Bob Huggins is stepping down from his head coaching position at West Virginia University after being arrested for driving under the influence last week. I know that I’m late to report on the subject, but it’s something that needs to be talked about in depth.
Operating a motor vehicle while under the influence and putting countless lives in danger can never be tolerated. That being said, we should still be able to separate a person from the body of work that they’ve created. “Huggy Bear” was just the sixth men’s basketball coach to ever reach 900 career wins, doing so over 43 seasons as a head coach at Walsh, Akron, Cincinnati, Kansas State, and West Virginia. He’d also made the March Madness tournament in 23 of his past 26 seasons, and just last year, he was inducted to the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. Needless to say, he was a constant presence in college basketball for all of my 22 years of life.
The loss of Huggins in college basketball is like another piece of my childhood fading. While he wasn’t as much of an icon as Coach K. or Roy Williams, you knew that every time you’d turn on a game that WVU was in, his large build and physically expressive presence would be there on the sidelines. Soon, all of the coaches I grew up watching will no longer take the court, but I know that more legends are soon to come.
Here’s where this article takes a turn. As previously stated, A2Z Sports will never condone irresponsible consumption of substances or operation of motor vehicles while under the influence. Those things are bad. What was also previously stated is that we should be able to separate a body of work from its origin. Now, you may be wondering where I could possibly be going with this, and to that I present you with the information regarding his arrest: Huggins blew a .21 BAC on the breathalyzer, nearly three times the legal limit, thought he was in Columbus OH, when in reality he was leaving a Taylor Swift concert in Pittsburgh, PA.
There’s a whole lot to unpack here, but let’s start with the .21 blood alcohol content that was recorded. According to Pinelands, a recovery center in Medford, NJ (not a sponsor, but if you have trouble and need help, they seem great), for anything in the .2 range, “You’ll feel dazed, confused, and disoriented. Balance and muscle control have deteriorated, and you may need help walking. You may not notice if you injure yourself, as feelings of pain are numbed. Nausea and vomiting are likely, and an impaired gag reflex could cause you to choke on your own vomit.”
Maybe it’s because I’ve never used a breathalyzer, so I have no clue what the numbers correlate to, but judging off of that description, whenever I come within a fraction of getting to that level, I put myself to bed and call it a night. How he managed to climb into driver’s seat and start the car is baffling to me. “Deteriorated” muscle control and “likely” vomiting sounds like a recipe for waking up with your shoes still on, not operating motor vehicles. To say that I am impressed sounds wrong, and it’s not the words I would use to describe my feelings towards the achievement (also not the right word), but after reading the arrest report, I was just shell shocked that the feat was even possible.
This led me down a rabbit hole of the highest BAC’s ever blown, and one guy out of Poland has everybody else beat by a landslide. His BAC came in at a whopping 1.48%(!!!). That is 18.5 times the legal limit, nearly double the record holder for the United States, and 3.7 times the level that is said to kill a human. This means that out of every 100 grams of blood in his system, almost 1.5 of those grams is just pure alcohol. Let that sink in.
Moving on, the next part of the Huggins arrest that needs to be discussed is the part where he thought he was in Columbus, but was actually in Pittsburgh, 185 miles away. My question is, how in the world was he able to find his car? Finding where you parked after walking out of a grocery store is hard enough, let alone after guzzling beers at a concert all night and having the car parked in a packed lot.
Now, about that concert. Who had Bob Huggins being a Swiftie for +900,000,000? I mean, this is somehow the most shocking part about this whole arrest to me. What’s next? Is John Gruden secretly in Beyoncé’s top 0.01% of listeners? There’s gotta be a video out there somewhere of the WVU team listening to “Shake It Off” after a tough loss, and I need to see it NOW.
Give me your thoughts in the comments, and for the third time, A2Z Sports will never condone irresponsible consumption of substances or operation of motor vehicles while under the influence. This article is strictly a reaction to the events that occurred, and in no way am I trying to slander Bob Huggins’ name. Things happen, and I blog about them. It’s just what I do.