, walked into the lobby and saw the entire coaching staff sitting there waiting.

Huggins sent Ford and Harris to their rooms. He asked the other coaches to leave.

“Let me tell you something, Corie,” Huggins said. “You’ve got a chance to make more money than anybody on this team. But you’ll be happy going back to Monrovia (California), hanging out with your little gang-banging friends, talking about how I could’ve done this, I could’ve done that. You don’t understand the opportunity you have right now. We’ve got an opportunity to do some big things. And instead of you focusing on what we need to do, you’re out running around and breaking rules with two young guys.

Coach Huggins was prophetic when he told Corie Blount (44) that he had the potential to earn NBA riches if he was willing to dedicate himself to the game. Blount did, and was taken by the Chicago Bulls in the first round of the 1993 NBA draft. Blount played 11 NBA seasons for the Bulls, Los Angeles Lakers, Cleveland Cavaliers, Phoenix Suns, Golden State Warriors, Philadelphia 76ers, and Toronto Raptors. (Photo by University of Cincinnati/Sports Information)

“Look,” Huggins continued, “I’m going to play you tomorrow. But if you don’t play your ass off, I’m going to take your ass out as soon as I can.”

Blount ended up with 19 points and 11 rebounds in 33 minutes, and the Bearcats won 71-54.

NO PLACE LIKE HOME

Damon Flint remembers the day NCAA officials came to Woodward High School in April 1993 to interview him about his recruitment to Ohio State, the school with which he signed as a high school senior. Flint had hoped to team with Derek Anderson in the Buckeyes’ backcourt.

But the NCAA cited the Buckeyes for several violations in recruiting Flint. The most severe: Giving Woodward coach Jimmy Leon $60 for meals and transportation during an October 1991 visit to Columbus. The most petty: Ohio State coach Randy Ayers going to Woodward during a non-contact evaluation period to offer Flint condolences after his mother died in September 1991.

Flint still could have attended Ohio State—if he sat out his freshman year. However, the McDonald’s All-American felt he had worked too hard to achieve a high enough standardized test score to be academically eligible.

Flint decided to turn to the hometown school that had been recruiting him as long as he could remember: The University of Cincinnati. Flint knew Huggins and all the players. He was a frequent visitor to Shoemaker Center.

“I told Huggins I was coming,” he said. “I felt welcome.”

GETTING THE POINT

Flint was a great scorer in high school, averaging 29.4 points a game as a senior at Woodward. But when he got to UC, Huggins needed him to play point guard as a freshman because there really wasn’t a solid playmaker on the roster. Starting point guard Marko Wright broke his foot.

“He’s the boss,” Flint said. “We didn’t have anybody else to do it. But that’s the type of player I am. If we win, I’m happy. We won a lot. That was a big sacrifice.”

The Bearcats were 99-34 during his four years.

Flint finished his career with 1,316 points and was, at the time, third in career three-point field goals made and third in assists.

He never played point guard in high school but considered himself versatile enough to pull it off in college. “I didn’t want to be one dimensional,” he said.

Flint played shooting guard most of his last three seasons, but was also a backup point guard.

“I think in the end it was the best thing for Damon,” Huggins said. “Because Damon turned out to be a player, not just some guy who stood out there and shot.”

With all his offensive talent, Flint said his two most memorable games came on the defensive end.

During his freshman season, he went head to head against California guard Jason Kidd on February 20, 1994, in the 7-Up Shootout in Orlando, Florida The Bearcats lost 89-80, but Flint scored 26 points; Kidd had 22.

In the 1996 NCAA Tournament Southeast Regional semifinals, UC came up against Georgia Tech and its star guard Stephon Marbury. Flint held Marbury to 15 points on four-of-13 shooting and finished with 18 points, six rebounds and three assists. He was named Player of the Game, and UC won 87-70.

UC players Damon Flint (3), John Jacobs (55), Curtis Bostic (43), Marko Wright (5) and Mike Harris (32) celebrate after the Bearcats defeated Memphis 68-47 in the championship game of the 1994 Great Midwest Tournament. (Photo by Lisa Ventre/University of Cincinnati)

“I was definitely jacked up for that one,” Flint said. “That was Marbury’s last game. He told me right after the game that he was leaving early for the NBA.”

CROSSTOWN LETDOWN

No. 19 UC played rival Xavier, ranked No. 22, at a sold-out Cincinnati Gardens in January 1994.

This would be the only Crosstown Shootout for Cincinnati’s Dontonio Wingfield, and it would be a completely forgettable outing for the heralded freshman from Albany, Georgia.

Wingfield sat out the final 7:30 of the first half, and Xavier led 41-31 at intermission. Huggins was yelling at Wingfield in the locker room at halftime.

The Musketeers won 82-76 in overtime that night. Wingfield finished zero of seven from the field in 15 minutes; he barely played in the second half. Jackson Julson started the second half instead of Wingfield, who did not re-enter the game until 7:27 remained. His only two points of the night came on first-half free throws.

“He didn’t play well. He hurt us,” Huggins said afterward.

THE NON-HANDSHAKE

As it turned out, Wingfield was just a subplot for the evening. The main event was Huggins vs. Xavier coach Pete Gillen.

The context to this is, of course, that Huggins and Gillen were not—how shall we say this?—too fond of each other. The UC-Xavier rivalry may have peaked during this time because of the coaches’ dislike for one another.

At some point in the game, Huggins was yelling at one of the officials, when—according to the UC coaches—Gillen looked down the sideline and essentially shouted for Huggins to sit down and shut up.

“I pointed after a few things were said,” Huggins said afterward. “They need to coach their team and I’ll coach my team.”

Gillen said later that Huggins was trying to gain an advantage with the officials and that he was just trying to stick up for his team and “keep the officials from getting intimidated.” Huggins said some of the XU assistant coaches started shouting at him during the game.

When the game was over, the Xavier fans rushed the court. As Gillen approached Huggins, the UC coach refused to shake hands. That incensed Gillen.

“If I lost, I would’ve shaken hands,” Gillen said that night.

“I’m not a phony,” Huggins countered. “I’m not going to act like everything’s all right and shake hands after the game.”

The next morning, sitting in his office, Gillen suggested the schools should take a break from playing each other.

“It’s just sad, it’s a very bitter series,” he told The Cincinnati Enquirer. “We should definitely play next year, but then we might have to think about a cooling-off period . . .”

Never happened. Nor did Gillen ever have to coach in another Shootout. He left Xavier after the 1993-94 season to coach at Providence College.

HOW PROPHETIC

Just eight days removed from a devastating loss to Canisius College from Buffalo, N.Y., at Shoemaker Center in the Delta Airlines Classic (the Bearcats blew a 20-point lead), Cincinnati had a game at Wyoming on December 17, 1994.

The team was in a considerably better mood, having won at No. 11 Minnesota (91-88 in overtime) on December 14.

The Bearcats traveled right from Minneapolis to Laramie, Wyoming, to get adjusted to the thin air.

“It was going to be a fight against fatigue,” said LaZelle Durden, UC’s leading scorer and a team captain. “I pushed myself in practice to prepare for the situation.”

Cincinnati had two bad workouts leading up to the game. Huggins told his team: “LaZelle’s gonna have to score 50 for us to win because he’s the only one who’s practiced well.”

Well, Huggins was close. Durden ended up with 45 points in a dramatic 81-80 victory.

The Bearcats trailed all game and were behind 80-78 with 15 seconds remaining. Keith LeGree dribbled the ball upcourt for UC and passed to Durden. Durden went to the right side and, with time running out, took a one-handed, off-balance, three-point attempt from roughly 25 feet out. He missed it, but Wyoming’s LaDrell Whitehead fouled him in a call disputed afterward by Wyoming coach Joby Wright. “I wasn’t sure it would get called,” Durden said. “But I know for sure he fouled me.”

During a timeout, all the UC players were pumping up Durden. Jim Burbridge, an academic advisor who traveled with the team, pounded his chest and said: “Money. Nerves of steel.”

“That gave me confidence,” Durden said.

With no time remaining, Durden calmly made all three of his free throws to stun the crowd of 8,688.

“That was a dream come true for me,” Durden said. “I would say that was one of my highlights. . . . And that was the most tired I’ve ever been in my life.”

He finished 16 of 32 from the field, seven of 20 from three-point range and six of seven from the foul line, and totaled the most points for a Bearcat in 45 years.

In the locker room after the game, John Jacobs needled Huggins. “Coach, you lied to us,” Jacobs said. “You said LaZelle had to score 50 for us to win.”

CAL RIPKEN, WHO?

Around the middle of his senior year, in January 1996, Keith Gregor realized his one chance to land in the UC record books was with his consecutive games played streak.

Make no mistake: It was important to him.

“I’d be forever etched into the history books,” he said.

The school record for consecutive games played was held by Dwight “Jelly” Jones, who competed in 112 in a row from 1979-83.

In No. 109, Gregor turned his right ankle against Marquette at Shoemaker Center. He had scored 16 points in the first half and got injured in the first minute of the second half. UC would go on to win 91-70.

It wasn’t just his streak that was in jeopardy; the next game four nights later was against rival Xavier. That would be Gregor’s last Crosstown Shootout, and the Lakota High School graduate didn’t want to miss it.

