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As WVU coach, Huggins has lived a dream each day

Photo courtesy of BlueGoldNews.com WVU coach Bob Huggins looks on during a game at Pitt earlier this season. The Mountaineers return to action Saturday night at Xavier.

MORGANTOWN — Let’s say that you, the typical West Virginia Mountaineer fan, could awake tomorrow morning in your dream world.

What might that be?

How about walking down the street and having Jerry West come your way, stop and chat for a while, exchange a couple of stories and move on.

You walk into a store or a bar and settle into a seat and who’s there? None other than your old friend, Oscar Robertson, the Big O. So you down a couple of cocktails, chat about how it was back in the days when he and you lived in Cincinnati and off you go.

Night comes and WVU’s playing a game, as it will this Saturday, when West Virginia plays against Xavier, and you’re gonna find yourself right down there next to the players on the Mountaineer bench.

Now that’s a dream day, right?

And it’s the one Bob Huggins has lived pretty much every day of his life.

Think about it. Bob Huggins can pick up a telephone and call Jerry West. He is, after all, the West Virginia coach.

And when he hangs up, he can call Oscar Robertson, whose fame began alongside West as the two best players at the turn of the decade — the 1950s to the 1960s. They were teammates on the U.S. Olympic Team in Rome.

Both of them are more than Hall of Fame players, and now Huggins himself is a Hall of Fame coach, with only two coaches ever with more wins than he has, having left in his dirt the likes of John Wooden and Bobby Knight and Dean Smith.

Talk about living the good life and now getting to enjoy it by being able to sign an autograph and add to it HoF.

Sometimes we don’t realize just how great the accomplishment is to be a Hall of Famer, as is Huggins, to be there with the Logo and Oscar, with Michael and Wilt, with Russell and Kareem.

You don’t need two names to identify them and it’s no different with the man who is known as Huggs.

“In all honesty, they both were terrific to me, absolutely terrific,” Huggins said when I brought it up to him a pre-Xavier game Zoom call Thursday. “Oscar was at virtually every practice in Cincinnati with Coach Smith and thought the world of him.”

Coach Smith was George Smith, Oscar Robertson’s coach at Cincinnati. He coached the Bearcats to records of 25-3, 26-4 and 28-2 with Robertson playing for him.

At that same time, West was in West Virginia putting together 26-2, 29-5 and 26-5.

He and Oscar had the world buzzing in 1959 as they cruised toward a face-to-face NCAA final that would have been everything that Magic vs. Bird was a few decades later.

Only it never happened, for California eliminated Cincinnati in the semifinal. They would then win the championship in overtime against WVU and West. That loss, while it ate away at West, was almost as bad as the feeling he had that he couldn’t go head-to-head with the Big O.

West worshipped Oscar.

“To me, he was so far ahead of the other players who were playing then,” West once recalled. “I looked at him and it was like, my God, playing with someone who was a wise old grandfather. He was one of those people who seemed to be a step ahead of the game.

“I thought, ‘He knows so much more about his game that I do.’ It was almost like watching some genius perform his magic, regardless of what it is.”

As it was, the 1959 championship was the greatest game never played.

Oddly, the two years after Robertson left Cincinnati the Bearcats won national titles, and Huggins went on to nearly win them one himself.

Huggins understands the meaning of the position he now is in.

“When I got to West Virginia, I got to know Jerry very, very well. I’m blessed,” he admitted. “How many people can say they go to work and they hang out with Jerry West and Oscar Robertson? What a great deal that is.”

It carried over right to his ceremony at his induction into the college Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass.

“When I got the call from the Hall of Fame and the guy said you need a presenter or a few presenters, the first thing I did was call Jerry and Jerry said, ‘Yes, I’d love to do that.’ I talked to Jerry for quite a while, then I called Rod Thorn and he said, ‘Yes, I’d love to that.’

“I’ve been blessed, man. Those guys are guys who, when growing up in Dug Hill in Morgantown you don’t get out of the hollow much,” Huggins said. “It’s been neat for me to have some association with some of the greatest players who ever played the game.”

But that NCAA title game never happened.

“That would have been an unbelievable thing to see, for sure. They both had their own style. Jerry was a drive it hard at you, stop on a dime, go straight up and down player. I remember one day he drew a circle, went up in the circle and came down in the circle,” Huggins said.

“Oscar was much different. He kind of had that ball back over his head a little bit. He was the first, I think, power guard. He was a big, strong, physical guy who just knocked people off of him. They were two of the best players to ever play our game.

“To watch old film of those guys going at each other (in the NBA), I could have done it all day,” Huggins said.

Neither won an NCAA title and there’s something wrong with that picture, just as the picture that is being painted today as Huggins has that one last glass to fill in his career.

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