A good lesson from Bob Huggins’ bad behavior and ugly words

Those two slurs that the headlines are focusing on did not happen in a vacuum; they happened in a sequence.

West Virginia University on Wednesday handed Bob Huggins a 3-game suspension, a reduction of $1 million in his annual salary and an order to attend sensitivity training following a radio interview on Monday in which he twice used a homophobic slur and denigrated Catholics

Those two slurs that the headlines are focusing on did not happen in a vacuum; they happened in a sequence.

Things don’t happen in a vacuum; they happen in a sequence. Short of the big bang, or, if you are so inclined, the universe spoken into existence, nothing comes from nothing. Something came from something, and came here from somewhere. It’s as close to a self-evident, universal truth as there can be.

Those ugly words, slurs by any measure, which WVU head basketball coach Bob Huggins uttered on live radio didn’t happen in vacuum, either. No matter how much social media fans parse them out. No matter how hard those who want to defend Huggins try to contextualize them into a vacuum of less bad words that, if not socially acceptable, would at least be non-firing offensive. Or, failing that, trying to make it something plenty of others have done and therefore less of an offense than most took the comments to be.

But those two slurs that the headlines are focusing on did not happen in a vacuum; they happened in a sequence. The widely distributed one minute and fifty-eight second clip reveals escalating words, rising laughter, and loosening tongues by the time the two words were uttered around the 1:20 mark. The first utterance prefaced with a “those…” the second with “those Catholic…” referencing the Jesuit-founded Xavier University students of decades ago before the slur rolled off the legendarily acerbic tongue of a Hall of Fame coach.

The moment was preceded by an on-air conversation about how “any school that can throw rubber penises on the floor and then say they didn’t do it, my God they can get away with anything,” to much laughter. Then there was the “transgender night” crack from the host. Then those two words, bad words, ugly words, came: “What it was was all those f**s, those Catholic f**s, I think,” Huggins said. “They were envious they didn’t have one.” Laughter paused after the slurs, because everyone heard it both times, before nervous laughter started up again. “They were envious they didn’t have one” Huggins clarified, to more nervous laughter. Then came “he’s the best” from the hosts, who then…