He temporarily moved into his parents’ home in Cincinnati, and for three nights leading up to the Xavier game, Gregor didn’t sleep. He spent all night every night icing his ankle for 20 minutes, then taking ice off. Compression. More ice. No ice. Compression. More ice. No ice. Elevated foot. He watched west coast basketball games on ESPN and late-night movies on TBS.

“You can play if you’re tired,” Huggins reminded him. “But you can’t play if you can’t walk.”

Gregor tested his ankle the night before the XU game, making some cuts on the floor. He was about 90 percent. While loosening it up on game day, he actually weakened his ankle, and by tipoff he was hobbling.

He played a total of 22 minutes off the bench, running out of gas at the end. Gregor finished with four points, four rebounds and three assists. The Bearcats won 99-90. The streak was alive at 110.

The night he would tie “Jelly” Jones, UC was at home against DePaul. Gregor’s ankle was in bad shape, and Huggins told him he planned to rest him. Huggins said he’d let Gregor play at the end for a couple minutes to tie the record.

“I thought, that’s kind of a cheap way to keep it alive,” Gregor said. “But OK, Coach, whatever you say.”

UC struggled in the first half. Huggins kept going up to Gregor on the bench, saying, “Can we put you in now?” DePaul led 33-31 at halftime. Gregor felt OK.

“I think I can go, Coach,” he told Huggins.

“OK,” Huggins responded immediately. “You’re starting.”

Gregor played the whole second half. UC beat the Blue Demons 71-61.

He wouldn’t miss any games the rest of the way and finished with a school-record 131 consecutive games played.

“I always go down there to Shoemaker when Huggins has got a sophomore who’s played a lot and tell him ‘This kid needs to be benched for a game,’” Gregor said.

“(Steve) Logan broke most games played. That’s pretty good company to be in, I guess. I figure as long as Huggins is coaching, my streak is not going to be broken. If there’s anybody good enough as a freshman to come in and play there, they’ll probably be gone in three years.”

Gregor’s record was surpassed in 2014 by Sean Kilpatrick, who played in 140 consecutive games. Gregor currently ranks seventh in games played.

THE NICKNAME

During the summer before he entered ninth grade, Melvin Levett was playing in the Ohio Sports Festival. During one game, he went up and tomahawk dunked over an opposing player. “He seemed to hang in the air forever,” said Tom Erzen, the assistant coach. “I remembered a professional basketball player who was named the helicopter and I thought it was appropriate to say that about Melvin. I started calling Melvin the helicopter. Soon everyone was calling Melvin the helicopter!”

That didn’t stop in Cincinnati, especially after . . .

‬ THE DUNK

UC vs. Alcorn State. December 3, 1997.

“I remember it like it was yesterday,” Levett said.

The Bearcats were 2-1 and had lost at home to Arizona State in the Preseason NIT Tournament at Shoemaker Center. Levett, a junior and one of the more talented players on the team, had averaged just 12 points in the first three games. He went three of 14 from the field in Game 3 against Morehead State.

“I was in a funk a little bit, because of my performances at the beginning of the season,” Levett said. “I was kind of down on myself. Huggs was letting me have it pretty good throughout that week. There was a certain point at halftime (against Alcorn) when we had a little shouting match. I guess it made me just say, ‘OK, now it’s time.’”

During the second half, Levett dunked twice in a row. But it was the third one that went down in UC folklore.

D’Juan Baker fired up a shot from the left side behind the three-point line.

“I saw it go up, and I just ran and jumped,” Levett said. “I never hesitated. I didn’t know where I was taking off from. I was going to get that basketball. I took off and I just kept going. I kept rising and rising.

“It hit the rim and bounced off the top of the backboard, and it came right into my hands as I was floating over Bobby Brannen and another guy from Alcorn State. I just slammed it home.”

Levett caught himself and ended up swinging on the rim. It would be called the Helicopter Dunk by many.

“There was a lot that went into that,” Levett said. “That was pretty much the one to say, ‘I’ve arrived for this season. I’m here. Now is the time to play ball.’ The season took off for me from there.”

In November 2001, Slam magazine included Levett among the 50 greatest dunkers of all time. He came in at No. 32, ahead of folks like Tracy McGrady, Chris Webber, Elgin Baylor, Scottie Pippen and Kevin Garnett. Topping the list (in order): Vince Carter, Michael Jordan, Dominique Wilkins, Julius Erving.

IN A ZONE

Less than three weeks later, Levett scored a career-high 42 points against Eastern Kentucky.

After practice a couple days before the game, Levett stayed in Shoemaker Center and had a shooting contest with guard John Carson. They put up several hundred shots. Some of the players stuck around to watch.

The touch stayed with him. When Levett was warming up before the EKU game, he couldn’t miss. Usually, as the adage goes, if a player doesn’t miss a shot during warmups, he’s in for a bad night.

But Levett’s first shot in the game fell, and he thought he had perfect extension on his follow through. Every time he let go, swish, the ball went right in. His shot hardly even touched the rim. Levett made 16 of 24 field goal attempts and was 10 of 14 from three-point range.

“It was one of those things that you watch on TV and you wish you were that guy in that moment, like when Mike (Jordan) had 63 in Boston or 69 against Cleveland,” Levett said. “You wish you could get in a zone like that. That day, I did. Whenever I am inconsistent with the form on my shot, I go back and watch that film.”

LOVE YOU, MOM

Ruben Patterson’s teammates learned a lot about him February 19, 1998.

Patterson and Alex Meacham were rooming together on a road trip to UAB. The night before the game, the two were talking when Patterson started opening up.

“He was talking about where he came from in Cleveland and how his goal was to get to the NBA and make lots of money,” Meacham said. “His dream was to buy his mother a car and a house and get her out of the ’hood. It was just a typical story of a guy wanting to do better for his family.

“We stayed up until 1:30, 2:00 in the morning. All he talked about was his mom.”

Finally, the two fell asleep with the television on. Around 6 a.m., there was a knock on the door. It was Huggins.

Huggins took Patterson back to his room and delivered some horrific news: Patterson’s mother, Charlene Patterson, had died of a heart attack in her sleep at age 38.

“Ruben was pretty shaken,” Levett said. “Basketball really didn’t matter at that point.”

At the team’s shootaround the day of the game, Huggins tried to convince Patterson to go home to be with his family.

“I’ll never forget this,” Meacham said. “Ruben said, ‘This is my family. I’m going to play this game.’”

Ruben Patterson (23), an Associated Press honorable mention All-American in 1998, was selected by the Los Angeles Lakers in the second round of the NBA draft. Patterson played 10 years in the NBA and scored a total of 6,953 points for the Lakers, Seattle SuperSonics, Portland Trail Blazers, Denver Nuggets, Milwaukee Bucks, and Los Angeles Clippers. (Photo by Lisa Ventre/University of Cincinnati)

Back at the hotel, Patterson took his shoes and wrote on them with marker: “Charlene Patterson, #23” and “I am going to miss you.”

Then Patterson went out and had one of the best games of his career.

He scored a career-high 32 points and added seven rebounds, three assists and three steals in 37 minutes in a 93-76 victory. “We needed to win this game, and I wanted to play well for my mom,” Patterson said that night after the game. “Every time I scored, everybody saw me point up.”

“He was playing with an unbelievable amount of concentration defensively and offensively,” Meacham said. “And he had a glow to him while he played. After the game in the locker room, everybody was kind of crying. It was a real emotional thing. This is a weird thing to say but it was a good thing for our team in that it brought us a little closer together. And some guys saw a side of Huggins that they had never seen before. There was no doubt that Huggins, his staff and the players truly cared about Ruben and what happened.”

“That just shows you the kind of heart he had to overcome something so huge,” Levett said of Patterson. “I remember after the game every guy going down to the pay phones in the hotel and waiting to call home to tell their parents they loved them.”

THE AGONY OF DEFEAT

There were some tough losses during the Huggins era. The following certainly ranked up there:

UC was the No. 2 seed in the 1998 NCAA Tournament, and the selection committee sure set up an intriguing second-round matchup. After the Bearcats knocked off Northern Arizona in the first round, they earned a meeting with West Virginia.

The subplots? For starters, this was Huggins’s alma mater, the school for which he starred as an Academic All-American in the 1970s. He also coached a year for the Mountaineers as a graduate assistant. Coincidentally, West Virginia was coached by Gale Catlett, who left as UC’s coach 20 years earlier, took over as the Mountaineers’ coach and opted not to retain a young assistant coach named Bob Huggins.

Nice storylines, eh?

Cincinnati uncharacteristically went out and committed 22 turnovers yet remarkably had a chance to win the game. UC led 74-72 with 7.1 seconds remaining.

West Virginia inbounded the ball to Jarrod West, who dribbled to halfcourt and fired up a prayer. UC’s Patterson tipped the ball with his middle finger, changing the trajectory. It sailed into the basket for a three-pointer to win the game.

“I think my face was in the floor,” Levett said. “I couldn’t believe it. I really thought we had a curse on us. If you watch the ball leave his hands, you’ll see the rotation on it. It’s fast, but as Ruben tips it, it slows down but gains a little bit more flight. If that shot’s harder, if Ruben doesn’t touch it, we go to the Sweet 16 and possibly the Final Four.”

CREATING CAMARADERIE

Teams are allowed to take off-season trips every four years. The advantages: The players get to play games, but more important, they get to bond.

