Huggins brought UC to Big East

[Apis Bull]

Huggins brought UC to Big East

Column by The Post's Lonnie Wheeler

All day Friday, they'll be celebrating at the University of Cincinnati. It's the day the university officially joins the Big East Conference.

There will be a continental breakfast at the baseball stadium. There will be a noon-time rally at Fountain Square. For the grand finale back on campus, there will be fireworks.

The fireworks, in fact, will crackle and pop and shake the shingles all year long if this celebration thing is not done properly. The ka-booms will ka-rattle around in Nancy Zimpher's ears until she pays the piper who put this conga line in motion.

Pays him, that is, for more than a single, lame-duck, lame-excuse, lame-brained season.

Under the untenable, unpopular circumstances, it is courageous of Zimpher to show up for pastries at 7:45. The folks who fill The Shoe have been ranting and chanting about giving her The Boot. The place could end up sounding like a Danny Graves outing if the president doesn't have better news than her office has recently been dispensing.

If, however, she would step up, clear her throat and wash down her doughnuts with a contract extension for Bob Huggins, now that would be a celebration. That would be doing it right.

He is, after all, the impresario of this production, notwithstanding the efforts of athletic director Bob Goin, who, without Huggins, would have been bargaining with cow chips. Without Huggins, the UC program would be about to join the Big Deceased.

Even so, there are only two reasons to believe that Zimpher and the university trustees will reconsider their position on Huggins' contract; and neither can be trusted. One is rampant rumor - that trustees like Jeff Wyler have changed their minds, and/or that big-time boosters have been heard from in booming, bottom-line voices. The other reason is common sense.

Zimpher's aversion to Huggins is said to be based on academic and image concerns. Meanwhile, the basketball program continues to graduate players at an increasing and even impressive pace - including Jason Maxiell, who was just selected in the first round of the NBA draft by the Detroit Pistons.

One could argue, using the Maxiell example, that Huggins has done more for the professional prospects of his top student than any UC professor or department head has done for his or hers. "Playing for Bob Huggins," said Maxiell, who leaves with a degree in psychology, "is the best thing out there."

This is not to ignore the academic failings of the program's past, or Roy Bright's alleged gun incident, or Tyree Evans' legal complications in Virginia, or Keith LeGree's DUI charge, or Huggins' own DUI conviction.

Or Phil Cox's.

Cox, you may recall, is the UC trustee who spoke out rather harshly about the character of the people Huggins has brought onto campus over the years. The long record of transgression has led the athletic department to adopt a zero-tolerance policy for those who run afoul of the law.

In such a climate, one would imagine that the same standard might be applied to, say, trustees. And yet, Cox, their chairman, pleaded guilty to drunken driving in 2000, according to a story in the Western Star.

The point here is not to have Cox removed from the board. He is, by some accounts, a good and worthy trustee. And Huggins, by most accounts, is a good and worthy basketball coach.

The same adjectives certainly serve Goin, who will be retiring a year from now. Goin's successor would be off to a perilous start indeed if his first major decision were to replace Huggins with his man.

That, however, would be wholly consistent with Zimpher's precedent. She has reconfigured the university at the dean level. Those broad changes, presumably, were not made for purposes of image.

Nor did they result in popular revolt. On the other hand, the Huggins movement has become a groundswell; and judging by the rumbling in the dell, the ground will not do any significant unswelling until the coach is contractually liberated.

With Friday's pomp-filled arrival, Zimpher has a grand chance to set the basketball program free of its unbecoming burdens. She could do it at breakfast. She could do it over the lunch hour. She could do it just prior to the evening pyrotechnics.

Or not at all.

Either way, there will be fireworks.

Huggins brought UC to Big East