Bob Huggins retained by West Virginia after using homophobic slur
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West Virginia will retain men’s basketball coach Bob Huggins despite his use of a homophobic slur in a radio interview. In exchange for his continued employment, Huggins agreed to a $1 million reduction to his annual salary, a three-game suspension at the start of the 2023-24 regular season and sensitivity training, school president E. Gordon Gee and Athletic Director Wren Baker announced in a statement Wednesday afternoon. Any additional derogatory comments made by Huggins will result in his immediate termination, the statement noted.
“We will never truly know the damage that has been done by the words said in those 90 seconds,” Gee and Baker said in their statement. “Words matter and they can leave scars that can never be seen. But words can also heal. And by taking this moment to learn more about another’s perspective, speak respectfully and lead with understanding, perhaps the words ‘do better’ will lead to meaningful change for all.
In an interview Monday with a Cincinnati radio station, the former University of Cincinnati coach recalled a years-ago Bearcats matchup with Xavier University in which, he said, Musketeers fans threw “rubber penises on the floor.”
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After a radio host joked that it was “transgender night” at the arena, another asked Huggins to confirm that the incident occurred in an installment of the Crosstown Shootout, Cincinnati’s annual rivalry game against Xavier.
“What it was,” Huggins replied, “was all those f--s, those Catholic f--s.” Xavier is a Jesuit university.
“It was a moment that unfairly and inappropriately hurt many people and has tarnished West Virginia University,” Gee and Baker said in their statement, adding that Huggins will make “a substantial donation to Xavier University to support its Center for Faith and Justice and its Center for Diversity and Inclusion.”
After issuing an apology Monday night for using what he called “a completely insensitive and abhorrent phrase,” Huggins issued another apology Wednesday in a separate statement released by the school.
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“I deeply regret my actions, the hurt they unfairly caused others and the negative attention my words have brought to West Virginia University,” the statement read. “… I have no excuse for the language I used, and I take full responsibility. I will abide with the actions outlined by the university and athletics leadership to learn from this incident.”
Huggins, the winningest active coach in Division I men’s basketball, previously earned $4.15 million annually as West Virginia’s coach, a salary that made him the eighth-highest-paid Division I men’s coach in the country last season. The school said the $1 million taken from Huggins’s salary will be used to support LGBTQ+ communities in West Virginia and around the country.
In August 2021, Huggins signed a contract extension with West Virginia, his alma mater, through the 2023-24 season. Under the terms of that deal, he had the option to extend it each year through the 2026-27 season. Gee and Baker’s statement Wednesday said Huggins’s contract will be amended from a multiyear to a year-by-year agreement.
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Huggins’s sensitivity training will involve meeting with LGBTQ+ leaders from across West Virginia, and he and all other coaches at West Virginia will undergo “annual training sessions that will address all aspects of inequality including homophobia, transphobia, sexism, ableism and more,” the statement read.
Huggins, 69, has a career record of 863-389 in 38 seasons as a Division I coach at Akron, Cincinnati, Kansas State and West Virginia, including the past 16 seasons with the Mountaineers. He reached the Final Four with Cincinnati in 1992 and with West Virginia in 2010.
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Source: The Washington Post