When UC went to Europe after the 1996-97 season, all the players shaved their heads bald. Except, of course, Bobby Brannen, who wasn’t going to cut his locks for anyone.

One day after visiting Vatican City in Italy, Darnell Burton, Flint and Levett went to a nightclub. It was a hole-in-the-wall place. Very dark inside.

Once they got seated, servers started bringing drinks, including bottles of champagne. Women were sitting with them. Nobody was speaking English, and the UC players didn’t know quite what was going on. After a while, Levett told Burton to find out why drinks were being brought to the table.

An employee told the players they owed $500 in lira, Italy’s currency at the time.

“What? We didn’t ask for this stuff,” the players protested.

“They took us to the back of the club,” Levett said. “It reminded you of one of those situations in a movie where you’re in a mob joint in some underground place and they want to take you in the back and chop you up. It just happened so quickly. Damon was talking fast. It was so confusing.

“We pull all the money out of our pockets and put it on the table and said, ‘This is all we’ve got.’ We didn’t get to $500, man. We were well short. We bolted out and walked down the street and we were quiet. Nobody said a word.”

Now that’s bonding.

“That was funny,” Burton said. “We were wondering why they were treating us like stars. We didn’t know they were keeping a tab on us. . . . We were a little scared. It was like one of those scenes from the mafia.”

LOOKING INTO THE FUTURE

He was a sophomore who had not yet established himself as a standout player. In fact, Kenyon Martin averaged fewer than 10 points a game and was not the kind of force that caused opposing coaches to alter their game plans.

So there was no way to prepare for what Martin unleashed on DePaul on February 21, 1998. Try this on for size: 24 points, 23 rebounds, 10 blocked shots.

“I was just being more aggressive than everybody,” Martin said. “I was grabbing everything and blocking every shot. Guys were scared to come to the hole.”

Kenyon Martin (4) gives instructions to teammates Steve Logan (22), Pete Mickeal (32) and Kenny Satterfield (right). (Photo by Lisa Ventre/University of Cincinnati)

It was only the 12th triple-double of any kind in UC history, and Martin was only the third player at the time to have one, joining Oscar Robertson and Rick Roberson. Robertson had 10 triple-doubles during his three seasons, and Roberson’s 16 points, 10 rebounds and 10 blocks came 30 years and one month earlier than Martin’s.

“Just watching from the sideline, it was unreal,” said UC teammate Jermaine Tate, who was sitting out that season after transferring from Ohio State. “I hadn’t seen a performance like that by an individual player in a game. It seemed like they were just throwing him the ball. It was unbelievable.”

Two years later, Martin would do it again. He finished with 28 points, 13 rebounds and 10 blocks against Memphis during his senior season.

GOOD MOVE

Martin did briefly consider leaving UC a year early for the NBA. Huggins was told by his NBA sources that Martin would be selected between Nos. 19 and 22 in the first round of the 1999 draft.

When he met with Huggins, the coach asked: “What do you want to do?”

Martin replied: “I want to win a national championship.”

“That was the only discussion we ever had about leaving early,” Huggins said.

CONFIDENCE BOOST

Martin averaged 2.8 points a game as a freshman, 9.9 points as a sophomore and 10.1 points as a junior. He was steadily improving and had a legendary work ethic. But mentally, he did not approach every game as if he were the dominant player on the court until he was a senior.

During the summer 1999, after his junior year, Martin was selected to the U.S. team for the World University Games in Palma del Morca, Spain. He was likely picked for his defense, to provide an intimidating presence near the basket.

Martin brought much more. He would lead the gold-medal-winning team in scoring (13.9 ppg) and rebounding (6.6 rpg). Dayton’s Oliver Purnell was the coach.

“A lot of people probably thought I was just going to be another guy on the team,” Martin said. “I came back with a different attitude about my game and my ability. That put me over the top. I worked the weight room hard. I worked on my game harder than I ever had. It always takes something for you to realize how good you can be. Those World University Games did it for me.”

Walk-on Alex Meacham remembers bumping into Martin when he returned from Spain. They were on their way to play pick-up games in Shoemaker Center. Meacham asked how the Games experience had been.

“I’ll never forget this,” Meacham said. “Kenyon said, ‘I don’t mean to brag, but I was probably the best guy on that team.’ When he left for those games, he was a little nervous. He knew he was going to be there with some of the best players in the country.”

In Shoemaker, team trainer Jayd Grossman told Meacham that he knew the trainer for the World University Games team, and the trainer had said Martin was the best player on the team—by far. That confirmed what Martin had said.

That day, Martin dominated the pick-up games.

“It came down to one thing: Kenyon knew he was a good player, but I don’t think Kenyon knew he was that good of a player,” Meacham said. “He worked out the same, shot the same amount. It was a mental thing.”

Huggins said a few other things happened in the summer of 1999: Martin learned to shoot free throws; he built up his leg strength; and he spent a lot of time with former Bearcat Corie Blount, who taught Martin “how to be a professional,” Huggins said.

The World University Games also helped Martin get past a game during his junior season that Huggins thinks affected him.

The Bearcats lost 62-60 at Charlotte on January 14, 1999. Trailing by two, UC threw the ball into Martin, who was fouled intentionally with three seconds left. “It was a gamble,” 49ers coach Bobby Lutz said afterward. Martin missed the front end of a one-and-one free throw situation, and Cincinnati lost.

“Kenyon’s such a good guy, he never wanted to hurt the team,” Huggins said. “So I think he didn’t want the ball at the end of games after that because he didn’t have a lot of confidence in making free throws. I think the World University Games helped him with that because he went to the line and made them.”

Martin made 13 of 19 free throws for the U.S. team, which included UC teammate Pete Mickeal.

HAPPY NEW YEAR

UC players may complain privately about Huggins when they’re on the team, but after their eligibility expires, most are extremely loyal to Huggins. All he has to do is ask for something, and it’s done.

On December 31, 1999, Huggins was at a junior college event in Florida. He called back to assistant coach Dan Peters and wanted the word put out that he needed some former Bearcats to show up for a New Year’s Day practice at Shoemaker Center. Huggins gave him phone numbers and said, “Tell those guys I need them at practice.”

“Huggs, those guys are not coming in on New Year’s Day,” Peters said.

“Pete, call them, they’ll be there,” Huggins said.

They all showed up.

“It really surprised me,” Peters said.

UC was 11-3, ranked third in the country and about to play host to UNLV on January 2. But Huggins thought his team needed a test, needed to learn how to compete.

And so they arrived for a little scrimmage: Terry Nelson. Tarrice Gibson. Anthony Buford. Curtis Bostic. A.D. Jackson. Keith Gregor. Donald Little, a freshman center, played with them.

“They just wore them out,” Huggins said.

“Could you at least let Satt cross half court so we can start our offense?” Huggins shouted to Gibson, referring to freshman Kenny Satterfield.

“We had a pretty good team, and we couldn’t get a shot off against them,” Peters said.

“Those guys could play defense at a totally different level,” former video coordinator Chris Goggin said. “It was a fiery game. We scrimmaged forever. Those guys came in and absolutely just wiped the floor with them. T-Rat (Gibson) had Kenny Satterfield almost in tears, just locked him up defensively.

“After the whole scrimmage, our guys are exhausted, laying on the ground. Satt’s sprawled out on the baseline and T-Rat, just for the hell of it, starts running wind sprints.”

Gibson said: “That’s just what I usually do. It was out of habit. When we played, we ran after practice. That was fourth quarter and overtime.”

The Bearcats blasted UNLV the next day 106-66. They did not lose again until February 20 against Temple.

KENYON HAS TO TOUCH THE BALL

If Martin wasn’t already a favorite to be named college basketball’s National Player of the Year, he might have clinched the honor March 2, 2000, during a 64-62 victory at DePaul.

The game was on national TV. Huggins benched Pete Mickeal, UC’s No. 2 scorer and rebounder. UC’s offense was so out of sync that the Blue Demons raced to a 17-point lead.

“Everybody was ready to pack it in,” Huggins said. He asked Martin if the game was over with? “Hell no,” Martin responded.

With 3:36 remaining and DePaul ahead by 10, Huggins did something unusual for him. In a huddle during a timeout, he told his No. 2-ranked team: “Nobody shoots the ball until Kenyon at least gets a touch. He’s the best player in the country. We’re shooting quick, taking bad shots. Whoever shoots it before he touches it is never playing again.”

Team manager Scott Wilhoit turned to Goggin and said, “We’re about to come back.” Goggin gave him a look that said, You’re crazy!

Martin then got on a roll, scoring the next four baskets. Dick Vitale was raving about him on the ESPN broadcast. The Bearcats were within four points with 2:08 to play. Martin’s turnaround jumper with 1:10 remaining tied the game.

Martin finished with 33 points, including his first career three-pointer. He scored 21 in the second half. “He was hitting shots that we had never seen him hit in practice or during the year,” freshman DerMarr Johnson said.

“The DePaul players were asking us, ‘Does he do this all the time?’” Jermaine Tate said. “We were just as shocked as everyone else.”

“I just did not want to lose,” Martin said. “I felt I was the leader of the team and I put the team on my back and told them to get on and let’s go. A lot of people said that’s when I made a true name for myself.”

The game was tied with 22 seconds left, and DePaul was in possession. Tate stole a Rashon Burno pass and immediately got it to Martin. Martin then passed to Johnson, who was ahead of the pack racing toward the UC basket.

“All he had to do was drive in for a layup or take an open shot,” Goggin said. “He took forever to actually shoot the shot. He said the reason he didn’t shoot it right away is because he was looking for Kenyon because that’s what Huggs told him to do.”

Said Martin: “He was just looking around. I was screaming, ‘Shoot it, shoot it!’ After the game, Huggs asked him what was he waiting on. He said, ‘I wasn’t sure if Kenyon touched the ball or not.’”

Johnson said he hesitated because he didn’t want to drive to the open lane and somehow end up getting called for a charge. He pulled up for a 15-foot jumper and nailed the game-winning shot with 2.7 seconds remaining.

“I was thinking, ‘Should I drive in or sit here and take the shot?’” Johnson said. “I just set my feet and hit the shot.”

THE DAY THE MUSIC DIED

UC’s overtime loss to Loyola in the 1963 national championship game has to be considered the most heartbreaking day in Bearcat basketball history.

No. 2 may very well be March 9, 2000.

That was the day Kenyon Martin broke his leg in Memphis, Tennessee.

The Bearcats were the nation’s No. 1-ranked team, and Martin was the best player in the country. Just three minutes, four seconds into their Conference USA tournament quarterfinal game against Saint Louis, the six-foot-nine Martin went to set a screen on the baseline. He started to fall, and Saint Louis guard Justin Love hit Martin’s left knee. Martin fell hard on his own right leg.

“It was a freak accident,” he said.

Martin tried to get up but couldn’t. He said he knew right away it was broken.

“I felt bad for him,” Huggins said. “When I went out there (to the court), all he talked about was how he came back for his senior year to win a national championship. My only thoughts were about him. They weren’t about anything else. Kenyon and I were really, really close. I probably spent as much time with Ken as I did anybody that I’ve had. The whole halftime, I hardly talked to the team. I was on the phone with the doctors at the hospital. My concern was how bad he felt because of what he wanted to do, but more important my concern was that he was going to be able to play again. It would’ve been tragic if he wouldn’t have been able to play again.”

The UC players were stunned. “We didn’t know how to respond,” DerMarr Johnson said. “That’s a game we still should’ve won even with him out. It affected everybody.”

“We all were in shock,” Huggins said.

Martin rode in an ambulance to Campbell Clinic in Memphis. His sister, Tamara Ridley, was with him. At the clinic, Martin’s leg was X-rayed and put in a cast. He said he rushed staff members because he wanted to return to the arena to cheer on his teammates. “I thought that would mean a lot to them just to see me come back,” he said.

“When he walked in and everybody saw him on crutches,” Huggins said, “. . . it was totally the opposite affect.

“Everybody was concerned for him more than anything. Kenyon was and still is the ultimate team guy. He’s the greatest team guy you could ever have.”

The Billikens, who had lost to UC by 43 points five days earlier, went on to win 68-58.

Huggins was emotional. Not only did Martin’s injury likely end UC’s bid for a national championship, Martin also is one of Huggins’s favorite players.

“He was hurt,” Martin said. “He felt the way I did. That was a chance to get to the Final Four and win the national championship. But more than he was hurt about that, he was sad for me because I had worked so hard to get to where I was. He knew all the work I put in.”

Martin said he had never suffered a serious injury playing sports, and he wasn’t sure how to deal with it. He said his family, teammates and coaches and the Cincinnati community helped him through a difficult time with support and kindness.

He did his best to maintain perspective.

After breaking his leg during the 2000 Conference USA Tournament, UC star Kenyon Martin was on crutches during the Bearcats’ NCAA Tournament games. (Photo by Lisa Ventre/University of Cincinnati)

“I had already made a name for myself and showed how well I could play,” he said—and indeed, he would be the No. 1 overall pick in the NBA draft three months later. “It took away a chance to win the national championship, which I thought we would’ve won. I’ve had other things in my life that were a little harder than that, but playing sports, yeah, that was the hardest.”

After Cincinnati lost to Tulsa in the second round of the 2000 NCAA Tournament, Martin was in tears in the locker room. He had sat on the bench giving Huggins water the whole game. “I’m sorry I wasn’t able to help you all,” Martin told his teammates. “That kind of touched me,” DerMarr Johnson said.

“I was their leader,” Martin said. “They looked up to me, not just on the basketball court. It was rough to see those guys struggle and to see us lose like that. It was rough.”

SURPRISE, SURPRISE

Martin knew he was going to collect several National Player of the Year and team awards at UC’s postseason banquet in 2000. What he didn’t know was that his jersey No. 4 was going to be retired, with a banner to hang in Shoemaker Center alongside banners honoring Basketball Hall of Famers Oscar Robertson (12) and Jack Twyman (27).

UC officials decided to surprise Martin. Huggins said some fans called and wrote, suggesting the honor, especially after Martin broke his leg. Athletic director Bob Goin made the decision to retire the number.

“Certainly it wasn’t very controversial,” Goin said. “It was obvious his performance merited something very special, staying in school and coming back and doing what he did. I did it for Charlie Ward (at Florida State), too.”

Goin said maybe a half-dozen people knew of the plan. The “jersey” was hung on the wall and covered up the night before the banquet.

“They didn’t tell me,” Martin said. “That was exciting. It was touching. You get emotional. I had my jersey retired in high school, too. To have it retired in college, that was even more special.”

AUTHOR, AUTHOR

When Alex Meacham, a fan-favorite walk-on (aren’t they all?) who totaled 20 points in 21 games in his UC basketball career, told Huggins that he wanted to write a book about his experience as a Bearcat, Huggins said: “You’re not going to make a lot of money. All you’re going to get is exposure.”

That was enough for Meacham, a Roger Bacon High School graduate and a member of UC’s team from 1997-99.

“How many people can say they wrote a book?” Meacham said. “My theory is sometimes you do things just for the experience, and sometimes it can lead to bigger opportunities.”

Walk of a Lifetime, which was released in August 2000, sold close to 3,000 copies in just over three years. In addition to hoping hardcore UC fans would be interested in the book, Meacham targeted a younger audience, hoping to send a message to junior high and high school players about persevering. Meacham’s book is about his overcoming several injuries and his persistence in wanting to achieve his goal of being a Bearcat.

“My senior year, nobody knew my story,” Meacham said. “People at the games knew me and would chant my name, but they would think, how the hell did this guy get here?”

Columnist Paul Daugherty of The Cincinnati Enquirer wrote about Meacham in February, prompting Simon Anderson, a UC professor of music education who owns Clifton Hills Press, to tell Meacham he should write a book.

“I can barely write these papers for school,” Meacham joked.

Meacham would end up working on the project with Anderson, his roommate Sam Dunn, who writes scripts for commercials and writes and edits videos, and Cincinnati Herald reporter Marc Brown.

“We were doing something related to the book every day for 14 months,” Meacham said. “That’s no joke. Every day we did something. If you go to a bookstore and pick up a book, you have no idea what that person went through to do every single piece of that book. Every piece was an adventure.”

In the end, Huggins was right on in his advice.

“Everybody who plays for UC should have an opportunity to do something,” Meacham said. “Some go play in the NBA. Some guys go play basketball overseas. I’ve kind of made a career out of playing for UC. My credibility with Shining Star and working with these kids is I wrote a book and I played for UC.”

HOTEL, MOTEL, HOLIDAY INN

B.J. Grove was a talented big man from Cincinnati, six foot 11 (the good news) but often weighing upwards of 300 pounds (the bad news). He also didn’t always practice to Huggins’s standards.

UC had a game February 1, 2001, at Charlotte, and Athletic Director Bob Goin wanted to send Grove a message.

The day before the trip, student manager Corey Brinn was called into a meeting with Goin and told he was going to be put on a special mission in Charlotte: He was in charge of Grove.

The Bearcats were going to be staying at the Embassy Suites in Charlotte, as usual. Grove and Brinn were going to stay in an old hotel with few amenities in the Charlotte area. Grove was not allowed to travel on the team bus, speak to his teammates or be part of the team with the exception of practices and the game.

“From the minute the team left campus, I was with B.J.,” Brinn said. “We had to take a cab to the airport. We sat by ourselves at the airport. Once we got into Charlotte, we found our own cab from the airport to the hotel.”

Trainer Jayd Grossman, who made the team’s travel arrangements, booked Grove and Brinn into another hotel.

“We pulled up not knowing what to expect,” Brinn said. “It’s 11 or 11:30 at night. When they checked us in, there’s a big plate of homemade cookies. Well, B.J.’s in heaven. He starts grabbing cookies and putting them in his pocket.

“We got to our room, and it’s one of those old hotels. You’ve got the two beds, and in between the beds are the sink and a mirror. The bathroom’s off in the corner. It doesn’t really have a door on it. The shower’s right there. The TV had about six or seven stations, and none of them were any good. We were both depressed the minute we walked in.”

The next morning, they had to take a $40 cab ride to Halton Arena for shootaround. They had to wait about an hour for a cab to take them back to the hotel. They found their own pregame meal and had to return to Halton.

After the game—Grove had six points in 16 minutes—they met the team at the airport for the flight home.

Finally, Grove and Brinn were allowed on the team bus from the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport back to campus.

“It was an experience,” Brinn said. “We were laughing. After we first got there and the initial shock, we had a pretty good time together. . . . I think he learned his lesson.”

THIRTY YEARS LATER ‬

Oscar Robertson was sitting courtside watching a feat rare to the UC basketball program, though common to Robertson when he played.

Kenny Satterfield, a sophomore point guard from New York City, became only the fourth Bearcat to get a triple-double with 12 points, 11 rebounds, and 10 assists in a 105-57 victory over Tulane at Shoemaker Center. And Satterfield only played 24 minutes. His 10th assist came on a pass to freshman guard Field Williams, who drained a three-pointer with 5:24 remaining.

The only other UC players to have triple-doubles were Kenyon Martin, Rick Roberson, and Robertson. Eric Hicks joined the club in January 2006.

MOTIVATIONAL TACTICS

In five years of playing in the Rock-N-Roll Shootout in Cleveland, the Bearcats had never lost. They beat Temple, Western Kentucky, Massachusetts, Dayton and Gonzaga. But on December 30, 2000, the streak ended with a stunning 69-66 loss to Toledo at Gund Arena.

The new year did nothing to calm Huggins after the defeat. On Thursday, January 4, 2001, he had the doors to the team’s plush locker room locked and made the players dress in the smaller, no-frills men’s soccer team locker room in the lower level of Shoemaker Center.

“Our locker room is for champions,” Huggins told the Bearcats, who dropped to 25th from 19th in the Associated Press poll that week.

For two days, the team was locked out of its customary digs. The third night, Cincinnati pummeled Charlotte 76-66, leading by as many as 20 during the game.

“I think it got the guys’ attention,” Jamaal Davis said afterward of Huggins’s actions.

Not totally.

Two weeks later, UC dropped consecutive games at Saint Louis and at home against a struggling Louisville club. The day after the loss to the Cardinals, Huggins approached student manager Brinn about two hours before practice and told him to find plain gray T-shirts and black shorts for all the players. Much of it ended up being too small. But the guys had to wear it anyway.

“We couldn’t find stuff that big quick enough,” Brinn said.

The team was also prohibited from entering their locker room again.

“We really don’t come out and play like Cincinnati Bearcats, so why should we dress like them?” Davis told The Cincinnati Enquirer.

It worked again. In their next game, the Bearcats upset No. 8 Wake Forest 78-72 in a game that would turn around the 2000-01 season.

Two years later, Huggins would dip into the same bag of motivational tactics. In February 2003, after No. 18 Marquette beat UC 82-76 in Shoemaker Center, Huggins again banned the team from its locker room and would not allow the players to wear UC practice clothes. Instead, they were “shirts” and “skins” during practice. This time, they dressed in the women’s rowing team locker room in the Armory Fieldhouse.

“It’s got nothing to do with motivation,” Huggins told The Enquirer at the time. “It’s loyalty to the people who have played so hard and earned that stuff.”

After a 77-71 loss at No. 5 Louisville three days later, the Bearcats upset 11th-ranked Oklahoma State 61-50 at Shoemaker.

MAKING THE CALL

Sometimes it’s fate that lands a player in a certain basketball program.

Huggins remembers watching a high school player in Louisiana whom he’d been recruiting. The player was very athletic but—with Huggins in the stands—shot miserably in the first half of the game, going something like three for 20 from the field. Huggins turned to then-assistant coach Mick Cronin and said, “I’m going to call Logan.”

That would be Steve Logan, a chunky five-foot-11 guard from St. Edward High School in Lakewood, on the west side of Cleveland, Ohio. Major colleges did not heavily recruit Logan, and he did not sign a national letter of intent in the fall of his senior year because he held out hope Huggins would offer a scholarship.

Which is exactly what happened.

“We had too many guys who couldn’t make shots,” Huggins once said.

With Logan, Huggins knew, that would not be a problem.

After leading his high school team to a state championship, Logan was named Ohio’s Division I Player of the Year. In four years at Cincinnati, he slimmed down, got stronger, worked relentlessly on his game and left as the Bearcats’ No. 2 all-time scorer behind only Oscar Robertson.

Just think: What if that Louisiana prep star had a good first half?

LOGAN 41, SOUTHERN MISS 37

Logan accomplished a great many things at UC—including playing in the most victories—and had his name scattered all over the record books by the end of his senior season. But perhaps one of his most memorable nights came when he outscored an entire team all by himself.

True.

Southern Mississippi came into Shoemaker Center with a 7-15 record just one year after sharing the Conference USA regular-season championship with the Bearcats. Coach James Green’s teams had a reputation for playing good defense. But on February 15, 2002, it really didn’t matter what they did.

Steve Logan was hot. He drove to the basket. He pulled up for mid-range jumpers. He fired long-range three-pointers. And at the end of the night, Logan had 41 points. Southern Miss had 37.

“Oh man, he put on a show,” teammate Donald Little said that night.

“We tried to double him,” Green said afterward. “We tried to keep the ball out of his hands.”

Nothing worked.

UC won 89-37. Logan left to a standing ovation with 4:25 left, also finishing with nine assists and six rebounds. He made 12 of his 18 field-goal attempts and was eight of 13 from three-point range and nine of 10 from the foul line.

To make the night even more special, Logan’s mother and sister were in the stands, and the game was nationally televised on ESPN.

“To do it in a game like there was nobody in the gym with me, it’s amazing,” Logan said the next day. “I was just in a zone, I guess.”

IT’S BETTER TO GIVE

Leonard Stokes didn’t think much about it the night it happened. UC had just defeated Southern Mississippi at Shoemaker Center. As usual, Stokes showered, dressed and went to sign autographs outside the Bearcats’ locker room.

Jon Johanson, an 18-year-old UC fan with cerebral palsy, was in his red-and-black wheelchair waiting in line. As Stokes approached and signed an autograph for him, Johanson told Stokes: “You’re my favorite player.” Stokes soon disappeared back into the locker room.

The junior forward grabbed the shoes he wore that night—size 13 Nike Air Jordans—and asked a student manager to give them to Johanson. “Leonard Stokes wants you to have these,” the manager told Johanson, who was stunned by the gift.

Steve Logan left UC in 2002 owning school records for games played (135), career victories (111) and free throw percentage (.861). He was second in scoring (1,985 points), minutes played, three-point field goals attempted and assists. (Photo by Lisa Ventre/University of Cincinnati)

“I remember it was about twelve o’clock at night,” Johanson said. “The first thing I wanted to do was wear them.”

Nancy Johanson, Jon’s mother, wrote a letter to Stokes and sent a copy to Huggins and a reporter with The Cincinnati Enquirer. She wanted everyone to know how moved she was by Stokes’s gesture

“You really don’t know how much you can impact a person’s life by some of the things you do,” Stokes said. “That day made me realize that.

“I didn’t do it and expect anyone to tell the media and make a big deal out of it. I did it out of the kindness of my heart. That kid was sitting there and telling me how I was his favorite player. That touched me. To me, I was just doing something to make him feel happy.”

Stokes’s mother, Candace Quarles, was awfully proud. She framed the picture of Johanson and the shoes that later ran in The Enquirer and hung it in the family’s living room in Buffalo, N.Y., alongside Leonard’s basketball trophies and awards.

“That’s the way she raised me, to be courteous and kind to others,” Stokes said.

“I think it was a magical moment that symbolized the goodness in people,” Nancy Johanson told The Enquirer. “That a perfect stranger would do something that was so generous and meaningful for a fan. I think that’s why it lives on. It was a very loving moment. Everyone I have shared this story with has been really touched; it restores people’s sense of goodness.”

UNCLE CLARENCE

Logan—a first-team All-American and Conference USA Player of the Year as a senior—almost wasn’t around to collect all his accolades.

During his sophomore year, Huggins pulled Logan out of the starting lineup late in the season and used him as a sixth man. The Bearcats had one of the best teams in the country, led by National Player of the Year Kenyon Martin. UC was deep, versatile and appeared to be on the way to a Final Four berth—until Martin broke his leg during the Conference USA tournament.

Logan’s disappointment after the season was more personal. He didn’t think he was being treated fairly. Huggins didn’t think Logan was working as hard as he could. Logan went home to Cleveland and was determined to transfer.

Enter Clarence Newby. Or, as Logan calls him, “Uncle Clarence.”

Talk to Logan about Newby long enough and Logan will choke up. “I get chill bumps when I hear his name,” Logan told The Cincinnati Enquirer. “He saved my life.”

Newby owned a shoeshine parlor around the corner from where Logan grew up in Cleveland. Logan was 12 years old and the man of the house after his mother asked his father to leave. Newby hired Logan with the intent of keeping him from getting involved in drugs and gangs like other kids in the neighborhood.

When Logan told Newby he planned to leave Cincinnati, Newby set him straight: “No, son, you’re going to stick it out. I don’t want to hear no more about transferring. It’s not even up for discussion.”

Logan listened. He mended his strained relationship with Huggins, then went on to be named Conference USA Player of the Year in 2001 and 2002.

“I grew up a little more and understood I wasn’t going to win with him,” Logan said of Huggins. “In order for me to be successful . . . I had to be a little bit more respectful and not talk back.”

MEETING OF THE MINDS

UC lost its first regular-season opener of the Huggins era on November 16, 2001, at Oklahoma State, a game set up by the TV network.

The Bearcats looked horrible offensively (they shot 22.7 percent from the field in the first half), and the Cowboys won 69-62. Stokes, expected to be one of the team’s leading scorers, went scoreless in the first half and finished with just 12 points. The next day, senior forward Jamaal Davis (one point and one rebound in 20 minutes) would quit the team—temporarily.

“I’m coming in from the outside, and I’m looking for the big, bad Bearcats that I’ve always thought about,” said assistant coach Andy Kennedy, who was then in his first year at UC. “And when I got here I looked around and said, ‘Where are they?’”

That night, after the game, the UC coaching staff sat around in the lobby atrium of the Holiday Inn in Stillwater, Oklahoma. Artificial trees surrounded them. They could smell the chlorine from the nearby indoor swimming pool, and a manure plant next door was sending out an odor.

“The biggest thing I remember about it was, we don’t have meetings,” former associate head coach Dan Peters said. “But Huggs called one.”

Everyone assembled was trying to figure out how Cincinnati could even become a .500 team that season. It did not look good, they all agreed. They sat around for three or four hours, talking about the best style of play for the team, how to maximize Logan, who had scored 31 against the Cowboys.

Some grand conclusion must have been conceived.

The Bearcats won their next 20 games, climbing as high as No. 4 in the Associated Press poll. Logan would be named first-team All-America and lead UC to a 31-4 record, setting a school record for most victories in a season.

“I certainly did not envision going 31-4,” Kennedy said. “I don’t think anybody did. That was unfathomable at the time.”

HELPING HAND

In 1983, Derrick McMillan took advantage of one of the greatest assets the University of Cincinnati basketball program has: Oscar Robertson.

The Hall of Famer has offered his help to Bearcat players for decades. McMillan seized the opportunity and turned into an all-conference player (see Chapter 9).

It was another 18 years before a UC player turned to the Big O.

Robertson sat courtside for many games during the 2001-02 season, saw some flaws in Leonard Stokes’s game and thought he could help.

“I think he has talent he hasn’t tapped yet,” Robertson told The Cincinnati Enquirer. “I don’t like to interfere. You can only say so much to a guy. They have to learn to play as it comes and learn to grow with it. I just don’t think he’s aggressive enough yet.”

The two talked on the phone regularly, but Robertson came to practice one afternoon and stayed the whole day. He talked at length with Stokes, a six-foot-six junior, and showed him ways to improve some techniques.

“It’s a blessing, definitely, when you’ve got a guy like Oscar noticing you,” Stokes told The Enquirer. “I just try to take in everything that he says. If he tells me to clap when I’m on the bench, I’m going to listen.”

WEST VIRGINIA: A LONG WEEK

The talk started before UC’s 2001-02 season even ended. From the moment Gale Catlett resigned as coach at West Virginia on February 14, 2002, reports surfaced that the Mountaineers would target Huggins to replace Catlett.

It made sense for West Virginia. Huggins played there, was a two-time Academic All-American and the team’s most valuable player as a senior. He was a graduate assistant there in 1977. He had friends still in Morgantown. And then there was this: Huggins was interested.

Bob Huggins is UC’s all-time winningest men’s basketball coach with a record of 399-127 (.759) in 16 years. (Photo by Lisa Ventre/University of Cincinnati)

The Bearcats lost a heartbreaking double-overtime game to UCLA in the second round of the NCAA Tournament on a Sunday. Then . . .

Monday: West Virginia officials called UC Athletic Director Bob Goin and asked for permission to speak to Huggins. “I told them to get his thing moving as quickly as they could,” Goin said. “Bobby and I had dialogue immediately.” Goin expected the phone call. “I wasn’t nervous,” he said. “I thought when he started putting all the pluses together, what he was seeking at West Virginia he already had here.”

Tuesday: Huggins met with West Virginia officials in a Pittsburgh hotel. Some people close to Huggins believe that if West Virginia would have made him a good offer this night, he would have accepted. “If they were going to get him, it would’ve been when he was emotionally removed from the city,” Goin said. “Once they let him come back to Cincinnati, then the city started showing its affection. It was openly expressed to him better than I could do it. It reassured him that everything he had done in the past hadn’t gone unnoticed.”

Wednesday: Huggins could not return to his Shoemaker Center office. Some members of the media were around all day long. The phone wouldn’t stop ringing. He spent a lot of time driving around the city and at Goin’s home. It was where the two could have the most privacy. The Athletic Director’s wife Nancy was out of town for the week. “Most of the time, it was him weighing what he wanted to do, and not me saying, ‘Well, you’ve got to stay here,’” Goin said. “That was not my approach. Ultimately, I felt very confident.”

Thursday: The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported Huggins was staying at UC. Huggins still couldn’t go near his office.

Friday: CBS.Sportsline.com was the first to report that Huggins accepted the West Virginia job, but other reports soon followed, including one Cincinnati television station, which also reported Huggins was leaving UC. Huggins called another TV station that night to deny that any deal was done. Steve Farmer, a West Virginia-based lawyer representing Huggins, met with West Virginia officials Friday and Saturday.

Saturday: This was the most frustrating night for Goin. He had a news release written that said Huggins was staying at UC, and Goin was eager to release it. Then Huggins called to say he was indeed meeting with the West Virginia president in Cincinnati on Sunday night. “I owe that to them,” he told Goin.

Sunday: West Virginia president David Hardesty and Athletic Director Ed Pastilong flew to Cincinnati to make Huggins an offer. After that meeting, Huggins went to Goin’s house. “He was still torn on emotion versus reality,” Goin said. Meanwhile in Morgantown, TV trucks showed up over the weekend outside the WVU Coliseum for a potential press conference. The Charleston Daily Mail sent a reporter to Morgantown for a possible announcement.

Monday: Huggins drove around Cincinnati and ended up at Goin’s house for the sixth straight day. Goin said: “Bobby, this has gone on long enough. I’ve got two releases here. One says you’re leaving and one says you’re staying. I want you to pick one of those.” The releases were lying on the sofa. Huggins said he had to make another phone call, and he retreated to Goin’s game room in the basement. Goin remained upstairs.

Huggins came back up and tapped one of the releases. “Go ahead and send it out,” he said.

“But the one he tapped said he was leaving,” Goin said. “Then he looked at it and said, ‘No, no, no, not that one. This is the one I want to go out.’ And it was the one saying he was staying.”

During the previous three days, Huggins received phone calls and visits from former players, who told him they just wanted him to be happy. Brian Goldberg, Ken Griffey Jr.’s agent, called Bret Adams, Huggins’s Columbus-based agent, to basically say it isn’t always so easy “going home again.” Junior wanted Huggins to understand that; his return to his hometown to play for the Cincinnati Reds had not worked out so well.

“It was hard,” Huggins said. “I really love the people at West Virginia, but I love the people in Cincinnati, too. I love being here. I love being around my former guys. I really love this town. It would’ve been kind of neat to go back and kind of right the ship there because they had fallen on hard times.

“What caught me by surprise was the number of people who are Bearcat fans here, from elderly people to guys that you would never think follow sports. The people who follow us in TV and newspapers. I had more people say to me, ‘I’ve never been to Shoemaker Center but I love to watch you guys play.’ At the gas station, anywhere I was, they would walk up and talk to me.”

Make no mistake—without Goin’s presence, Huggins would not have stayed. Goin was the assistant Athletic Director at West Virginia when Huggins played there.

“If he’s not the AD, I wouldn’t be here,” Huggins said a few years later. “But I’d have probably left long before that.”

This story is even more interesting in hindsight. After parting with UC in August 2005, Huggins sat out a year, then coached Kansas State for one season. On April 5, 2007, he agreed to become the head coach at West Virginia. The Mountaineers got their man after all.

SEPTEMBER 28, 2002: THE HEART ATTACK

PITTSBURGH

Huggins was in Pittsburgh on Friday, September 27, to watch a few potential recruits play pick-up games at Baldwin High School. He spent time Friday night with longtime friend J.O. Stright, who was legal guardian to former Bearcat Danny Fortson when UC was recruiting him.

Huggins had a late Saturday morning flight out of Pittsburgh. He was scheduled to be at a Nike coaching clinic in Wisconsin that night.

The UC coach returned his National rental car at Pittsburgh International Airport at about 8:30 a.m. Then Huggins started having chest pains. He called Stright on his cell phone and said, “I’m sweating. I feel like I’ve got an elephant on my chest. I’m having a heart attack.” Huggins’s cell phone then lost power. Stright left his home immediately and headed for the airport.

Huggins, 49 years old at the time, ended up lying on the sidewalk near the parking garage. A police officer was with him, waiting for paramedics to arrive. An ambulance transported Huggins to Sewickley Valley Hospital, about five miles west of the airport. He was then transferred to the Medical Center, Beaver (Pennsylvania), 19 miles north of the airport and 35 miles north of downtown Pittsburgh.

Doctors found blockage in three main coronary arteries and had to operate immediately. A stent, a tiny metal mesh device designed to keep Huggins’s once-clogged artery open, was implanted. Huggins was in serious but stable condition overnight.

“I don’t know if he realizes how close he came to not being here,” Goin told The Cincinnati Enquirer the next day.

At Conference USA Media Day five weeks later, Huggins said: “They tell me 10 or 15 more minutes, I probably would’ve been dead.”

CINCINNATI

June Huggins was preparing to meet her husband at the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport where he was catching a connection to Wisconsin. She was going to join him on the trip to the Nike clinic.

Stright called June to tell her what happened. “Bob just had a heart attack,” he said.

“Is it very serious?” she asked.

“Yeah, I think it is,” Stright said.

June Huggins and her oldest daughter, Jenna, then a sophomore at UC, headed for the airport to catch a flight to Pittsburgh, where Stright picked them up. They arrived at the Medical Center shortly after Huggins’s surgery. Jacqueline, the Huggins’s younger daughter, remained in Cincinnati with friends.

“It was pretty scary,” June said. “I really kept it together, and I think that’s because my daughter was with me. She was scared to death.”

As soon as she saw her husband, there was some relief.

“Once I got there and saw him, it was better,” June said. “You know him. He wasn’t going to act like there was anything wrong, like it wasn’t a big deal.”

Back on campus, the UC players had just finished lifting weights and were getting ready to play pick-up games. Former associate head coach Dan Peters got a phone call from athletic trainer Jayd Grossman telling him Huggins had suffered a massive heart attack.

Peters called the Bearcats into the locker room and delivered the news. The room fell silent. The players prayed together. Some were in tears. They decided not to play that day.

“It was real emotional,” Leonard Stokes said. “I started crying. I walked into a bathroom stall and just stood there. Coach Pete gave me his number and said to call him later, he’d keep me up to date.”

PHILADELPHIA

The Bearcats football team was playing at Temple University in Philadelphia. The players were just about to come onto the field for pregame warmups. Goin was standing on the sideline at Franklin Field about 20 minutes before kickoff when trainer Bill Walker walked up and handed him his cell phone. It was Grossman, telling Goin that Huggins suffered a massive heart attack. “And he didn’t know if he was going to make it,” Goin said. “It was not looking good.”

Goin hung up the phone, went to the UC locker room and told associate Athletic Director Paul Klazcak that he was leaving for Pittsburgh. Goin’s wife, Nancy, was in the stands at the football stadium. By the time Klaczak got to her, Goin was already on his way to the Philadelphia airport, led by a police escort.

He bought a ticket on a U.S. Air flight, got through security and rushed to the gate.

“I was prepared for the worst,” Goin said. “I went there with the idea that if anything happened to Bobby, I wanted to be there for June.”

Goin arrived in Pittsburgh and went right to the Medical Center, Beaver (Pennsylvania).

“When I got there, he had just been wheeled into his room after they had done the procedure,” Goin said. “He was awake when I walked in. I think only June and his brother were in the room.”

CINCINNATI

On Wednesday morning, four days after his heart attack, Huggins was taken out a back door of the Medical Center, Beaver (Pennsylvania), and transported by jet ambulance in 37 minutes to Lunken Airport in Cincinnati. He was then taken by ground ambulance to Christ Hospital, where he was in stable condition in the cardiac care unit.

Stokes had not been able to stop thinking about his coach. Finally, he couldn’t take it anymore. He just had to see him. Early Thursday morning, Stokes went to the hospital. He said there were so much media and other people around the front desk and occupying security that he just snuck past everyone and onto the elevator.

When he got to Huggins’s floor, some of the workers recognized him and said, “You’re not supposed to be here.” Stokes just kept walking “like I didn’t hear them.” He rushed to Huggins’s room, ran in and shut the door.

“We talked for like 15 minutes,” Stokes said. “Just me and him. It made me feel good because he was sitting up. He was acting like his old self, laughing and joking. He was laughing at me. He said, ‘Everybody’s always got you pictured as a saint and you snuck in!’ I felt much better just to be in contact with him.”

Several UC players visited Huggins on Friday for about an hour. “He’s ready to roll,” Peters told The Enquirer. “We’ve just got to see what the doctors say.”

Huggins was released from the hospital October 7, nine days after his heart surgery.

SHOEMAKER CENTER

Goin had already decided to do away with Midnight Madness festivities for October 2002 before Huggins had a heart attack. In its place would be “Breakfast with Bob,” the morning of UC’s first official practice.

On October 12, Bob Huggins, accompanied by June, walked onto Ed Jucker Court in Shoemaker Center to a loud standing ovation from roughly 3,200 fans.

“I just want to thank everybody for everybody’s concern,” he told the crowd. “It’s overwhelming.”

“It was amazing how many people were there and the attention they gave it,” June Huggins said. “I’m just always surprised at how many people do care. He got so many cards and letters and flowers.”

Later, Bob met with the media for the first time since his heart attack.

“If it’s your time to go, it’s your time to go,” Huggins said at his press conference. “God decided it wasn’t my time to go.”

He coached practice that day and was on the sideline for UC’s season opener, his 14th with the Bearcats.

“He wouldn’t have been happy if he didn’t (coach),” June Huggins said. “I would kind of worry about him when he’d get so fired up. Dr. (Dean) Kereiakes (Huggins’s cardiologist) said he thought everything should be OK. I wouldn’t say I think about it all the time, just once in a while when he’s really red-faced and veins are popping out. But every time he goes to the doctor, they say his heart is great.”

SILENT BUT DEADLY

Jason Maxiell showed up from Carrollton, Texas, in the fall 2001 as the pride of UC’s incoming class of newcomers. He was a first-team Class 5A all-state high school player in Texas and was a two-time district defensive player of the year. He was only six foot seven, but he had long arms, could block shots and, oh, how he could dunk.

But unlike a lot of highly touted players, Maxiell seldom said a word during practice, pick-up games, drills, wind sprints, before games, after games—you name it. Whether a teammate made a bad or good play, whether Huggins yelled and scolded, Maxiell’s facial expression rarely changed and he almost never uttered a peep.

Not that Huggins had to get on Maxiell much during practice or games, but when he did, Maxiell just listened.

“I never was one to say something back,” Maxiell said. “I feel like he’s always right. My game has advanced because I listened to him. Defense—I didn’t know anything about it until I listened to him.”

Maxiell won Conference USA’s Sixth Man Award as a freshman and was a key player on the Bearcats’ 31-4 team in 2001-02. He had plenty of teammates who spoke up on the court—and off. Ironically, it was a player who was not shy about talking back to Huggins who gave Maxiell advice his first year on campus.

“Even though Donald Little wasn’t a quiet one, he always told me to shut up and listen,” Maxiell said.

Another player who kept silent at all times was 2004 graduate Field Williams, a shooting guard from Houston.

“Field and Max are as quiet as any two guys I’ve ever been around,” former associate head coach Dan Peters said. “Those guys never say a word. It’s good to have guys like that. They’re leaders by their actions. They just keep working.

“What they do is buy into the program from Day One because they trust and they believe by what’s been done in the past. They’ve seen the success of guys we’ve had, so they just roll up their sleeves and go to work.”

Maxiell finished his career with 1,566 points and ranked 13th on the school’s all-time scoring list. Williams left with 1,030 points and as one of the most prolific three-point shooters ever in the program. He still holds the career three-point field goal percentage record (.401), and he is fourth in three-point field goals made (262) behind Deonta Vaughn and Sean Kilpatrick (313) and Darnell Burton (306).

YOU WANT IT, YOU GOT IT

Armein Kirkland felt he needed a demanding collegiate coach to improve as a player. As a senior at Lee High in Tyler, Texas, Kirkland considered playing for Bob Knight, the new coach at Texas A&M. He said he was also recruited by Nolan Richardson at Arkansas. But Cincinnati commanded his attention.

Steve Logan was lighting it up his senior year. Kirkland was attracted to the C-Paw and the fact UC wore Nike gear and was a Michael Jordan-sponsored school. “I liked the uniforms,” he said. “As kids, that’s what you’re attracted to. I really didn’t know much about Huggs until he started recruiting me.”

Huggins was certainly the challenging coach Kirkland was looking for, but that doesn’t mean the two always got along after Kirkland’s arrival in 2002.

“I know me and Huggs bumped heads a lot,” Kirkland said. “I think he sometimes didn’t know how to relate to me. You’ve got to kind of know how you can talk to people. You can’t throw every batter the same pitch. We just bumped heads, but at the same time he saw a lot of potential in me. The approach on both of our ends was not always healthy. Our relationship probably could’ve been better. But I learned a lot.”

GETTING OFF THE BUS

UC’s 2002-03 season ended with a 74-60 loss to Gonzaga University in the first round of the NCAA Tournament in Salt Lake City, Utah. It was a game in which Huggins and radio analyst Chuck Machock were thrown out of the game.

You read that right: Machock, a former UC player and assistant coach, was tossed for repeatedly berating official Mike Kitts after he ejected Huggins, who had received two technical fouls. But the evening’s events weren’t over just yet.

On the quiet ride back to the hotel, a truck carrying Gonzaga fans pulled up next to the Bearcats’ bus and started yelling—and gesturing—at the team and Huggins.

When the bus stopped at a red light, Huggins walked off the bus and started to approach the Gonzaga fans. Assistant coach Andy Kennedy followed, as did strength and conditioning coach Scott Greenawalt. Associate head coach Dan Peters tried to keep the players on the bus.

“It was funny,” Kirkland said. “Nothing happened. Huggs said something to them. They kind of got scared. They didn’t say anything. They probably weren’t expecting to get stuck at a light with us. And you could tell by the looks on their faces they were surprised he got off the bus. I was surprised, too. They weren’t ready for that.”

CHANGE OF HEART

It was just like old times. The Bearcats, who earned a reputation as a full-court pressing defensive team in the early 1990s, were back at it early in the 2003-04 season. Cincinnati started the season 13-0 and climbed to No. 6 in the Associated Press poll.

UC was trapping opponents in the backcourt and converting turnovers into easy lay-ups and dunks. The players were smiling. The fans loved it.

The Bearcats took a 16-3 record into their February 11 home game against South Florida. The Bulls had just six scholarship players, were on an eight-game losing streak and came in with a record of 6-13, 0-8 in Conference USA.

Cincinnati won 80-67, but it was not as easy as it should have been. South Florida had numerous wide-open three-point attempts and lay-ups. It scored 46 second-half points and shot .522 from the field for the night.

Right after that game, Huggins announced: “We’ve seen the last of the press. You can’t press with guys who won’t run back on defense.”

“We had to readjust what we were doing,” Peters said. “We were really depending on getting steals and run outs and some dunks. We turned teams over, but I don’t know if we were getting any better.

“When we stopped pressing, we became a better team. We lost some games, but we became a better team. We pulled our defense back. We started guarding the ball a little better. We guarded the paint better. Our defense was better. It just took some time to adjust.”

UC lost its next two—at Wake Forest and at UAB—then won eight of its next nine games.

LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN

In 2003, Marquette won Conference USA’s regular-season title. It was the first time since the inception of the league in 1995-96 that Cincinnati did not at least share the championship.

It was up to the 2003-04 UC team to reclaim the conference.

That proved no easy task. The league was getting stronger. Rick Pitino was in his third year coaching at Louisville. John Calipari was in his fourth at Memphis. Marquette had advanced to the Final Four in 2003. UAB and DePaul were vastly improved.

No. 13 UC went into its final regular-season game—at home against No. 20 Memphis—needing a victory to share a piece of its eighth league title in nine years and clinch a first-round bye for the conference tournament.

The Tigers had won 12 of their previous 13 games.

“I can’t guarantee a victory, but we can guarantee that guys will come out and give it their best,” Tony Bobbitt told The Cincinnati Enquirer the day before the game.

It was another classic battle between the two programs.

Memphis was ahead 79-78 when senior guard Bobbitt came to the rescue—after he almost blew it. Bobbitt drove into the lane and sent a high pass out to senior guard Field Williams, who saved it from going out of bounds. Williams threw the ball inside, and another pass went out to Bobbitt in the right corner. He nailed a three-pointer to give UC a two-point lead with 36 seconds remaining.

After the Tigers missed a shot, Bobbitt got the rebound and was fouled. He made both free throws with 19.7 seconds left.

Final score: Cincinnati 83, Memphis 79.

“I just knew I wanted the ball,” Bobbitt said. “I told Coach Huggs in the huddle I wanted the ball. I wanted to show I could step up and make a big basket.

“When the shot went up, it felt good. I knew right then not only did I help myself, I helped my team and I helped the program.”

BIG-TIME TURNAROUND

On one wall in Shoemaker Center is a list of players who have been named All-America. One day before practice in the fall 2002, Bobbitt looked up and told a newspaper reporter that he wanted his name on the wall, too.

“I wanted to make an impact,” he says now.

Bobbitt, a native of Daytona Beach, Florida, came from the College of Southern Idaho as a highly touted junior college transfer who was expected to help UC right away offensively.

But Bobbitt’s Division I career did not get going the way he envisioned. In his first 17 games, he averaged just 12.3 minutes and never started. He scored in double digits only three times. His defense wasn’t up to Huggins’s standards. After missing a game with a sprained ankle, Bobbitt averaged 8.7 minutes over the next six games. He was frustrated with the limited playing time.

The day before UC played at No. 5 Louisville on February 5, Bobbitt left the team.

“Stupid move,” he said, “but that was my decision. I don’t even like to talk about it anymore. It happened. There’s nothing I can do about it.”

Bobbitt wasn’t the first player to leave the Bearcats in midseason (he wasn’t even the first that season), and he won’t be the last. After a meeting with Huggins, he was reinstated to the team. He apologized to his teammates and told The Cincinnati Post, “It will never happen again. I’m better than that. I just tried to copout the easy way.”

UC lost at Louisville 77-71. Bobbitt returned for the next game and played six minutes against Oklahoma State.

In the final seven games of the season, he averaged 11.1 points and 18.7 minutes.

During the summer of 2003, a former Bearcat stepped in and became kind of an unofficial mentor to Bobbitt. Corie Blount, who played on UC’s Final Four team in 1992, was in the weight room with Bobbitt one day and the two decided to have lunch. Blount talked to Bobbitt “about being a man and responsibilities,” Huggins said. “Corie’s been unbelievable for Tony. Tony’s been a different kid.”

“We just went to lunch and discussed some basketball things, as well as personal things,” Bobbitt said. “He was talking to me about who to be around, who not to be around, watching game film, preparing better for practice. More than basketball. He knew what I could do on the court, he just wanted to make sure I was doing the right things off the court.

“He told me the real things that I needed to hear. Corie said, ‘Don’t fight with Huggs. Act like a professional.’ Why not listen to a guy who’s been in the (NBA) making millions of dollars? It helped me a lot. I knew if I didn’t listen, it would shoot me in the butt later.”

Blount helped. The year of maturity and a year of experience with Huggins helped. Bobbitt’s approach to his life off the court helped.

“I let a lot of the friends I used to hang with go—friends in Cincinnati and Florida,” Bobbitt said. “I cut ties. I had to. It was hard.

“And my approach with Huggs was excellent. I think that’s one of the reasons I had a better season. He didn’t yell and I didn’t have to yell. Though he still got on me a little bit.”

Bobbitt turned things around all right.

He continued to come off the bench but was UC’s second-leading scorer at 13.4 ppg. He was third-team all-league and Conference USA’s Sixth Man Award winner. He tied a school record with eight steals against Coppin State (November 29, 2003), was most valuable player of the C-USA tournament and hit the game-winning shot with 16.1 seconds left in Cincinnati’s first-round NCAA Tournament victory over East Tennessee State.

“I think he dealt with Huggs better,” Peters said. “He just bought in to the whole thing, and you saw the results.”

END OF A SPECIAL ERA

It was no secret that University of Cincinnati President Nancy Zimpher was not a fan of Bob Huggins. Mike DeCourcy of the Sporting News reported in a 2010 article that among Zimpher’s charges by the board of trustees when she was hired in 2003 was to “do something about Huggins.” DeCourcy attributed that to former Athletic Director Bob Goin.

Zimpher’s contempt for Huggins only escalated after Huggins was arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol in June 2004, an episode captured on video and aired repeatedly on national television.

Coach Bob Huggins and 2000 National Player of the Year Kenyon Martin embrace during Martin’s final home game—an 84-41 victory over St. Louis on March 4, 2000. (Photo by Lisa Ventre/University of Cincinnati)

While Huggins was not dismissed after that, Zimpher refused to renew Huggins’ contract. Late in the summer of 2005, the impasse came to a head.

Huggins was on his way back to Cincinnati on August 24, 2005, after attending the Michael Jordan Fantasy Camp in Las Vegas.

Kennedy and assistant coach Frank Martin were sitting in the basketball office when they saw a fax had arrived.

“It was basically the terms of the end,” Kennedy said. “It said, ‘You resign by this time and here are the terms; if not here’s the other option.’ I just remember Huggs wasn’t in the office. We didn’t know if he was even aware of it. I’m sitting there holding this fax thinking, OK, what does this mean? Does Huggs know this? That was three or four hours of uneasiness.

“I just kind of sat tight. I didn’t feel it was my place to call Mr. G [Goin]. I just waited until Huggs was back.”

The day is well documented. After 16 years as head basketball coach at the University of Cincinnati, Huggins was given the choice to resign or be fired.

Kirkland said he found out from reporters. Eric Hicks said he saw the news on TV while in an airport returning from playing with the U.S. team at the World University Games in Turkey.

This can’t be true, Hicks thought. He called Kennedy, who confirmed what was happening. “I was angry as hell,” Hicks said. “I had bought into the program completely. I had given myself to the team. It felt like I was betrayed. If Andy Kennedy didn’t get the job as interim, I was transferring to North Carolina.”

Kennedy didn’t know what was going to happen. He tried to reach out to players, most of whom hadn’t yet arrived on campus for the school year. He didn’t know if he should start looking for a job. The next day, UC asked whether he would take over as interim coach with a contract through the following March.

Kennedy first wanted to speak with Huggins face-to-face and drove to his Loveland home.

“I don’t really know how to feel about this,” he told Huggins. “I don’t really know what to do. I’m certainly not going to do it without your blessing. I need to know you’re OK with it.”

“He obviously was in an emotional state based on all he had poured into the program and now within a few short days he was no longer captain of that ship,” Kennedy said. “But he said without hesitation, ‘Hey, if you think you can do it, do it.’ He understood it would be a challenge based on the roster. ‬ His concern was not about UC and how he had been treated; his concern was more about wanting me to have a chance to be successful. He felt responsible for bringing those kids into the program, especially the seniors, and said, ‘We have a responsibility to see this through. It’s a no-brainer if you’re up to the task.’”

Kennedy accepted the challenge.